Endless Saturday

It lay there. And I ignored it all day, though Mother Teresa's face called to me, tried to pull me in to read about her letters. Still, I resisted. I didn't want to feel her pain even though that's exactly why I bought the magazine. But then I read this, and I picked up Time and started to read.

I read about Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul, about things I've been told before about being tested, about how Job lived through the absence of God, about how in order to follow Jesus one cannot escape persection, even the persecution from God when He removes the hedge from around you and allows Satan to taunt and tempt you and when He removes His presence from your hearing and your sight, just as He did with Jesus on that last Friday.

"That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta...", when she joined them in a hellish place, where human love did not exist, where even the lowest had spurned them. Is it no wonder she entered the endless Saturday of despair and loneliness when she entered into their lives.

It is a torment, that endless, never-ending hellish Saturday. That Saturday when hope vanishes and the future becomes bleak, so bleak you close your eyes against it. And when at last the sun breaks night's hold on the landscape of your mind and reddens your eyelids, you wonder is it just the moon fooling you with the sun's reflected light and you're still in the middle of Saturday or is it true? Is it true that the hedge has been put back, that hell's hold on your mind is gone, that the sun is growing a new life for you? It is hard to believe it is true when the night has been and is so very long.

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