He Forgot The Hands That Held Him — Until He Fell Again

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

By Emma Lota

 

The words hit like a slap, gentle, but impossible to ignore. Because that was her way, wasn’t it? Mother Teresa didn’t preach from a pulpit; she knelt in the filth of Calcutta’s gutters, cradling the dying like they were Christ himself. While empires rose and fell on the backs of the forgotten, this five-foot-nothing nun with a face like crumpled parchment rewrote the meaning of power. Not with armies. Not with gold. But with love so fierce it scalded the soul.

This is the story of a woman who walked into hell, and dared to call it holy.

A Call in the Night

Calcutta, 1946. The air was thick with monsoon rot and the groans of the starving. A train rattled through the darkness, carrying a 36-year-old Albanian nun named Agnes Bojaxhiu. She was just another face in the crowd, until God, or fate, or something far more stubborn, grabbed her by the throat.

"I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums..."

No lightning. No angels. Just a voice in her heart, whispering: Go. The poorest of the poor are waiting.

So she went.

With no money, no plan, and only the sheer, stupid audacity of faith, she stepped into the slums like a woman walking into fire. The streets were open graves, lepers with flesh sloughing off, and orphans gnawing on trash, skeletal figures curled in doorways, waiting to die. The world had written them off. She didn’t.

Love as a Weapon

Most saints come polished, framed in stained glass. Not her. Mother Teresa’s holiness was a grimy, sweat-soaked thing. She scooped maggots from wounds with her bare hands. She held men shivering with cholera as they pissed themselves in fear. She turned an abandoned temple into Nirmal Hriday—"Place of the Pure Heart", where the damned could die with dignity, if not hope.

"Do small things with great love," she’d say.

But there was nothing small about it.

Critics sneered. What’s the point? You can’t save them all. She’d smile, that quiet, knife-sharp smile. No. But you can save this one. And this one. Every life was a universe. And she fought for them like a general on a battlefield, only her war was against indifference.

The Dark Night

Here’s the truth they don’t put on the prayer cards: for 50 years, she felt nothing.

No divine light. No warmth. Just a yawning void where God should’ve been.

"If I ever become a saint," she once wrote, "I will surely be one of darkness."

Imagine it. The woman who became the global symbol of faith spent half a century choking on spiritual silence. And yet, yet, she kept loving. Kept serving. Not because it felt good, but because it was right. That’s not piety. That’s raw, bloody will.

The Slippery Slope of Power

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin.

Because while Mother Teresa was wiping brows in the gutter, history’s "great men" were busy playing god. Napoleon. Stalin. Caesar. Brilliant minds, every one, until power turned their genius into a cancer.

Take Napoleon. A Corsican upstart who outmaneuvered empires, only to crown himself emperor and march half a million men into Russia’s frozen grave. Or Stalin, the paranoid scribbler who murdered millions to feed his own myth. Even Alexander wept when he ran out of worlds to conquer.

Power doesn’t just corrupt. It addicts. And the higher you climb, the less human you become, until you’re just a hollow thing in a golden cage, barking orders at ghosts.

Mother Teresa? She wielded a different kind of power. The kind that kneels. The kind that chooses the weak over the strong. While dictators built monuments to their egos, she built homes for the unloved.

The Legacy: A Fire That Still Burns

She died in 1997. The world wept. Calcutta’s streets, once her battleground, fell eerily quiet.

But here’s the miracle: her work didn’t die. The Missionaries of Charity still stalk the planet’s darkest corners, pulling the forgotten from the shadows. Because love, real love, doesn’t expire.

So what’s the lesson in all this?

Maybe this: the world will always crown its conquerors. But the ones who really change history? They’re the ones who touch the untouchable. Who love the unlovable. Who stare into the abyss, and refuse to let it win.

Mother Teresa wasn’t perfect. (Show me a saint who is.) But she proved something radical: that in a world drunk on power, the meek do inherit the earth.

One dying beggar at a time.

Empires rise and fall. Tyrants rot in their mausoleums. But love?

Love outlives them all.

And if that’s not sainthood, what is?