"Your poverty is greater than ours"

"The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only for a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God."
-  Mother Teresa

Something that has been apparent to me for quite some time now is that despite living in a developed country, I don't have to venture further than a step ahead to find a deep poverty in this country. It lives in our homes, in our workplaces, in the hearts of our friends, our family, and strangers. It's not something a couple of loonies thrown in a cup can help remedy temporarily. I don't even feel a few kind words help either - though I try. Even a trip to somewhere far away and beautiful seems to help at first, but we take our hearts with us, and the crevices of its contents eventually reveal themselves to remind us that we were missing something all this while.

How can we live in these privileged worlds with our mouths easily filled, our bodies always sheltered, our lives bombarded with company, with future luxuries just another easy paycheque away - and still feel so lost and listless?

I've seen that one can fill their lives and their bodies with necessities easily - but a sense of purpose and hope?<-- that seems a harder purchase to find. That need is found somewhere deeper in the soul that I've been humbled to realize only God can find and fill there. If we let Him.

What scares me is that some of us don't know what we're missing. We don't know how truly poor we are. How can you ask to heal a wound you can't see?

"Je ne sais quoi"

Paris:
Maybe she had a chat over some macarons with the Mona Lisa at her stop in Paris - because since she's returned, she smiles with that elusive clear-eyed secret that perhaps she may know something we all don't.