Randy Suits

Mother Teresa – A Mighty Warrior

My devout believer wife Eve,

She lived in squalor, filth, misery, poverty, hopelessness, sickness and disease, amid spiritual darkness. Her friends were the poor, uneducated, depraved souls who came to her mission the first time, walking skeletons, for a morsel of bread to preserve their lives from starvation. To receive these men, women and children was to expose herself to their infections and incurable diseases. Very often they had been thrust out of families to die because exposing the family to their hopelessly sick was to risk death. Mother Teresa welcomed these rejects of families and society. They did not know her God nor her Savior Jesus Christ. They came for the bread and a shelter for their bodies but their spirits were being nourished by the love and acceptance of a Godly woman, who understood ‘the hunger of love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread’. As her ministry grew, thousands more passed through her mission and many stayed because they had nowhere else to go. She and her fellow workers, friends and growing extended family of the worlds’ outcasts, social misfits, crippled, blind, lepers, family rejects or the poor of the lowest cast were living by faith. On 10 September 1946, she received what she would later describe as a ‘call within a call’ from God. “She was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would be to break the faith”. One author noted that ‘sister Teresa had now become Mother Teresa. She opened a mission in the slums of Calcutta, India. Her first year was filled with daily difficulties. She had no income and had to resort to begging for food and supplies. She experienced doubt, loneliness and temptation to return to the comfort of convent life but she stood firm in her faith and determined to finish the work God gave her to do. When tempted, she would reaffirm to her God “of free choice my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your Holy Will in my regard”. Through all the years, living from day to day, hand to mouth, her loving God always provided the bread, medicines and money required to meet the needs of this tough minded woman warrior, Mother Teresa who battled for the poor and dying. Her occupants were not only feeding the body, but simultaneously they were eating the bread of Life. Her faith enabled her God to show his power and faithfulness to an unbelieving group of lost souls. Like God fed the children of Israel manna for 40 years in the wilderness, on a daily basis, He fed Mother Teresa and her friends. Many of her friends (she fed all, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, any faith in need and athiests) gradually became Christian family, as they understood the truth of creator God. They did not know God but they did know mother Teresa. She lived her God, because she knew God. As the lost observed her walk with God, they began to follow her example because she lived the Word of God in its lowest common denominator, the great love of God and his Son Jesus Christ for every soul in need of redemption from sin. She loved so much because the unmatchable love of the Most High God lived in her and radiated from her soul as a beacon for all to see. She was filled with the Light of the love of God. Jesus said, ‘a light set on a hill cannot be hidden,” God gave her a burden for lost souls and she approached them by feeding their physical bodies. She said, “When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed”. In the weakness of servitude to others and the poverty of worldly wealth, she was a mighty warrior rich in blessings and worthy of the daily attention God Almighty showed around, upon and within her. The Most High God taught her that ‘It’s the greatest poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” Such sacrifice!  Such self denial! Such Godliness! The essence of Mother Teresa was the Way of Jesus Christ who laid down his life that He might take it up again in the resurrection in Life eternal that we who follow in the Way of Christ, might also claim our eternal prize. May all the earth celebrate the life work of Mother Teresa – A Mighty Warrior for Christ! May we be encouraged by her victory for God and His People. May the Most High God be forever glorified!