Let us love, since that is what our hearts were made for.
- St. Therese
There was a remarkable woman who lived a hundred and fifty years ago who not many people have heard of. Her name is Saint Therese. Not the praised Saint Teresa, but a woman equally as remarkable who died in obscurity at the age of twenty-four. Saint Therese never did anything extraordinary. She didn’t live a life of mission in the slums of Calcutta like Saint Teresa. Instead she lived an ordinary life of extraordinary love. She called herself a ‘little flower of Jesus’, as she gave glory to God by simply being the beauty God had created her to be amongst all the other flowers in His garden.
Like her, many of our lives fall into the beige lands of the ordinary. There are beds to be made, kids to drop at school, piles of work on the desk, an inbox full of emails, a laundry basket filled with a month’s worth of washing, groceries that need to be bought, dinner to be made… Or maybe it will just be easier to get takeout tonight. Life is busy. And sometimes it feels painfully ordinary. Unremarkable. If you’re anything like me, there are long nights wondering whether you have done anything to contribute to this world.
There is great news: All the mundane details of your life are great playgrounds of opportunity to love.
I recently had the opportunity to spend a month with The Mbuyu Foundation in Uganda. As I was there, I was painfully confronted with my seemingly ordinary life at home. As I witnessed the incredible work God is doing through Leah and Rob, I looked at my own life and felt so dispirited! My life is just so ordinary, I thought, I’m not doing anything remarkable at all.
What I have since learned though, is that it is sometimes in the ordinary that we are given the greatest opportunity to enact and embody the love of God. Although I do not work in the heart of the Katanga Slums in Uganda, I have a powerful opportunity to love from where I stand on the other side of the world through child sponsorship.
I took this opportunity to love and I now have a delightful daughter who can continue going to school and go to university to fulfill her dream of becoming an English teacher.
There are hundreds of other children in the Katanga slums who continually pray for people like you to sponsor them!
Live a life following the ‘little way’ of Saint Therese. Let your life not centre around great deeds, but rather great love. God loves us so much that it was ‘always in His perfect plan to adopts us as His delightful children’ (Ephesians 1:6). With this same Spirit of Adoption, you too can embody the love of God by sponsoring a child.
TO SPONSOR A CHILD TODAY THROUGH THE MBUYU FOUNDATION HEAD TO OUR CHILD SPONSORSHIP PAGE
https://www.thembuyufoundation.org/copy-of-projects
By Shell-Sea Ellem