Mother Teresa

One of the reasons I've wanted to become a nurse was because I have a thing for the sick and dying. I want to hold the people that everyone thinks are too gross to go near, love the people that others think are too dumb or stupid to be loved, and show people that their value and worth are not dependent upon their situation in life. I want to hold the dying. The thought has crossed my mind before, "If there was a job in which I could just hold people as they die, that would be it for me. That's all I want to do: show the dying that they are loved."

I sat down in my office today and sitting on the desk was a book about Mother Teresa. As I flipped through the photography and read the quotes my heart began to constrict. They were pictures of her home for the dying. Pictures of people missing body parts, bone thin, bleeding, oozing, and severely unloved. And there were pictures of the volunteers there that held them and stayed near them, took care of them and their needs in order to make them as comfortable as they could and most importantly, to feel as vastly loved as they could as they spent their last moments on earth.

Suddenly, I realized that there was a place that I go could in which I could hold the dying as they passed. Where I could show them love in their last moments and work healing into a lifetime of suffering. But I did not have the reaction I thought I would. The thoughts that ran through my head were not the thoughts that I expected. I wouldn't want to live outside of America the rest of my life: America is the best country to be in. Working with a bunch of behind the scenes people and a bunch of nobodies of society? I would get no credit: no recognition. To stay there the rest of my life would mean never making anything of myself: never doing anything great or living up to my potential. I wouldn't want to live in unsanitary conditions and pour myself out to people every day and get nothing back: I wouldn't find fulfillment, I'd just be exhausted and drained all the time.

Who am I?

That's what I've wanted isn't it? To love those people? And I can do that and now suddenly being presented with the real opportunity, I don't want to? Do I really believe that I'd be happiest in America? That I'm too good to live in poverty? That loving people would be unsatisfying? That caring for people isn't real success? That I need to find recognition and prestige through social standing to be worth anything? Who on earth am? That is not what I want to be. That is not how I want to feel.

It's been continually driven home in my life that God gives and he takes away. I've had a tendency to claim my selfless love for others as a characteristic of my own, and I wonder if God is reminding me that it is only because that is one of his characteristics that I contain it. That if he takes it away, that is not who I naturally am.

I desperately need to re-evaluate who I am, what I want, and what I value. I know who I want to be: it's not who I am. There are plenty of characteristics we claim to have, desires we claim to have, ideas for our life that we claim to have and we say to ourselves and others, "if only I had the opportunity this is what I would do." Or, "if that ever happens to me, this is how I will react." Sometimes when we're really faced with a situation or an opportunity though, we are really faced with the fact that we are not who we want to be. I desperately want to change that.

Mother Teresa is who I want to emulate. I remind myself that I can only do that through God, though that's an ideal and I don't know if I completely believe it. These are some of her words that I do not want to forget.


"Love to be real, it must cost--it must hurt--it must empty us of self."


"I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look only at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time.

Just one, one, one.

You get closer to Christ by coming closer to each other. As Jesus said, "Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me."

So you begin...I begin.

I picked up one person--maybe if I didn't pick up that one person I wouldn't have picked up the others.

The whole work is only a drop in the ocean. But if we don't put the drop in, the ocean would be one drop less.

Same thing for you. Same thing in your family. Same thing in the church where you go. Just begin...one, one, one."


Convicting? Let's not lie about who we are: we are not the people described in these quotes. But we want to be. Let's be honest about that. And let's push each other to be those people so that maybe we'll have a chance with one another instead of living a lie alone.

10/7/11