Daily Inspiration Quote by Mother Teresa

The words are a summons to cross the boundaries that pride, fear, and convenience erect. To touch the dying, the poor, the lonely, and the unwanted is both literal and spiritual: it means stepping close enough to feel another person’s pain and dignity, refusing the safety of distance. Touch restores personhood to those whom society has rendered untouchable. In places where disease, stigma, or poverty isolate people, physical presence becomes a form of healing in itself.

“According to the graces we have received” grounds the appeal in gratitude and realism. Not everyone can do everything, but everyone can do something with the gifts, time, and capacities entrusted to them. The phrase reframes service not as pity or duty alone but as a response to grace, a sharing of what has been given. It rejects perfectionism and excuses alike, asking for a faithful use of one’s particular portion.

“Let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work” confronts the vanity that prefers visibility to service. Humble work means bathing a fevered body, sweeping a floor, sitting in silence with someone who is dying. It rarely earns applause. Yet in the spirituality Mother Teresa embodied in Calcutta, these acts are not a prelude to the real work; they are the real work. They echo the Christian works of mercy and the Gospel charge to find Christ among “the least of these.”

The context of her ministry among the destitute sharpens the point: she chose the gutters, hospice wards, and slums, where touch cost something. The exhortation resists the drift toward abstract compassion or technocratic charity. Plans and policies matter, but they do not absolve us from proximity. The sentence therefore binds action to immediacy and humility, inviting each person to translate grace into presence, and presence into care, so that the unwanted discover they are seen, and the servant discovers that love grows in the very act of kneeling.