Today I’m talking to a group of people who care about people.

Nurses and social workers and chaplains and pastors who are giving up time and attention to learn more about caring for the grieving and lonely. I’m grateful for the opportunity, anxiously hoping to be helpful. Aware that these are people who make a massively small help in mostly tiny spaces with audiences of two or three.

When we measure impact, we think most about the numbers of people or dollars or words. We think less about short conversations filled with pauses. We think little of time spent with people who have little time left.

You may be thinking that today yourself.

Stop it.

A hundred small interactions with playdoh and blocks and pizza dough and small hands changes a heart. And a vocabulary of words and attentiveness.

Three minutes of eye contact and a question about the week that remembers the three minutes of eye contact and answer from last week matters.

Kindness. Listening. Affirmation.

They all matter. And repeated for months and decades build lives. Or at least a life.

We forget, in our attentiveness to crowds, that Jesus wasn’t. Attentive to crowds as a measure. Instead, he suggested that two or three was a large enough crowd for him to care about showing up. And one sheep was worth looking for. And his invitation to follow was first to a handful of people and was simply “come and see” and “follow me”.

And he was a huge fan of the ones who spent time with the least.