Mother Teresa

ENCOUNTERING CHRIST

“Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time and His hands in every happening; this is what it means to be contemplative in the heart of the world.”

The above quote is from Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhu. You might better know her as Mother Teresa.

At a very young age, when she was still in grade school, her father died. Her mother encouraged her children to always maintain a love for Christ, keeping Him as their foremost thought. Agnes was twelve years of age when she strongly felt God calling her. When she turned 18 she left home in Skopje, that is northern Macedonia, and joined the sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns.

Agnes was sent to one of the missions in India where she took her vows and then became known as Mother Teresa. In 1942 she made a personal vow to herself to never refuse Jesus anything.

From 1931 to 1948 she taught school at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta but seeing the suffering and poverty going on in the streets outside her window left an aching in her heart and an awareness that there were so many more needs going unanswered.

It was 1946 when Mother Teresa was given some time off and took a train trip for a brief vacation to Darjeeling. It was on that train when she experienced Jesus in a personal encounter. She had had previous encounters with Christ, which she made reference to as “The Voice,” but this one held particular importance. This encounter or “internal location,” as the Catholic church references the encounters that occur with Christ/God, stood out and was monumental in the making of life changing decisions.

While on that train trip Mother Teresa encountered Christ and heard Him say to her “I cannot go alone to the poor people, you carry me with you into them.”

On another occasion she felt that she was literally transferred to the foot of the cross and actually heard firsthand as Christ spoke out the words “I thirst.” Hearing those words literally coming from Christ had a profound effect on her. She took those words to have a specific meaning for her in that she was to serve the poor.

Mother Teresa made reference to the messages she heard from Christ as a “Call within a Call.” In her words she stated that, “The message was clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.”

Mother Teresa returned from her vacation and opened an open air school for slum children in Kolkata with no funding to back her. The remainder of her life was dedicated to fulfilling the request that Jesus had made of her.

Father Celeste Van Exem, Mother Teresa’s confessor, was convinced that her experiences were genuine.

story submitted Sept 2025