St. Thérèse of Lisieux

Thérèse grew up in a small town in France, the youngest of five sisters, and she kept a string of beads in her pocket. Every time she did some small kindness that nobody saw, or gave up something she wanted without saying so, she slid one bead along the string. At night she counted them.

But she wanted to do something big. The saints in her books had crossed oceans and talked to kings. At fourteen she decided to enter the convent, and every adult in the chain said no. The priest said no. The bishop said nothing at all. So her family took her all the way to Rome, and she knelt down in front of the Pope and asked him herself, after everyone had been told not to speak to him. Two guards picked her up by the arms and carried her out while she cried the whole way.

They let her in a few months later, and it was not what she expected. She was a small person in a small building she was never going to leave, and the work waiting inside was the same work she had done at home with her beads. A sister who made a clicking noise every night at prayer, and Thérèse decided to listen to it like a concert. An old sister nobody wanted to walk to supper, and Thérèse asked for the job. She called it the Little Way: a hundred things that size, done with love, instead of a whole life spent waiting for one big thing.