Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
“When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’” (Luke 17:10, NABRE)
They say that when Frances Cabrini died on December 22, 1917, she had been making Christmas candy for at-risk children in Chicago. It wasn’t a big, showy thing; but then, Frances probably wouldn’t have considered much of what she did to be big and showy. She just did what she felt the Lord obliged her to do.
It was a life in some way similar to many of the time… with some similarities to our lives today. No one thought she’d amount to much; a frail and sickly child who was nearly felled by smallpox and a near-drowning that may have been the reason behind her lifelong fear of the water. For health reasons, several communities of women religious refused to accept her. She failed at one of her first endeavors, turning around a troubled orphanage.
Frances had always felt called to be a missionary, and she knew it would be to China. She made little paper boats and put flowers in them, calling them missionaries. She and friends from the failed orphanage endeavor formed the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred 
Heart of Jesus, and made plans to go to China. The pope, however, saw a greater need among Italians who had recently emigrated to the United States, and famously told her, “Not to the East, but to the West.” Frances didn’t argue; she did what she felt the Lord obliged her to do.
The women received less than a warm reception from Church authorities in New York, who advised them to go back home until funding and a place to live were set up. Frances didn’t argue… or return to Italy. She and the others asked another community of women religious and immigrants for help in doing what they felt the Lord obliged them to do. She spent the next twenty-eight years establishing schools, orphanages, hospitals, and more on three continents, crossing the Atlantic more than two dozen times—and making Christmas candy and performing other small, mundane tasks she felt the Lord obliged her to do.
We can learn much from the United States’ first (naturalized) citizen to be canonized. But perhaps the greatest lesson the frail woman with the big eyes and bigger heart offers us is not to look for accolades and atta-girls and atta-boys for what we do in His name. We do it because it is what we are obliged to do, knowing our ledger with God can never be balanced.
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