“Mother Teresa always said, ‘Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.’ I was ready to come home. I knew that my Calcutta was the United States, for I knew that we could not end poverty until we took a careful look at wealth. I was to battle the beast from within the belly. I learned from the lepers that leprosy is a disease of numbness. The contagion numbs the skin, and the nerves can no longer feel as the body wastes away. In fact, the way it was detected was by rubbing a feather across the skin, and if the person could not feel it, they were diagnosed with the illness. To treat it, we would dig out or dissect the scarred tissue until the person could feel again. As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness. Could we learn to feel again?”
I'm highly opposed to war-metaphors for the Christian life and writing in general, but here's one in particular. Carl von Clausewitz said, "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult...So in War, through the influence of an infinity of petty circumstances, which cannot properly be described on paper, things disappoint us, and we fall short of the mark." [1]
Yes; exactly. The struggle for sight and feeling for our Calcuttas is a war for our hearts. God woos us; Satan threatens us; petty circumstances encompass us. It's the simplest thing to find my Calcutta, and equally difficult.
Praying that you'll see your Calcutta today.
[1] On War, Book I, Chapter VII, "Friction in War," Carl von Clausewitz.
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