Knowing your mission

One of my favorite stories about modern mission comes from the life of Mother Teresa.  It comes from her early days, when she first began her ministry in the slums of Kolkatta, India (formerly Calcutta).  She learned of a hungry Hindu family with eight children.   One night, she came to the family's home with a very small portion of rice.  She recalled that she could easily recognize the early stages of starvation in the faces of the childern.  Surely she must have felt embarrassed by the meagerness of the rice. 

After she presented the small parcel to the mother of the family, the matriarch  thanked her profusely  and then divided the rice into two equal portions.  She wrapped one in some cloth and then left the house.  When she returned a few moments later, Mother Teresa asked her, "Where did you go?" The mother replied, "Mother, they are aslo hungry next door." 

Mother Teresa later learned that the family next door was Muslim and was just as hungry as their Hindu neighbors.  Apparently the mother of the family saw the common hunger between the two houses despite a millenia of sectarian hostility between the two faiths.

The story is often told as a lesson in gratitude and it is a beautiful one.  It is also a story of mission. The mother in the story didn't excuse herself from charity because she had so little.  She didn't wait for an abundance to find her mission. She gave of the very little she had been given.  From that trueness of heart, God blessed her gift and made it immortal, just like the widow's mite.

Sometimes, we may think that our lives are too broken, our souls too weak, and our gifts too humble to share. We often dwell on the meagerness of the rice.   Yet the Divinity in the sacrifice is in the act of giving and not in the gift itself.   

We are also reminded that hunger, whether physical, emotional or spiritual, is universal.  Hunger trumps creed.  It also trumps race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, and whatever distinction we care to impose on ourselves.  The response to hunger must also be as universal and personal . Our job is to seek out the hunger in the lives around us and respond with whatever gifts we are given, trusting that God will bless and increase them.

Perhaps this is why Jesus' most frequently uttered commandment is to feed the hungry.  If you don't know where to look, just remember, they are also hungry next door.