Nick Baines writes on his latest blog: "Poetry learned and absorbed now gives us a language later when we do experience the things represented in memorable and imaginative language."

This morning I had been struck by Micheal O'Siadhail's 'Hostel'

Stations of ease for the broken or frail.

A tear in an ocean. And yet that welcome

At face value, a roof and warmth, a meal.

Vague signs of angeldom.

So little, So short of grand revolution

We'll always want to dream of.

If only dreams could scoop or fill an ocean...

Thimbled gestures of a love...

These words gave me a way of praying and thinking about the day ahead. Nick Baines is right.  I realise that the meetings, planned and chance encounters of this day, all the efforts do sometimes seem like tears trying to fill an ocean. 

But Holy Week speaks of the significance of the tears. The literal tears that were wept. Then the metaphorical 'tears' trying to fill an ocean: words of bravado by Peter, a towel offered by Jesus, speaking about swords, coins, gambling... All small ways in which people rightly or wrongly tried to mould, find or make significance in the big events swarming around them.

Yet each one, each small tear, finds its place in the story that we tell, in the story that God tells us, in the Good News. Nothing is insignificant. Each act in its own way find redemption as it is caught up in God's plan, whether the players wanted it or not.

This day may all my acts, though they seem like tears compared to the ocean that is needed, be done in loving trust and confidence in the one who is the Master Story Teller and does not overlook anything.  It is very easy to be discouraged from shedding tears - literal or metaphorical - through a sense of inutility. ("What use my words or small act for this homeless man when the need is so great?"). For the story of Holy Week and Easter is the story of the Ordinary becoming Extraordinary - all in God's grace to us in Christ.