and raises our capacities. The old adages have turned out to be
based on chemistry and physiology as well as faith.Respond with the Math of Hope
In Mother Teresa’s India, the hopeless and the dying are like
an endless sea of despair. Someone asked her how, considering
this enormity, she could continue day after day, year after year
with her ministry to the dying. How could she not be over-
whelmed when her efforts were contrasted with the needs? She
could do only a little.
She responded that looking at it that way applied the wrong
math. She used subtraction. Every time she loved and cared for a
destitute and dying man, every time she rescued a girl from pros-
titution, she was subtracting from the despair and adding to hope.
Author and scientist Loren Eiseley in his book The Star Thrower
describes someone who in this regard thought like Mother Teresa.
On a beach in Costabel, Eiseley saw great numbers of empty
shells, “the debris of life.” He watched gulls cut a hermit crab to
pieces and wrote, “Death walks hugely and in many forms.”
One dawn, he surveyed what the night’s ocean had deposited.
“Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere.” Eiseley knew
the tiny breathing pores of the starfish were stuffed with sand,
and the rising sun would shrivel their bodies.
Rounding a bluff, he discerned the star thrower. It was a man
who stooped to pick up a starfish, then loft it far out to sea. Eiseley
approached him. “It may live,” the man said of the starfish, “if the
off-shore pull is strong enough.”
The man stooped again and threw another starfish back to its
natural habitat. “The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help
them.”
Eiseley saw in the man’s skimming the starfish out into the
water “the posture of a god.” Yet he also wrote, “The star thrower
is a man, and death is running more fleet than he along every sea
beach in the world.”
Despite that fact, the star thrower kept at his task. “One can
help them,” he reasoned.
The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham