Looking for signs that God can still use me!

My health has deteriorated drastically over the last two years. My mind wants to do the things I once did, but my body will not allow it. I try to continue to go to church on Sundays because I have a strong desire to do so and go to the mall coffee shop a few times a week to satisfy friends. Each and every time I do I wonder if it is really worth it? Personally, it is too much of a struggle and drains me of every ounce of energy that I have, not to mention the chest pain and shortness of breath.

Lately something small always happens that causes me to make negative comments. Things that once would not have bothered me now drive me nuts. Little things like people eating with their hands in nice restaurants instead of using utensils, unattended children in the coffee shop splashing your coffee as they run and hit your table, people who see you walking to get in a taxi and know you are walking with a cane and assistance from someone else, but will run and get the taxi ahead of you.  I spiral downward and seem to be unable not to make nasty comments.

I then regret going out of the house. I begin to think I gave my life to Christ wanting to be used by Him, but I expected to serve out of my strength and not my weakness. It is hard to serve when you no longer feel adequate to do so.

As usual for this time of year I began to study the Christmas story. It hit me yesterday how Mary must have felt. I did a piece sometime back that I did not understand why people think the birth of Christ was a walk in the park for Mary.

How many friends and neighbors do you think really believed Mary was a virgin?  Her pregnancy must have been a scandal and the focal point of gossipers. Her family must have felt disgraced. Joseph at first did not even believe God had called Mary to give birth to Christ.

I wonder if Mary at times thought I did not sign on for this public humiliation. Did she ever say, ‘you are God why can’t you handle this better?’ Do you think Mary ever ask God will this one day get better? After all Mary was mortal, not a god.

I just do not believe Mary was totally jubilant as she struggled, pregnant, the last eighty miles to Bethlehem. She may have said some unkind words at times. She had no one to make the trip easier except Joseph. I know we vision her riding upon a donkey because that is what we see in pictures, but the Bible says nothing about a donkey. I believe Mary walked the eighty miles. How many pregnant women about to give birth do you know that would or could go on an eighty mile hike?

Why was Joseph’s family not traveling with them? They were required to go to Bethlehem for the census just as Joseph was. Do you think the family may not have wanted to be seen with them because they were ashamed of Mary’s pregnancy? All we really know is there was no prearranged place for them to stay. Joseph must have had family that lived in Bethlehem. No one seems to have felt an obligation to give up their bed for a pregnant woman.   

Did Mary not wonder why God had not intervened to make things easier for her? Scripture does not record that this birth was anything other than ordinary. It appears to me to have been a bloody and painful birth as all births are.  She gave birth and the baby was placed in swaddling cloth as all babies were at the time. It seems to have been a normal human birthing.

It would have been normal for family to have been present for the birth. The Bible records Mary and Joseph were alone. It makes no mention of family. Why did the family choose to stay away? Do you not think this would have made the situation even more difficult for a new mother?

I am not a woman, but I have counsel with lots of pregnant women. I have never met a woman about to give birth or has just given birth that her body chemistry was normal. All sorts of things must have gone through Mary’s mind – is this place safe, is this place clean, where do I lay the baby, God is this what you really planned for us and is this really the Son of God?

Signs in the Bible were significant. Can you imagine how relieved Mary must have been when the shepherds came and told Mary and Joseph all that had happened? Angels had proclaimed their child’s birth. The shepherds were Mary’s confirmation that her baby was the Son of God.

The Shepherd’s needed a sign to let them know they were in the right place. They were told: “…you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” The messy, dirty, smelly feeding trough was the sign that God used to show the shepherds where the Savior lay.

Mary needed a sign, the shepherds needed a sign and we sometimes need a sign in order to know that we are still in God’s will. That God is still with us and we are still being used by God. I just posted a piece on Mother Teresa and she had been looking for a sign before her death.

But what if the confirmation or sign from God is that things will continue to get more difficult and more humbling than we expected? The opposite of what we wanted? What if the confirmation or sign is that God is with us in our lonely/hard places, but things will remain hard and lonely? What if the confirmation or sign is our manger?

When our plans are falling apart, our lives feel unimportant and we are hoping for something better/easier, perhaps we are exactly where God wants us to be. That is what I have to accept and Mother Teresa had to accept, but it is sometimes difficult to accept that God knows best, but we must.

So as I grief over my weakness and disappointments, I recall the manger. My suffering is not pretty. It’s painful and humbling, but with the Holy Spirit's help I can still glorify God.

God can use our pain and humiliation to bring him the greatest glory. God’s kingdom does not operate as our earthly kingdom does: “The last shall be first, the weak shall be strong, and the foolish shall shame the wise.” Those are strange principles for humans, but strange or not that is what Christians are called to accept as a way of life.  

I am called with the help of the Holy Spirit to show strength to others in this time of weakness. I am called to show that I can maintain faith in these times of trials. I am called to demonstrate that I still have hope. I am called to allow God to use me in spite of my circumstances the same as Mary and Mother Teresa.

Losing my temper, replying with unkind words, being impatient does not help me or others and it certainly prevents God from using me. So, this Christmas season and every day that follows I will try harder than I have in recent months to be what God wants me to be while continuing to look for a sign that God still has a use for me.

Mother Teresa - Saint to the poorest of the poor!

Mother Teresa, a tiny framed nun who did great things for the poorest of the poor in the slums of India and beyond, nicknamed the 'Saint of the Gutters’, will be declared a saint next year after Pope Francis approved a miracle attributed to her intercession. The canonization in the Vatican will probably take place on September 4, 2016. That will be the nineteenth anniversary of her death.

Pope Francis approved a decree attributing a second miracle to Mother Teresa, clearing the path for the nun to be elevated to sainthood.  The miracle was approved during an audience with the head of the Vatican's department on saints  on Thursday, his 79th birthday. Pope Francis has dedicated his ministry to ministering to the poor just as Mother Teresa did. He admires and respects Mother Teresa. He met her personally in 1994. He knew her to be a strong woman that would not be pushed around by bishops. It is only fitting that Francis be the Pope to canonize Mother Teresa.

The second miracle was the cure of a Brazilian man suffering from a viral brain infection that resulted in multiple abscesses. By Dec. 9, 2008, he was in a coma and dying, suffering from an accumulation of fluid around the brain. Thirty minutes before the man was due to undergo surgery, he sat up, awake and without pain. The surgery did not take place and a day later the man was declared to be symptom-free by medical doctors. We (Catholics) do not believe that Mother Teresa caused the miracle, God caused the miracle and Mother Teresa was the intercessor.

The Vatican attributed the cure to the fervent prayers to Mother Teresa's intercession by the man's wife, who at the time of his scheduled surgery was at her parish church praying alongside her pastor.

The traditional Roman Catholic canonization procedure requires at least two medical miracles. One before a deceased Catholic can be declared “blessed,” and another occurring after that declaration then he or she can be canonized as a saint. The miracles must be confirmed by a medical team of doctors. They must find that there is no scientific reason for the healing.

She was beatified in 2003 after Pope John Paul II recognized her first miracle. He believed the healing of a seriously ill Indian woman of a tumor was the result of Mother Teresa's intervention. Pope John Paul II, one of Mother Teresa's greatest supporters, in 1999 waived the normal five-year waiting period for her beatification process to begin and launched it a year after she died. The process leading up to the sainthood has been the shortest in modern history. Normally it takes 100 years or more to be declared a saint by the Vatican.

Mother Theresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, on Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, to an Albanian family. Mother Teresa joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928. In 1946, while traveling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, she was inspired to form the Missionaries of Charity order.

The order was established four years later in 1950 and at the time of her death, September 5, 1997, her Missionaries of Charity order had nearly 4,000 nuns and ran roughly 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work with Calcutta's destitute and ill. She described herself as, "By blood, I am Albanian, by citizenship an Indian, by faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus."

Mother Teresa did not always receive praises from the public. She was often criticized for accepting money from people with questionable backgrounds.  She was also criticized for the quality of care in her clinics by an Indian-born physician living in England. She was criticized for her political ties. She was even called a hypocrite.  

She accepted donations from Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier (an ex-priest) in 1981. She flew to Haiti to accept the Legion d'Honneur from the right-wing dictator, who, after his ouster, was found to have stolen millions of dollars from the impoverished country.

She accepted money from the British publisher Robert Maxwell and it was later revealed he embezzled UK£450 million from his employees' pension funds. There is no suggestion that she was aware of any theft before accepting the donation.

