BBC Radio 4 2016-06-18

‘She woke up every day and said, How can I change the world?’ recalled a colleague.

Jo Cox, we’re told, ‘crackled with energy, fizzed with life.’ With time for everyone, the rising star who fought with passion for the world’s neediest remained rooted in her own people, and her murder was so unexpected, so shocking that it’s little wonder that those of us who never knew her have shared the stunned grief of all who did. We might wish we’d encountered that spirit for ourselves through more than the tear-laden tributes.

Those tributes might indeed inspire us. But they could also unintentionally be pretty daunting for some of us. Changing the world is a great idea: there’s so much we’d like to see put right. But we’re not all gifted with extraordinary vigour and vision - it can be tough enough juggling our way through the mundane business of each day, and the world and its problems can seem more than a bit beyond us.

In reality, though, we always face options on this. At its simplest, we can’t feed a billion hungry people: but we can make a life or death difference to a few, and lobby those with more power to make a bigger difference. We can’t free every prisoner of conscience languishing in the cells of repressive regimes, but our letters, cards, petitions can open a chink of light for one or two. We can’t transform the lives of every lonely person in our own communities, help every refugee or asylum seeker, but a small gesture can make at least some realise that they’re still valued as human beings.

The most we can do when we’re confronted with the big issues which threaten to overwhelm us is, as someone has said, to take hold of the near edge of one of those issues and seek to act at some cost to ourselves.

Changing the world might never appear in those words in a mission statement, but for schools and colleges, for health providers and charities, for political parties and for most religious communities it’s exactly why they exist.

Certainly the Christian faith isn’t embarrassed by this objective. It affirms that the world belongs to God, is loved by God, and is one day to be restored in accordance with the original intention. It needs to be changed, and Jesus Christ invites everyone to a way of living which assumes that whole communities can be changed, as well as individuals.

And it’s the simplest of actions which can be vital. As the French spiritual writer Francois de Sales put it, ‘Great works do not always lie in our way, but every moment we may do little ones excellently, that is, with great love.’ This really is the business of us all.