“It is not how much we do,
but how much love we put in the doing.
It is not how much we give,
but how much love we put in the giving.”
– Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa, the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, is one of the most respected personalities of the twentieth Century. She was born in Macedonia in 1910 to Albanian parents and she taught from 1931 to 1948 at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta. The suffering and poverty of the poor in the slums of Calcutta, which was close to her school, moved her into serving these people.
She stepped out to do this when she experienced a divine call in 1946, and began to serve the blind, aged, disabled and leprous people. As a nun and missionary, she poured out her life for the sick and poor. In 1979, she was recognized for her humanitarian work by being given the Nobel Peace Prize. She refused to attend the banquet ceremony, and donated the prize money, which amounted to $192,000, to the poor. Her deep passion for the poor was a reflection of her love for the Lord Jesus Christ, one of her foremost motivations being the teaching of Jesus, “Whenever you did it for any of my people, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did it for me.”
She truly lived out one of her own famous sayings: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