She accepted money from American financier Charles Keating who was later charged with fraud following high profile business failures. Keating donated millions of dollars to Mother Teresa and lent her his private jet when she visited the United State.

Detractors also opposed her stand against the use of birth control in Calcutta's slums, which followed the Catholic Church’s teachings.

 After Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's suspension of civil liberties in 1975, Mother Teresa said: "People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes." These comments were seen as a result of her friendship with the Congress Party and she was widely criticized for the remarks.

She was accused of encouraging members of her order to secretly baptize dying patients, without regard to their religion. Susan Shields, a former member of the Missionaries of Charity, wrote that "Sisters were told to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a 'ticket to heaven'. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the patient’s head with a wet cloth, while in fact, she was baptizing them, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Muslims.”

She was criticized for spending too much time and money on trying to convert people to the Catholic faith. The Assembly of God Church was supposed to have been doing more charity work in India than Mother Teresa’s organization.  

Mother Teresa died in 1997. Despite her request that all writing and correspondence be destroyed, a collection was posthumously released to the public in book form by a priest. Her writings revealed that she struggled with feelings of disconnectedness that were in contrast to the strong feelings she had experienced as a young novice. In her letters Mother Teresa describes decades of a long sense of feeling disconnected from God and lacking the earlier zeal which had characterized her efforts to start the Missionaries of Charity. As a result of this, she was judged by some to have "ceased to believe" and was posthumously criticized for hypocrisy.

All great people have their distractors. There was a lack of doctors and licensed nurses – funds are always an issue with charities.  I have seen the same situation in hospitals in Third World Countries. As far as whom she accepted funds from few charities refuse donations.  There is no reason to believe that she knew that some of the people she accepted funds from are thieves. The United States government supported Haiti’s dictator. Robert Maxwell was friends with the Royal family. Charles Keating was on the “A” list of New York socialites. Mother Teresa could not have spoken out for artificial birth control even if she had wanted to.  She was obligated to teach Catholic doctrine. Baptizing non-Christians was not right, but really what harm did she do. If you believe in baptism, she did good, if you do not believe in baptism then what difference does it make. They did nothing more than cool someone’s face. She was a ‘Catholic’ missionary her vocation was to try and bring about conversions. How do you determine how much time and money should be spent in that area? How much time and money do Protestants spend in that area?  I would expect the Assembly of God denomination to do more than Mother Teresa in India. They have the backing of ALL Assembly God Churches World Wide. The Catholic Church was not funding Mother Teresa’s ministry. The Catholic Church requires every order to be self-sustaining.

It is not uncommon for devoted Christians in ministerial work to feel at some time in their life that God is not hearing their prayers. I would say most go through a dark period that can last a very long time. I have had those periods in my life and they have lasted for years. Later in life you do not have the energy you had when you first began your ministry as a younger person. You grow tired faster and more often. If you are devoted to your vocation it is a very difficult life. Once you have an organization up and running even in the private world you experience attitude changes.

I do not believe Mother Teresa every stopped believing and she did not say that she did. She said that she could not feel God’s presence in her life for a long time. That does not mean she did not want to feel His presence and it does not mean she did not believe He was present and it certainly does not mean she no longer believed in God.

She was not a hypocrite for not sharing those feelings before she died. She must have feared it would cause distress for a lot of believers, especially her nuns, because they may not have understood, obviously some did not. I certainly did not and would not have shared my black periods with anyone. She wanted that secret carried to her grave, but she was betrayed by a priest, who had pretended for years to be her friend. In the end money from a book deal meant more than friendship. 

Those that have been critical of Mother Teresa have not accomplished near what she did for the poor. They probably do not understand what it is like to see extreme suffering and death day after day and know there is little you can do to alleviate it. There is never enough time or money. You are constantly second guessing yourself – what if I had done this or that.  I would not have turned down tainted money even if I knew it was tainted, she claims she did not know it was tainted. if I could use tainted money to help the poor and suffering I would.  I see it as taking the devil’s evil and turning it to good! 

I have gone to bed many nights not understanding peoples lack of charity and saying, “God, if everyone would only give fifty cents one time a year so much could be accomplished.” I have been where you know you are working as hard as you ever did, you see growth in the organization, you are witnessing more people being help than ever before, you are praying more, but something is missing. You begin to think something is wrong ‘with me’ and you cannot fix it. The test of your faith continues! God does allow the faithful to be tested.