Mother Teresa of Calcutta

 Whether we agree or not with the practices and doctrine of different Denominations we need to remember God’s vessels who were faithful to Him and  to the truth of His Word by reflecting Jesus Christ, they did this by their words and actions showing God’s unconditional Love  to everybody in both big ways and small and lets be thankful for those who do the same today and help them multiply through the power of God working in us.

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 Known as the  “Saint of the Gutters”

She was born 26th August 1910 and died 5th September 1997.

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Over the years, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands serving the “poorest of the poor” in 450 centers around the world. The first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States was established in the South Bronx, New York; by 1984 the order operated nineteen establishments throughout the country.In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitute a threat to peace.” She refused the conventional ceremonial banquet given to laureates, and asked that the $192,000 funds be given to the poor in India, stating that earthly rewards were important only if they helped her help the world’s needy.

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 When Mother Teresa received the prize, she was asked, “What can we do to promote world peace?” Her answer was “Go home and love your family.”

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Building upon this theme in her Nobel Lecture, she said…..

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“Around the world, not only in the poor countries, but I found the poverty of the West so much more difficult to remove. When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread, I have satisfied. I have removed that hunger. But a person that is shut out, that feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person that has been thrown out from society – that poverty is so hurtable and so much, and I find that very difficult.

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Mother Teresa’s Daily Prayer…..Dear Jesus, help me to spread Your fragrance everywhere I go. Flood my soul with Your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of Yours. Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel Your presence in my soul .Let them look up and see no longer me but only Jesus.Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as You shine, so to shine as to be a light to others; the light, O Jesus, will be all from You; none of it will be mine: it will be You shining on others through me. Let me thus praise You in the way You love best: by shining on those around me. Let me preach You without preaching empty words , but by my example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do, the evident fullness of the Love my heart bears to You. Amen.

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. Some of God’s words of wisdom shared by Mother Teresa…..

If we really want learn how to forgive we need to Love, for in Love is forgiveness.There is a terrible hunger for Love. We all experience that in our lives – the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family. Find them – Love them. Speak tenderly to them. Let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of your greeting. Always have a cheerful smile given from the heart. Don’t only give your care, but give your heart as well. Pray that you will understand the words of Jesus, “Love one another as I have Loved you.” Ask yourself “How has he Loved me? Do I really Love others in the same way?” Unless this Love is among us, we can kill ourselves with work and it will only be work, not Love. Work without Love is slavery.On Poverty…..

“I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper’s wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?” — 1974 interview.

“When I see waste here, I feel angry on the inside. I don’t approve of myself getting angry. But it’s something you can’t help after seeing Ethiopia.” — Washington 1984.

The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we are perfectly happy.

Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.

Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His Love than in your own weakness.

Little things are indeed little, but to be faithful in little things is a great thing.

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is Love, the fruit of Love is service, the fruit of service is peace.

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And now these three remain: Faith, Hope and Love. But the greatest of these is Love (1Corinthians 13:1-13)