In the 1950s, Mother Teresa ran into trouble with finding a suitable spot for a new leper clinic in Calcutta. The wife of a British solicitor, Ann Blaikie, suggested a plot of land between two railway lines. Government officials whipped up public opinion against this move.
When Mother Teresa arrived "the villagers picked up stones and started to throw them, forcing the well-intentioned intruders to run to the car. Mother Teresa, always quick to perceive the hand Providence at work, saw in their disapproval a sign that God might not want a leper clinic in that particular location and resolved to pray for two mothers to see what God did want...."
(Within two months she received a $10,000 rupee donation AND free medical support to open the first ever mobile leprosy clinic is laid. The new discovery of the sulphone drug, DDS, means that patients can now be treated at home.)
"Ambulances carrying this and other medicines to those areas where there were most needed could arrest the disease and in some cases cure it and, what was of vital importance to Mother Teresa, they could do so without removing the patient from his family, his essential source of love, or his employment, the mainspring of his dignity." (Spink, Mother Teresa, p 65)
Can you imagine such meekness? First, if a crowd of people started literally throwing stones at me for "doing God's work" , I would be sorely tempted to get on my high horse. I'd be tempted to think that clearly I was in the right and they were in the wrong. It's a LEPER Clinic, after all. How much more cut and dried can you get for being "inside of God's will?" For Mother Teresa to view the villagers stone -throwing as the permissive Will of God Almighty is pretty amazing. Then she had the courage and self-discipline to sit still and PRAY about the problem for two months??? So inspiring!
