Reading Mother Teresa--Knowing God's Will

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, 

but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

 Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is 

– his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2 

Probably the most famous line in all of theater belongs to Prince Hamlet: “To be or not to be.” Won’t be long and I’ll be going through Hamlet again, and it’ll be my job, for the last time, to try to explain why that ubiquitous question of his is somehow timeless, arising formidably in all our lives, as it does, with sometimes alarming frequency, although the context is always different, thank goodness, few of us struggling with suicide or revenge for a murdered father.

Really difficult decisions about what to do are made more trying, or so it seems, by a transcendent, even eternal dimension to our decision-making, something we call “God’s will.” Joel Nederhood, in his book of devotions, The Forever People, claims that what Jesus himself gives us in the single petition of the Lord’s Prayer is the wish that we human beings would become more like the angels, simply taking God’s orders without question. “The reference to heaven in the perfect prayer,” he says (“Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”), “reminds us that there is a realm where the will of God is absolutely supreme.” Therefore, he says, “Those who want to live eternal life beginning now realize that God’s will must be supreme,” a realization and commitment that should make Hamlet’s indecision silly, if not, dare I say it? – sinful.

Emphasis on should. If only complete submission to the will of God were that simple. In my life at least, determining God’s will has never been a piece of cake. Am I alone here?

Mother Teresa, on the other hand, had no such problem. When, occasionally, she was accused of acting without thinking, she excused herself on the basis of her commitment, her vow, to do God’s will always. Always.

She had to have been blessed with a mind cleansed of filtering agents, nor could she have a dime’s worth of cynicism. She never heard that still small voice that says, so frequently (at least to me and Hamlet), “well, hold on just a minute here.”

I once wrote an article about a retired missionary who lit up my day with jubilant recitations of the abundantly good life on the mission field. I came away from that interview truly blessed. The woman breathed joy.

Sometime later, another old missionary told me that the woman who’d blessed me with her stories had been indefatigable on the mission field, but her overflowing energy sometimes got her into trouble. If she was scheduled for a meeting, she’d forget in a heartbeat if, on the way, she spotted some children playing under a tree. She felt compelled to tell them about Jesus. Meetings be hanged.

She knew God’s will.

I couldn’t help think of her when I read that Mother Teresa “developed the habit of responding immediately to the demands of the present moment,” something she did so regularly that “this swiftness to act was misinterpreted and taken for impetuousness or lack of prudence” (34). Maybe that caliber of commitment is packaged with any call to mission work – you simply and wholeheartedly equate your mission with God’s will. End of subject.

As for me and my house, we’re more Hamlet-like, forever between a rock and hard place. I probably think too much; and, right now, smarting under Nederhood’s admonition, I’ll probably not repeat that petition from the Lord’s prayer again without seeing my own ink-faced sin in the mirror – “thy will be done.” Sounds so stinkin’ easy. Just like that – no brooding, no worrying, no sleepless nights. Just do it.

One of the few theological words with earthy Anglo-Saxon roots is atonement, which means, as it says, to be “at one” with God. I know two now-deceased women, missionaries both, who obviously got closer than I am to being at one with God.

But my cynical mind says so did David Koresh and Harold Camping and a thousand other cultists who thought they were abundantly “at one,” but were not.

There I go questioning again. I’m hopeless.

May God have mercy on me. And Hamlet.