In Calcutta

We have all heard of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.  Even those of us who are not Catholic have stood in awe of her selfless devotion to the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India.  In a devotion I read this week, she stated, "The meaning of my life is the love of God.  It is Christ in his distressing disguise whom I love and serve."

God has not called me to serve him in Calcutta, at least not yet.  I have never been there.  But I have spent a brief time in India, in New Delhi and Mumbai, formerly called Bombay, when I was privileged to accompany Bill on a whirlwind speaking tour about fifteen years ago.  

I have breathed (and smelled) the heavy yellow smog that hangs over the ancient city of Delhi like a smothering blanket.  I have ridden in a brightly colored, three-wheeled auto rickshaw, and gazed in disbelief at the dead man lying in the middle of the street, the one the taxi driver pointed out to us as he carefully drove around the body and continued down the street.  I have seen the rows of cardboard boxes stretching along the beach between the highway and the ocean, providing minimal shelter for the poorest people of the city.  I have been accosted by hoards of women and children, touching my clothes, begging for money or anything else I might be persuaded to give them.  I have stepped over the leftover curried goat bones that the locals dump onto the intricately woven carpet when they are finished eating.  I have seen the monkeys in the trees in the middle of the city, and the sacred cows that are allowed to go wherever they will, because they might contain the souls of some departed human ancestor.  I have visited a fairly large shop that was crowded with man-made idols of all shapes and sizes.  I have spoken with the proud shop owner, who wanted to know if I drove a car in America, and if my family actually owned a car.  I said yes, but I didn't tell her that every adult and teenage driver in my family had a car to drive, and that we had an extra pickup sitting in our driveway as a spare. Some things are just too much for people to imagine.

Most of us who live in the US do not consider ourselves to be rich.  Yet, our country is the richest in the world.  For the cost of one family meal in a moderately-priced American restaurant, we could feed a whole family for a year in some locales.  One American's daily minimum wage could support one of many foreign families for a month, or even a year in some places.   I have enough cardboard boxes in my basement to house a couple dozen people in India.  

Even the poorest people living in the streets of American cities have clothes on their backs, and shelters that provide hot meals and occasional beds to sleep in, and dumpsters that provide more wealth than much of the world's population can imagine.  The hungriest school-aged American children receive free breakfast and lunch at school.  In our country, it is extremely rare to hear of a child with distended stomach and spindly limbs, dying of starvation.

Even so, there are needy people all around us.  We are surrounded by people who are poor by US standards, or physically or mentally ill, or emotionally needy.  But even those who seem to have it all together may be lacking something very important.  As Jesus said, in Matthew 19: 24: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."  When we are blessed with many possessions, it is easy to decide that we don't need God in our lives.  That's why people in our country tend to turn to God in times of widespread disaster or personal tragedy.  That's when we become aware that we can't control the weather or accidents or catastrophic illness.  It's during those hard times that we realize just how much we need God.

We can't all serve God among the people of India, but there are plenty of people all around us who need our help.  There are children who need foster homes and forever families.  There are elders who need to have meals and prescriptions delivered.  There are grieving soldiers' families who need people to shield them from hateful protesters.  There are families who need groceries and gas for their cars.  There are throngs of people in our own communities who need to hear the Good News of Jesus. 

Mother Teresa wrote one more intriguing statement in the devotion I read:  "I am nothing.  He is all.  I do nothing of my own.  He does it.  That is what I am, God's pencil.  A tiny bit of pencil with which he writes what he likes.  God writes through us, and however imperfect instruments we may be, he writes beautifully."  The Bible uses other, similar analogies to say the same thing:  He is the potter and we are the clay; we are the vessels that he molds and fills with whatever we need to serve him effectively.  The question is, are we willing to use our God-given talents and abilities to love and serve the people around us? Have we asked him where he wants us to serve him, and what he wants us to do?  Or do we expect the Mother Teresa's of this world to do all the work, on the other side of the world, in Calcutta?