A Body Left on the Street
In 1952, a woman walked past a Calcutta hospital carrying a man who was half-eaten by rats and ants. The hospital had refused him. He was dying on the pavement outside, and nobody stopped.
Mother Teresa picked him up. She carried him to a rented room near Kali Temple and washed his wounds herself. He died within hours, but he died looking into the face of someone who treated him like he mattered.
That room became Nirmal Hriday -- the Home for the Dying -- the first house of Missionaries of Charity. It started because one woman refused to walk past what everyone else ignored.
What She Found in the Wreckage
Teresa described something that rewired her theology: she saw Christ in the dying. Not metaphorically. She said she physically recognized Jesus in each person she carried off the street.
"I see God in every human being," she told Malcolm Muggeridge in 1969. "When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself."
This was not sentimentality. Her private letters, published after her death, revealed 50 years of spiritual darkness -- the absence of any feeling of God's presence. Yet she kept serving. The service itself became her only evidence of God, the one place she could still find him.
What Grew from One Room
From that single rented space in Calcutta, Missionaries of Charity expanded to 610 missions in 123 countries by the time of Teresa's death in 1997. They operated hospices, orphanages, and homes for people with HIV/AIDS when nobody else would touch them.
The entire movement grew from one act of service: picking up a man nobody wanted.
What This Means for You
You do not need to feel God's presence to find him. Teresa proved that for half a century. Sometimes the surest evidence of the divine is simply refusing to walk past someone else's suffering. The act of service itself becomes the encounter.