Many years ago, I sat with Betty on the front porch of her modest home in an established neighborhood of an old Southern town. We were discussing the special needs of an adolescent girl that we were considering placing in her home as a foster child. “This is going to take a lot of your time” I explained. “Sister,” she said “I have nothing left to give but my time.”
It was true, the challenges of her early life had left her, a middle-aged woman, with very little that our world values. As a young woman, shortly after her graduation from LPN training, she married her high school sweetheart. He was apprenticed to a local housebuilder and together they worked hard to make a home for themselves and the three children who came along in rapid succession. When her youngest child was in kindergarten, tragedy struck. Her husband died in a construction accident. She gave herself completely to raising her children–seeing to their education, their religious training, and encouraging them to pursue their dreams. When her youngest enrolled in college, she answered a request placed by our agency in the Catholic newspaper for foster parents for older, special needs children.
Sunday, November 10th, is the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time. The Gospel is Mark 12:41-44 in which Jesus observes a widow placing two small coins as her contribution to the Temple treasury and remarks, “Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they all contributed form their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.”
In reflecting on this Gospel, I thought of Betty, whom I met so many years ago, and so many like her, who might not realize that when they give from the wellspring of themselves, even if it seems so little, it becomes great in the eyes of God. A little drop from each of us becomes a torrent of God’s love.
By Sister Eileen M. Gallagher, OSB