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CRIES FROM THE HEART
Hello My Friends,
As unassuming as Mother Teresa was, something of God unquestionably radiated from her. She showed her love in deeds; that is what made her words significant.
Everything in her life was an expression of prayer - her scolding, her humor, her example of serving the poor instead of preaching about it. Her work continues to inspire people all over the world, making the promise in Revelation a reality: "Blessed are they who die in the Lord, for their works shall follow after them."
Once someone asked Mother Teresa where she found the strength for the enormous work she did for the poor. Her answer:
My secret is quite simple - I pray! You should spend at least half an hour in the morning and an hour at night in prayer. You can pray while you work. Work doesn't stop prayer, and prayer doesn't stop work. It requires only that small raising of mind to him: "I love you, God, I trust you, I believe in you, I need you now." Small things like that. They are wonderful prayers.
Prayer cannot be an excuse for inaction. Love must be put into deeds. As writer Anna Mow used to say, "Love is an action, not a feeling." If we pray for God's will to be done on earth, then our life will be a life of work. For just as faith without works is dead, prayer without work is hypocrisy. Unless our love is expressed in deeds, our spiritual life will wither and die. John Michael Talbot tells us that, for Francis of Assisi, solitude and service were two sides of the same coin. And Dorothy Day said that she believed many people pray not through words but through the witness of their lives, "through the work they do and the love they offer to others."
Each of us can offer to God the things we do during the course of the day. George Arthur Buttrick once wrote that "fields are not plowed by praying over them. But let a man remember that fields become a drudgery, or a botched labor, or even a greed and a bitterness, unless the plowing is done in prayer." There is a difference between just doing something, and making it a prayer. When we make our work a prayer, we do it not only for ourselves or our neighbor, but for God. All our loving deeds, all our work for human justice and the relief of suffering, are not really prayers until self is out of the way, and we acknowledge God and recognize that we are just as much in need of him as he is in need of us to do his works.
Johann Christoph Arnold-
Many Blessings to you all my friends, Kathy Martin
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