Reading Mother Teresa--Workmanship

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10

“I was only twelve years old then. It was then that I first knew I had a vocation to the poor. . .in 1922. I wanted to be a missionary, I wanted to go out and give the life of Christ to the people in the missionary countries. . .” Mother Teresa

Wow. Twelve.

When I was twelve, I lived across the street from a school playground where one of the three fields of dreams offered all the joy and thrills I needed: a blacktopped basketball court, hoops sometimes even netted; a sandlot baseball field, scraps of cardboard for bases; and a broad, open space for football, come September. Wasn't an adult in sight. No uniforms, no score books, no instruction. Just play. Oh, yeah--and golf midsummer with ancient wooden clubs we rescued from a neighbor's trash.

When I was twelve, I went to catechism and church and Christian school. I played piano, not well, and sang in choirs. I heard the Bible read every time we ate, and listened to my own parents talk about faith openly and lovingly. When I was twelve, I had every advantage Mother Teresa did spiritually. 

When I was twelve, with buddies, I grabbed cigarettes from a grocery store. That's another story.

When I was twelve, I wrote a letter to Elizabeth Eliot after reading Through Gates of Splendor, the story of those missionaries murdered by Auca Indians somewhere in South America; and I remember getting a letter back from her, too, a sweet one. The letter was a school assignment. I was twelve.

What I don't remember is ever aching to become, someday, a missionary. I just wanted to play ball, and, for a while at least, smoke cigarettes.

I don't think of my childhood as being spiritually or materially impoverished. Not in the least. In fact, I tend to judge it as almost idyllic. Does that make sense?

At twelve I don't think I felt much at all of Mother Teresa's immense conviction of God. It was something I had to learn. Maybe, at twelve, Mother Teresa didn’t feel as if life had a learning curve. I did. Maybe, as a child, she was already capable of what Christ extols when he talks, as he often did, about child-like faith. I don't believe I was.

But honestly, I don’t regret much about my childhood, not even the smokes. Each of us is built of different stuff. She was somehow blessed with a huge head start. But I was blessed too, greatly so. We are, from womb to grave, His workmanship. 

What the two of us share, I’m sure—Mother Teresa and me—is the knowledge that his hand is ever opened lovingly in our lives.