I finished reading Mother Teresa's "No Greater Love" and I must say that I am truly touched by her sense of humility, grace, and unconditional love for serving God. It really inspires me to find the inner Mother Teresa within myself and to just be more loving and kind. I know that sounds like an easy thing to do, but it truly does take an extreme amount of patience and understanding. So I just wanted to jot down my favorite excerpts from each section of her book, the ones I felt I related the most to :]
On Prayer:
"You learn humility only by accepting humiliations. And you will meet humiliation all through your life. The greatest humiliation is to know you are nothing. This you come to know when you face God in prayer."
On Love:
"We must know that we have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just for diplomas and degree, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and to be loved."
On Giving:
"One thing will always secure heaven for us: the acts of charity and kindness with which we have filled our lives. We will never know how much good just a simple smile can do. We tell people how kind, forgiving, and understanding God is, but are we the living proof? Can they really see this kindness, this forgiveness, this understanding alive in us?"
On Being Holy:
"How unlike Him we are. How little love, how little compassion, how little forgiveness, how little kindness we have. We are not worthy to be so close to Him - to enter His heart. Let us find what part of His body is wounded by our sins. Let us not go alone but put our hands in His. Our Father loves us. He has given us a name. We belong to Him with all our misery, our sin, our weakness, our goodness. We are His. Our way of life depends on our being rooted in Christ Jesus our Lord by our deliberate choice."
On Work & Service:
"If you pray you will have faith, and if you have faith you will naturally want to serve. The one who prays cannot but have faith, and when you have faith you want to put it into action. Faith in action is service. The fruit of love is service. Love leads us to say "I want to serve." And the fruit of service is peace. All of us should work for peace."
On Jesus:
"Don't allow anything to interfere with your love for Jesus. You belong to Him. Nothing can separate you from Him. That one sentence is important to remember. He will be your joy, your strength. If you hold onto that sentence, temptations and difficulties will come, but nothing will break you. Remember, you have been created for great things."
On Forgiveness:
"Reconciliation begins with ourselves. It begins with a pure heart, a heart that is able to see God in others."
On Children & the Family:
"Bring prayer to your family, bring it to your little children. Teach them to pray. For a child that prays is a happy child. A family that prays is a united family. We hear of so many broken families. And then we examine them: Why are they broken? I think because they never pray together. They are never in prayer before the Lord."
On Suffering & Death:
"Suffering will never be completely absent from our lives. So don't be afraid of suffering. Your suffering is a great means of love, if you make use of it, especially if you offer it for peace in the world. Suffering in and out of itself is useless, but suffering that is shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift and a sign of love. Christ's suffering proved to be a gift,the greatest gift of love, because through his suffering our sins were atoned for. Suffering, pain, sorrow, humiliation, feelings of loneliness, are nothing but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close that He can kiss you."
On the Missionaries of Charity:
"Total surrender to God must come in small details as it comes in big details. It's nothing but a single word: Yes! "I accept whatever you give, and I give whatever you take." It doesn't mean doing extraordinary things, understanding big things-it is a simple acceptance, because I have given myself to God, because I belong to Him. If something belongs to me, I've got full power to use it as I want. I belong to Jesus-He can do to me whatever He wants."
*I think that this last excerpt is my absolute favorite. I'm still learning to accept what He gives me, what His plan is for me, but when I come to think of it, my REAL "yes" began when I joined Liwanag and accepted His presence in my life. I opened my heart to His love and to those around me. And that love is what strengthened my faith. And that faith turned into my willingness to serve.
I guess He really IS using me for something, I just don't know what exactly. And that's okay :]
