First of all, you are doing well by patiently engaging in small efforts, hidden and ordinary. You cannot offer our Lord a better mark of humble and pleading goodwill than when you cling to your "possible little." Believe that in this way you are progressing step by step in the most important point, in total surrender to the divine Will. Even the very humiliation that the thought of not yet advancing in what is "essential" represents for you must be, on your part, an act of very sincere and very intimate bowing. The smaller you feel, the better you will bow, because you will speak from a greater depth of heart; and the better you bow, the more God will enter into your imperfections and use you, even with your imperfection, to spread much goodness.
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ /1881–1955/, letter from the front, to a cousin, November 7, 1915)
