Mother Teresa: Waiting and Submitting…
I’ve been enjoying reading a biography on the life of Mother Teresa lately. In 1928, at the age of 18, she began serving as a nun at a Convent in Calcutta. She started as a simple teacher and then after eight years she became the principal of the school. She was described by the people who served with her during those years as, “There was nothing extraordinary about her. Just that she was a very simple, ordinary girl. Very gentle, full of fun.” No one expected her to ever leave the Convent. When a fellow nun was asked what could have influenced Mother Teresa so much the nun answered without any hesitation, “Her life of prayer, her closeness to God. She was very ordinary. We just looked upon her as one of our Sisters who was very devoted and dedicated, but I could never envision this large institute around the world, nobody envisioned this.” Her own superior said of her, “Mother was not an exceptional person, she was an ordinary nun, a very ordinary person, but with great love for her Lord.”
It was actually after serving 18 years at the Convent (1946) that Mother Teresa first got the call to leave the Convent and serve and love the poorest of the poor in the slums. She got this call in a very clear way from the Lord and never doubted it, despite her love for the Convent and the knowledge of how poor her life would become. Of this time of stepping into her call, Mother Teresa remarked, “I had the blessing of obedience.” Mother Teresa waited. She sought the blessing of her spiritual director and followed his instructions carefully, seeking the blessing of the archbishop in her area. The archbishop was alarmed at the thought of a nun living and serving in the slums on her own and initially said no, but for some reason he continued to consider the petition and seek the advice of other leaders while Mother Teresa continued to faithfully serve at the Convent. After ONE YEAR of waiting, Mother Teresa finally received permission from the archbishop simply to write to a higher superior. This followed with more waiting and more letters to other leaders. Mother Teresa had many options along the way and could have taken short cuts, but she always chose the way of “implicit obedience.” She ended up waiting two full years before she finally got the full blessing. The day she received the news that she was blessed by the church to leave the Convent and fulfill her God given call, her first question to her spiritual director was, “Father, can I go to the slums now?”
It might seem silly for her to have waited two years to submit to all those spiritual authorities and wait for the full blessing. It also probably looked silly for her to finally go to the slums and start a class for a few young kids having nothing but a stick to use to write in the ground with for her lessons. That was how she started though. A simple, “ordinary” woman who simply loved the Lord and knew how to wait on Him. What an amazing, ordinary woman!!!
God bless!
