This past weekend a young woman came to Corhaven to talk about Mother Teresa.  A freshman in high school, she’s working on a year long research project and had heard that Tara and I had met her. It’s true. I met Mother Teresa in 1995 when I spent a month in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the Home for the Dying.  Tara was discipled by her for several months that same year.   Both of us were profoundly changed by our encounters with Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

Her life and presence and teachings touched Tara and I so deeply.  Reflecting on it, I realize that there are a few quotes from her that have stayed with me and really been a guide and a goad on my own spiritual quest, and at times, supreme comfort.  Here’s a few and then I want to drill down on one, and offer my best talk I ever gave on Mother Teresa.

• “If we have been created in the image of God, then we have been created to love, because God is love.”
• “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”
• “If I can give you any advice, I beg you to get closer to the Eucharist”
• “Today God loves the world so much that He gives you, He gives me, to love the world, to be His love, His compassion… You and I must let Him live in us and through us to the world.”
• “We are not social workers. We may be doing social work in the eyes of some people, but we must be contemplatives in the heart of the world.”
• “God has not called me to be successful. He has called me to be faithful.”

I’ve mulled over each of these insights so many times, and so many others as well.  She had a knack for saying really really True things really really simply.  I think that the deeper we understand and can live what she was getting at in her insights, the easier life becomes and we experience a sense of relief and even liberation.

She used a simple image to describer her deepest desire and also her truest understanding of her work.  “I’m like a little pencil in His hand. That’s all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do it. The pencil has only to be allowed to be used.”

It’s a very simple and very powerful way to approach our lives and ministry.  We so often want to so something great for God, and that’s good.  But too often we confuse what we think would be great with the way the God is actually using us or would want to.

In fact, God knows best how to use our lives in God’s Kingdom and for his purposes, so ours is to simply to receive each day as the way that God wants to use us each day, in every circumstance.  Ours is not to tell God what picture he should be painting with our lives. Ours is to say a humble and loving “Yes” to however it is that he is in fact using us, trusting that he knows how to paint and that the entire canvas is in fact his and he knows what he’s doing, even when its hard for us to see or we wish he was using different brush strokes.

When we do this, we can cease strategizing how to do something great for God, and simply let him use us to do something great for him, on God’s terms, not ours.  And God knows better than us.  (This is wonderfully captured in Psalm 131)