Scott Fillmer

This is a small post series I started last week called Quotes and Quips (see last entry called Quotes and Quips // a Little Dirty Dinner) that is taken from small pieces that my mother-in-law saved or cutout and put in a binder.

The binder was left to me when she passed away back in April and I am sharing a few of her favorites, this one is called A Real Life, I had not read this or seen this text before today, but I really like it and wanted to share it with my readers.  This one was really an incredible look at how a lady thought who impacted this world in such a great way before her death.  She even had questions about her own faith and wrote about these questions in her own journal and that to me was the most genuine thing I had ever heard about her.

People are unreasonable,
illogical and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will
accuse you of selfish motives.
Do good anyway.

if you are successful, you may
win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today may be
forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honest and transparency make
you vulnerable.
Be honest and transparent anyway.

What you spend years building
may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People who really want help may
attack you if you help them.
Help them anyway.

Give the world the best you
have and you may be hurt.
Give the world your bests anyway.

– Mother Teresa

It is not a comical or humorous poem but I like the heart that comes with it. When someone tells you that you should go “help” someone and has never done anything with their life it isn’t quite as powerful as when Mother Teresa says the same thing.

Mother Teresa spent her life helping others, but from what I have read, it also gave her great joy. I was fascinated by the letters that surfaced after her death where people questioned her faith. From one line of one letter where she said:

Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, Listen and do not hear the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.

That to me is powerful. Someone is our world is always looking to take a shot at faith in Jesus Christ and will jump at any chance. That to me is a spiritual person who can look more honestly at herself than any of us probably can, and it shows she was human.

Do you have something like this poem to share? Just leave a comment below with the link so we can go read it. My mother-in-law loved to collect little clippings, I know she wasn’t the only one.