Nothing Ventured Nothing Gained

I was seriously tempted to write nothing today for my daily spiritual thought. As the great bear Winnie the Pooh once said, “People say nothing is impossible. But I do nothing every day.” We often find ourselves in situations where doing nothing seems a lot better than any of the alternatives. After all, if we were to rank sins from most to least damning, sins of omission would have to fall pretty low on the list. But it turns out that nothing is one of the worst things that we can do. The Atonement of Jesus Christ can take something small and simple and make it great. It can transform our failures into triumphs. Jesus Christ is the author and the finisher of our faith, but He can’t finish our sentence or our chapter unless we actually start writing one. Our Savior is like this amazing co-author who will take our first draft, however poorly realized and help us build it into something great. But He leaves it to us to write the first word. The beautiful thing about working with the Lord is that His power and goodness is infinite, so even if we have only the tiniest particle of faith, then He can multiply that subatomic particle by infinity and it will still end up bigger than anything we can imagine. But infinity times zero is still zero. In the Parable of the Talents, the slothful servant was chided not only because he didn’t make any effort at all to grow his one talent, but if he wasn’t going to do anything with it anyway, he didn’t at least let it sit in the bank and collect interest. It’s like, if you’ve got a seed, even if you refuse to water it or weed it or keep the bugs off, at least take it off the shelf and throw it in the dirt. Even that would be better than nothing. The seed might still grow despite our neglect and apathy, and seeing something grow from the very tiniest possible effort on our part might just help us to realize that doing something - anything! - is better than nothing. If we can do something that is not nothing, then Christ can work with that. He will make all things, except for nothing, work together for our good and His glory. I hope we will all choose to do something and to trust that God will magnify our efforts and use the small and simple things we do to bring to pass great things.