When the Evidence Arrives on Stretchers

For nearly fifty years, Mother Teresa carried a secret. Letters published after her death revealed that the woman the world celebrated as a saint of certainty lived in profound spiritual darkness. "Where is my faith?" she wrote to her confessor in 1959. "Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness." She wondered if God was real, if her work meant anything, if she had been abandoned.

She sounded remarkably like John the Baptist, locked in Herod's dungeon, sending word to Jesus: "Are you the one, or should we expect someone else?"

Jesus did not send John a theological argument. He sent evidence. "Go back and report what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the dead are raised, and good news is proclaimed to the poor."

Mother Teresa never received the inner consolation she longed for. But every morning she walked into the streets of Calcutta and picked up the dying. She bathed wounds. She held hands no one else would touch. She became, without fully realizing it, the very answer Jesus described — the evidence of the Kingdom arriving not in thunder but in tenderness.

Sometimes faith is not a feeling. Sometimes it is a woman in a white sari lifting a stranger from a gutter, becoming the proof she could not find within herself. The Almighty often answers our deepest doubts not with explanations but with invitations to become part of the evidence.