Mother Teresa – Life of Sacrifice and Love

Mother Teresa:

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months’ training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun.

From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Although she had no funds, she depended on Divine Providence, and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.

By the 1970s she had become internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due in part to a documentary, and book, Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work. Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity continued to expand, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children’s and family counseling programs, orphanages, and schools.

Quotes of Mother Teresa:

On God:

Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.

I am not sure exactly what Heaven will be like. But I don’t know that when we die and if comes the time for God to judge us, He will not ask, “How many good things have you done in your life?” Rather He will ask, “How much love did you put into what you did?”

I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.

Let’s do something beautiful for God.
On Love:

The fruit of faith is love.

A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.

Love cannot remain by itself… it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action, and that actiis service.

God told us, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” So first I am to love myself rightly, and then to love my neighbor like that. But how can I love myself unless I accept myself as God has made me?

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

Love is like a fruit in season at all times. Love can warm three winter months.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

There is more hunger in the world for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.

If we want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

On Life:

In light of heaven, the worst suffering earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.

The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody

On Loyalty:

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.

Serve:

Good works are links that form a chain of love.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devoticome in — that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.

Get to know the poor in your country. Love them. Serve them.

If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

It is a kingly act to assist the fallen.

It is not how much you do, but how much love you put into the doing that matters.

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

On Holiness:

Holiness is not the luxury of the few; it is a simply duty, for you and for me.

On Family:

Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other. And in the home, begins the disruptiof peace of the world.

On Kindness:

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

On Prayers:

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.

Abortion:

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortibecause if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.

On Peace:

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Jesus, I thank you and plead you raise up Many Teresa’s to serve this world and show your Love.

Related posts:

1. Do you really know about God's Love?
2. John Bunyan – Man who wrote Pilgrim's Progress
3. Power of Relationship with God's Love
4. One Solitary Life
5. As a Mother Comforts…

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