“Mother Teresa, with all due respect, don’t you feel like a failure?”
That’s the question former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., had for famed missionary to India Mother Teresa many years ago.
He went on to clarify what he meant.
“There’s a sea of poverty outside your doors; you can’t possibly succeed in helping all the people in Calcutta,” he said.
Mother Teresa looked at Hatfield and said, “My dear senator, God did not call me to be successful. He called me to be faithful.”
“Success is not the goal,” says Richard Stearns, former 20-year president of World Vision and prior leader in the secular business world. That’s why he shares this moving story with Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network and in his latest book, Lead Like It Matters to God.
“I think with those words, Mother Teresa turned inside out the leadership paradigms that we are taught in our business schools and in our academies, because Mother Teresa was saying, ‘God doesn’t care about your success, the title on your business card, the size of your bank account; God is interested in your character, your faithfulness to Him,'” Stearns says. “And if you’re faithful to God—and that’s the thesis of my book—and you take your character, your Christian character, to work with you, that’s what real success is.”
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