Devoted To The Task -- Not The Completion Of It

God hasn't called me to be successful.
He's called me to be faithful.
--Mother Teresa

 

A reporter asked Mother Teresa how she could bear to go on working at such a hopeless task day after day and year after year. The people she cared for were so wretchedly poor. Many of them, very sick. How could she continue with such dedication, knowing that all the poverty and sickness would still be there long after she had died? Didn't she realize she couldn't win?

Her explanation was simple: Of course she knew the task was immense, but "finishing" wasn't her purpose. Mother Teresa had turned her life and will over to God, and her work was what she believed to be God's will for her. Because of this, she was devoted to the task itself, not to the completion of it.

We too can learn to be receptive to a higher purpose. We can direct our energies into causes we believe in, even if we know the job will never be finished. We can visit with friends and family and not try to win a verbal exchange. We can accept the will of our Higher Power and thereby find serenity.

Today, I will let go of the driving need to succeed or to impress others.

Instead, I will be receptive to my Higher Power's will.

 

Days of Healing, Days of Joy

by Earnie Larsen and Carol Larsen Hegarty

Heal Thy Broken Body

Reprinted from Henri Nouwen Society Weekly Reflection -- March 19, 2008

On the Journey To Seeing With the Eyes of the Heart

written by VICTORIA S. SCHMIDT

Let my hands heal thy broken body are words purposely placed near a broken crucifix in the Home for the Dying run by the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India.

The story behind the broken corpus of Jesus is that a mentally ill person, in anger, took the cross from the wall and threw it at Mother Teresa.
In that instant, Mother Teresa picked up the broken Jesus and instructed one of her sisters to place it back on the wall with those words.

It was Mother Teresa who taught me to see with the eyes of my heart twenty- seven years ago, when I went to India to volunteer with her community.
Having been caught up in the busyness of life and building a career, I had paid little attention to the importance of seeing with the eyes of my heart.
I know today that I do not see clearly what is unless I am seeing through the eyes of my heart.
Mother Teresa taught with her own life that Christ dwells in every soul, that God lives within every human person.
In knowing this truth, I must see everything through the lens of my heart.
However, as with many spiritual truths, knowing this does not make it easy, and I struggle to live this truth.

On my journey towards seeing with the eyes of my heart, my prayer is to have the wisdom to know when I'm looking through the wrong lens and when I am indeed letting the eyes of my heart allow my hands to heal the broken world.

- VICTORIA S. SCHMIDT lives in Springfield, Illinois (USA). She has a missionary heart that has been formed by thirty years of missionary work around the world. She currently serves as Director of Theresian World Ministry, an international Catholic women's organization.

Silence

The trees, the flowers, the plants grow in silence.

The stars, the sun, the moon move in silence.

Silence gives us a new perspective.
Blessed Mother Teresa

What God Asks

Mother Teresa in a talk on prayer said that God speaks in the silence and poverty of the heart.
"If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you.
Then you will know that you are nothing.
It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with himself."
. . . He asks our love and our willingness to be poor in spirit.
Then he will show us what we perhaps never expected to find in a state of need -- his immense love for us.

-- Father Donald Haggerty

Loving Father, make me poor in spirit

so that I can hear the voice of your Son

speaking in every circumstance of my life.

A Simple Smile

I will never understand all the good
that a simple smile can accomplish.

Blessed Mother Teresa