The World’s Most-admired Woman

The World’s Most-Admired Woman

No one would have ever guessed that scrawny little Agnes would one day light up the world. Like most folks in her poverty-stricken eastern-European country, she seemed doomed to a dead-end life. After her widowed mother had exhausted herself trying to find an eligible bachelor for the mousy girl, Agnes announced that God had called her to be a missionary. Everyone said she was crazy. But eighteen-year-old Agnes headed for the faraway city of Dublin, Ireland. After learning a smattering of English, she moved to Asia where she kicked around from school to school, seemingly consigned to teach schoolchildren forever.

Everything changed when Agnes went on a spiritual retreat to a nearby city. There she stumbled upon the worst slums on earth. She was overwhelmed by the poverty and disease. At thirty-six years of age, the diminutive spinster heard Jesus tell her to bring his light to this place of darkness. She called other women to join her in ministering to the poorest outcasts in India.

The world doesn’t know her as Agnes: after she committed herself to ministry, she changed her name to the patron saint of missionaries, Teresa. Who would have figured that the Gallup Poll would one day declare this pint-size Albanian woman the most admired woman of the twentieth century? Or that she would win the Nobel Prize? Or that her order would grow to 4,500 sisters in 153 countries giving themselves to the poorest of the poor? Who would believe that from her one-room cell in a Calcutta convent, she would oversee a worldwide string of hospitals, hospices, AIDS centers, orphanages, and schools?

When Mother Teresa won the Nobel Prize, reporters asked her how we should promote world peace. She shocked everyone with her simple answer: “Go home and love your family.” When they asked her to describe herself, she replied, “By blood, I am an Albanian; by citizenship, an Indian; by faith, a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to Jesus.”

When a delegation of nuns came to Calcutta to discover the secret to Mother Teresa’s success, the head of one order asked, “Why are you growing while so many other orders are dying?”

Mother Teresa quietly replied, “I give them Jesus.”

“I know that,” replied the woman impatiently. “But can you be more specific? Do your sisters object to wearing habits? What about the rules of your order? How do you enforce them?”

“Only one thing matters. I give them Jesus,” she replied again.

“Yes, yes, I know that!” persisted the woman. “But there’s got to be more than that!”

The little nun walked up to the woman and said in the sternest voice possible, “I give them Jesus! There’s nothing more!”

Jesus alone can change the world. By giving Jesus only, even a humble nun from a hardscrabble upbringing can change the world. So can we, if we remember this from Agnes’s story:

Religion does not save or transform people. Only Jesus does.

But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.

2 Corinthians 3:18, NKJV