Teresa's Picture

                                                           Teresa’s Picture

Take away her robe, habit, beads and she’ll look like any other grandmother.  But that would be her appearance only.  Now watch her give herself in prayer, caring, loving and helping the worst of all sick people on the planet.  Her eyes seem swollen from too many tears, her face wrinkled from frowning in sorrow, her hands so gnarled from a million washings of deseased bodies and her back is bent from trying to carry people to feeble to stand.

Okay, so she couldn’t heal the sick like a big name tele-evangelist or she was not a dynamic crusade speaker or she didn’t write a best selling book but she sure looked like a genuine Christian out on the earthly battlefield of human suffering waging war with humble hands of mercy.  I liked her, I liked her a lot.  I am certain she was a Christian.  Not because she was Catholic or worked her way into Heaven but she loved Jesus and let Him live through her.  She said before she died, “I am ready to go be with Jesus.”  Paul wrote in I Cor. 2:9, “Eye has not seen, ear heard nor though entered into the mind of the things God has prepared for those who love Him.”  She sure seem to love Him and those who He loved.

Now for a moment forget religion, denominations and trendy cults of the day.  Jesus said, “If anyone will deny themselves, let them take up their own cross and follow me...”  So little frail Teresa followed Him into the ghettos, slums and stench of poverty, sickness and death where the pious only show slides of.  Seemed like something Jesus would do out in the highways and hedges of life, doesn’t it?

I don’t know about her doctrine or politics, which are fuel for factions at this time.  I just know when I asked a group of young folk who emulates a true active Christian today, repeatedly they’d say, “Mother Teresa”.  Catholic, Protestant, Charismatic, Baptist, Jewish, Gentile?  What are those names anyway?  Oddly, one individual filled and controlled by the Holy Spirit of God transcends those religious lines.  The Billy Graham’s, Mother Teresa’s, Apostle Paul’s and many others like them who are so given to Christ Jesus are distinctly different than modern merchants of church.

I am thankful for her life and I am a Baptist.  But I refuse to deify her now, yet I can eulogize and edify her life and work.  God raises one person up and lowers another down.  Success and failure are in His holy hands.  With six billion people on earth we were allowed to see a common woman of faith touch many lives that most wouldn’t dream of reaching out to in life.  She never had any children of her own but lots of brothers and sisters it seemed.  Maybe though when the pictures are eternally developed, this tiny mother will have had more children than them all.  Good-bye Teresa and thanks for the pictures of servant-hood.  We’ll cherish them for eternity.

Larry D. Sparks

September 8, 1997