Across the street

When the team was in Kolkata, our hotel rooms looked out over a busy four-lane city street, that with the driving habits in India qualifies it for an eight-lane bumper car rally race track. Directly on the other side of the street was a Baptist Mission House used to host, house, and feed missionaries, volunteers, and workers in Kolkata. Just a few blocks down is The Mother House, the final resting place of Mother Theresa and an overwhelmingly simple community of Catholic sisters who spend their day praying, serving, and helping the poor and homeless in that crowded city.

Our team visited The Mother House one day, but we would frequent the Baptist Mission House more than a couple mornings because of a very generous offer to feed us breakfast. Somewhere around the time I was reaching for a hard-boiled egg to compliment the porridge and milk, Monique introduced herself to a precious, lively, 80-something year-old woman named Betty, sitting across the table from Joel and myself. You could just tell that her heart was filled with love, and her eyes had seen decades of life, death, pain, and joy. That simple introduction invited her to spend the next hour or so, telling us her story, and the time that we spent with her that one day, I never saw the smile leave her face. She told us her story of how she came to India on a month-long boat ride in the early 1950's from Pennsylvania to Bombay, and how she met her husband Solomon while working as a Baptist Missionary. Each story she told had the potential to be it's own novel or motion picture, filled with twists and colorful characters. Betty remembered every detail, but often forgot whether she had described each detail enough.

Her stories made me wonder if, when I am reaching my old age, I'll have that kind of impact on a country, on a people-group, on history. She radiated a potent legacy that burns a new desire to impact the world. You can't just sit at a table with her and sip your tea and nibble on your toast with orange marmalade, you have to drop everything and study the details of her account, and study the lines on her face. A face that had once been a beautiful 25 year-old girl starting out on an adventure that would shape her life, and countless other lives. After over 50 years in the mission field, despite saying that she is retired, you can tell that she never stops thinking about serving the poor, the weak, and the needy. A new kind of beauty pours from her soul. Love. You can hear it in her laugh.

Sitting there with Betty made me realize that she has lived so much life, that really, a conversation with her consists of her answering questions that we asked. There wasn't much of a dialogue coming from our side of the table, we were just trying to soak in as much of her life experience as possible. There is so much that we learned from our conversation with Betty, and so many opinions and false expectations were shattered just by going across the street for breakfast.