Loving Until It Hurts

There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

John 15:13

On this day in 1946, a little-known nun experienced what she later described as “the call within the call.” She was thirty-six, and she heard God telling her to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. Two years later she replaced her traditional nun’s habit with a simple white and blue cotton sari, adopted Indian citizenship, and ventured into the slums of Calcutta to work with India’s poor, sick, orphaned, and dying. Forty years later, Mother Teresa was an internationally renowned humanitarian and advocate for the poor. She became nothing less than an iconic symbol of compassion and love.

Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution, spent a summer in the slums of Calcutta with Mother Teresa and wrote the following about one of his experiences there:

People often ask me what Mother Teresa was like. Sometimes it’s like they wonder if she glowed in the dark or had a halo. She was short, wrinkled, and precious, maybe even a little ornery—like a beautiful, wise old granny. But there is one thing I will never forget—her feet. Her feet were deformed. Each morning in Mass, I would stare at them. I wondered if she had contracted leprosy. But I wasn’t going to ask, of course. “Hey Mother, what’s wrong with your feet?”

One day a sister said to us, “Have you noticed her feet?” We nodded, curious. She said: “Her feet are deformed because we get just enough donated shoes for everyone, and Mother does not want anyone to get stuck with the worst pair, so she digs through and finds them. And years of doing that have deformed her feet.” Years of loving her neighbor as herself deformed her feet.^a

Think of it! She loved so much that her feet became deformed from placing others above herself. Love almost always has a way of changing us—if not physically, emotionally. How has your love for each other changed you as individuals?

Intense love does not measure—it just gives.

—Mother Teresa

^a 107

From the book