Doing Small Things with Great Love, Even When It's Hard
Picture this: A tiny, wrinkled woman in a simple blue-and-white sari, a global icon of charity and compassion. You know who I’m talking about, right? Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She’s one of those people who transcends faith and culture. Her image, her name, it’s all synonymous with loving the forgotten and doing small things with great love.
And guess what? Her feast day is coming up on September 5th! It’s the perfect time to reflect on her life and legacy. I was so moved by her story that she’s one of the women featured in my book, Important Catholic Women of the 20th Century.
Now, if you had asked me a few years ago, I would have told you the usual stuff: she left her teaching job to serve the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. She founded the Missionaries of Charity. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. All true. All incredible. But it's only part of the story.
What truly captivated me, what made me feel like I had to include her in my book, was learning about her decades-long "dark night of the soul."
I mean, can you even imagine? This woman, who radiated so much joy and love to the world, who seemed to be a walking embodiment of God’s grace, was living in a state of profound spiritual darkness. For nearly 50 years, she felt abandoned by God. She wrote letters describing her inner turmoil, her feelings of being unloved, and the deep, spiritual pain she carried. The very God she dedicated her life to felt absent.
This wasn’t a passing phase. It was a decades-long struggle. And yet, she never stopped. She kept doing the work. She kept picking up the dying from the gutters, comforting the sick, and feeding the hungry. She did all of this incredible, selfless work—the kind of work that screams "I'm doing this for Jesus!"—all while feeling nothing but a vast, spiritual emptiness.
Eventually she understood that this inner darkness was not a punishment but rather an invitation to enter more deeply into the experiences of those who feel unloved or unwanted, and to unite her suffering to Christ’s. In fact she said, “There is much suffering in the world - physical, material, mental. The suffering of some can be blamed on the greed of others. The material and physical suffering is suffering from hunger, from homelessness, from all kinds of diseases. But the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one. I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.”
Saintly Perseverance
Mother Teresa had resolved at a young age not to refuse Jesus anything He asked of her. She knew He’d asked her to work with the poorest of the poor - that was clear. But after she started, she stopped feeling His presence.
The last thing she’d heard was that she was supposed to work with the poorest of the poor, and so she did. She continued working on the last thing she knew God had asked of her. I find her perseverance absolutely remarkable. It can already be difficult to serve when you feel the warmth of God’s presence. It’s a completely different kind of heroic to get up every single day and do the hardest work imaginable, all while feeling like you're alone in the spiritual desert.
Mother Teresa’s story gives me, and I hope it gives you, a fresh perspective on what it means to be a person of faith. Her life reminds us that our faith isn't about feelings. It's about a choice. A daily, moment-by-moment choice to serve, to love, and to show up, even when we don't feel a thing.
Her legacy isn't just about the thousands of sisters or the hundreds of missions. It’s about the truth that no small act of love is insignificant, and that heroic perseverance is about more than just physical endurance. It's about a spiritual fortitude that can only come from a radical surrender to God's will, whether or not your feelings agree.
So this September 5th, as we remember St. Teresa of Calcutta, let’s not just celebrate the saint who did big, amazing things. Let's celebrate the woman who did small things with great love, even when it was the hardest thing she'd ever done.