Youth ministry | Members

Illustration texts

Needs in the World

Seeing Christ in the Poor

Garbage Disposal Eats Well

I Am a Little Pencil

Seeing Jesus in the Poor

Thirsting After God: Mother Teresa of India

Seeing people from God's perspective radically changed a young girl growing up in Albania.  She desperately desired to love God and His people more as a teenager.  So, she became a novice at a convent in Dublin.  However, she was described as such a clumsy girl she was not even  trusted with lighting the candles.

But at age 18, Agnes Bojaxhiu changed her name to Teresa and left Dublin to begin her "Missionaries of Charity" ministry to the streets of Calcutta.  Searching for a way to serve God in Calcutta, Mother Teresa learned to recognize God in one of His most distressing disguises -- the dying poor of India.

Mother Teresa never thought that anything she did was exceptional.  She considered her contribution to relieving human suffering as "A drop of deliverance in an ocean of suffering."

Scooping up the terminally ill off the streets, she learned to love them as God did and gave them a death with dignity.  Giving up her poor rations of food to the starving, while bandaging stinking wounds were nothing out of the ordinary to this small woman who pursued God with all her heart.

She told an acquaintance, ''If we did not believe that this was the body of Christ, we would never be able to do this work. No amount of money could make us do it. In our wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor, it is Christ we touch in the broken bodies of the starving and destitute. He said, ''What you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me.''

Her simple pursuit of Christ through loving the poor challenged the world so greatly that at her death the Missionaries of Charity had 2,500 nuns serving across the world, backed up by 400 brothers and thousands of lay volunteers who run the 380 hospices and leper colonies and over 160 orphanages in India.  Because of her work, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Explaining her work, Mother Teresa told Time Magazine, "I have the opportunity to be hours a day with Jesus?The poor are Jesus for me?I find the rich much poorer. Sometimes they are more lonely inside. They are never satisfied. They always need something more?I find that poverty hard to remove. The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.''

Speaking to an increasingly materialistic world, Mother Teresa once said, "I have come to realize more and more that the greatest disease and the greatest suffering is to be unwanted, unloved, uncared for, to be shunned by everybody -- to be just nobody to no one."

It would be hard to picture Mother Teresa lusting after material possessions.  When the Pope gave her a Rolls Royce, Mother Teresa auctioned it off for four times its value and gave the money to the poor. Why would she do this?  Her God had already supplied her with everything that she would ever need. (Written by Cherie Miller, Copyright February 1, 2003)

Legacy Youth Ministry Resources

Illustration texts