24th July

Serving faithfully

A journalist questions Mother Teresa shortly before her death in September 1997: "Do you not think that you only give a drop of water in the middle of so many needs?" She answered: "The only important thing is personal faithfulness."

Good lesson! It is true that we ourselves cannot carry all the miseries of the world. However, God asks each one of us to be faithful, to have a life style which is coherent with our faith; and to meet the need which is in front of us.

Should we not recognize that we often find excuses for not doing what is in front of us? Sometimes we believe that we are overloaded with so many jobs which we think have priority, with so many urgencies which could wait and with preoccupations which sometimes are unjustified.

Very often we are similar to the priest and the levite in the parable of the "Good Samaritan" (Luke 10), we see our neighbour in distress but we walk away because this is the easiest solution.

We need to remember that the "Good Samaritan" - a nice picture of our Lord Jesus Christ - saw the injured person, stopped, approached to him, bent, took care of him and put him into a sure place.

In our neighbourhood or maybe in our church there are certainly souls which have been injured by modern life. They are at the roadside and cannot get up again. What do we do with them?