When we reflect on our spiritual heritage, there are several spiritual "giants" who have lived such sacrificial lives that even non-believers admire their legacy. One of those "giants" is the small-statured Mother Teresa who spent her life caring for the forgotten in the streets of Calcutta. Her work was difficult, yet she endured without complaint. I think her prayer below reveals how she did it...

"Dear Jesus, Help us to spread your fragrance everywhere we go, flood our souls with your Spirit and life. Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly that our lives may only be a radiance of yours. Shine through us and be so in us that every soul we come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul. Let them look up and see no longer us but only Jesus. Stay with us and then we shall begin to shine as you shine, so to shine as to be light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from you. None of it will be ours. It will be your shining on others through us. Let us thus praise you in the way you love best by shining on those around us. Let us preach you without preaching - not by words but by our example...by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do...the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to you."

What would happen if each of us woke up each morning and lived each day with the goal of spreading His fragrance wherever we go? Oh God, let that be our prayer and our desire - to preach you without preaching, not by words but by our example.