These words were spoken by Mother Teresa, that tiny Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in India. She is now considered to be a saint in the Catholic church. After reading Mother Teresa’s thoughts concerning the endless echoes of the words we speak I couldn’t help but relate the idea to the art of letter writing. What an opportunity we have to send kindness into the world with each letter we write.

I have the ritual of writing a letter each morning with my first cup of coffee. What I should ask myself each morning is whose life can I make brighter today? Sure, it’s fun to share what I’ve been up to and some days that can be pretty interesting and entertaining reading, but what does that sort of news really do for my friend? Not much I’m sure. If however I look for opportunities to say “yes” to their ideas or praise them for something they did, or encourage them for something they’re thinking of doing, well, those words could really make a difference in my pen friend’s day.

I’m happy to say I always have lots of wonderful letters waiting to be answered. I’m blessed to have many penfriends. I hope you have many penfriends too. Each letter friend is important to me. I love the one to one conversations and Mother Teresa was also about the one to one. She writes, ” I do not agree with the big way of doing things. What matters is the individual. To get to love a person, we must come into close contact with them. If we wait until we get the numbers then we will be lost in the numbers and we will never be able to show that love and respect for the person.

Every time we write a letter we have the opportunity to show someone the love and respect Mother Teresa talks about. In this way letter writing is more than a fun free-time activity. It becomes a ministry of love, a ministry we can carry on all by ourselves, in our comfy slippers, any hour of the day or night. While some people spew hate, fear and retribution around our world we can be working against those nasty efforts by sending out kind words which echoe melodiously all the way up to heaven.

Don’t just write any old kind of letters. Write love letters. What the world needs now more than anything is love sweet love and we are all capable of sending that needed love out into the world one letter at a time. Our penfriends may be so moved by our kindness they’ll start writing their own love letters too and on and on it could go.

Mother Teresa was only one person, and so am I, and so are you, but we just might be able to accomplish more than we think. Mother Teresa’s way was not in big things but in doing small things with great love. We should all try that too. We may never know the full extent of what our kind letters will accomplish until we get to heaven, but once there we’ll have to look up Mother Teresa and tell her how she inspired us. At least I hope she inspired you. She sure inspired me.