Thirteen Women and an Open Door

On October 7, 1950, the Vatican officially recognized a tiny new religious order in Calcutta, India. Its founder, a 40-year-old Albanian nun named Agnes Bojaxhiu — known to the world as Mother Teresa — had spent the previous two years walking the narrow lanes of Motijhil, one of the city's most desperate slums. She had left the security of the Loreto convent, where she had taught comfortably for nearly twenty years, carrying almost nothing. Her first classroom in the slums was a patch of bare ground where she traced letters in the dirt with a stick for children no other school would accept.

When the Missionaries of Charity received its charter, the entire order consisted of Teresa and thirteen members — most of them her former students from St. Mary's High School who had watched their teacher trade a sheltered life for open sewers and dying strangers. Their constitution required them to live among the poorest of the poor, not as administrators, but as servants. They dressed in cheap white saris, ate simply, and knelt to clean wounds others would not touch.

Jesus said in Mark 10:45 that the Son of Man "did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Teresa understood that this verse is not a sentiment to admire but a direction to follow. Service that costs nothing changes nothing. The question for every believer is not whether we are willing to help, but whether we are willing to go where the need actually lives — and stay.