Mother Teresa Leaves the Convent

For years Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the suffering and poverty she saw outside the convent walls. In 1948 she got permission to leave the school and go work among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. She didn’t have any money. She simply trusted God to provide and started an open-air school for slum children. In 1950 she was allowed to start her own order, and its main job was to love and care for the people nobody else was willing to look after. You don’t need a big budget to start serving. You need eyes that see the hurting and the faith to take the first step toward them.

The Lady with the Lamp

In 1854, Florence Nightingale answered a government call for nurses and headed to Scutari, near Constantinople, to care for British soldiers from the Crimean War. What she found was awful. The hospital was dirty and crawling with vermin, and it didn’t even have basic supplies. More men were sick from disease than from battle wounds. Florence and her nurses got to work. They set up food kitchens, washed linen and clothes, wrote letters home for the soldiers, and started reading rooms. The Times reported that at night she walked among the beds checking on the wounded with a light in her hand. That’s how she became the Lady with the Lamp. Greatness in God’s kingdom usually looks like somebody carrying a light into a place nobody else wants to go.

A Ring Around Christian Eriksen

On June 12, 2021, Denmark was playing Finland in Copenhagen when midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed on the field just before halftime. Captain Simon Kjaer was one of the first to reach him and appeared to clear his airway. Medics rushed in to resuscitate him. While they worked, his teammates did something simple and beautiful. They locked arms in a ring around him to give him some privacy from the crowd and the cameras. Many of them were in tears. Some appeared to pray. In the stands, Finland fans chanted “Christian” and Denmark fans answered “Eriksen.” He survived. One Danish newspaper summed it up: Denmark lost, but life won. When a brother goes down, the best thing we can do is surround him, cover him, and pray.

The Village That Hid Thousands

During World War II, the little French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the farms around it became a refuge. Led by Pastor André Trocmé, his wife Magda, and his assistant Pastor Edouard Theis, ordinary church people took in an estimated 5,000 refugees, about 3,000 to 3,500 of them Jews fleeing the Vichy government and the Germans. They hid people in homes, hotels, farms, and schools, and guided some of them about 300 kilometers to the Swiss border. These were descendants of persecuted Protestants, and they remembered what it felt like to be hunted. After a mass roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942, Trocmé said in a sermon that “the Christian Church must kneel down and ask God to forgive its present failings and cowardice.”

Ruby Bridges Walks into First Grade

On November 14, 1960, a six-year-old named Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans escorted by U.S. marshals. She was the first Black child to enter an all-white school in the South. People threw objects at her. One woman held up a Black doll in a little wooden coffin. Many white parents kept their kids home, so Ruby spent first grade alone with her teacher, Barbara Henry, a white woman from Boston. Ruby ate her own lunch from home because of fear of poisoning, and her mother lost her job. Through all of it, Ruby never missed a day of school. Years later she said of her teacher, “She showed me her heart.”