LRC, Houston - the weekends-free church in Houston, Texas

Tragically, there are way too many Christians who go to church every Sunday, maybe even Sunday evening, with a Bible study mid week. They tithe and do “good works” for the Lord. They appear to be happy and totally sold out to God. But, if you could see inside that outer shell, you’d find many lonely people who don’t even know if God exists. They have no relationship with Jesus or God, beyond the words they speak. And you can even put Mother Teresa in that category!

A book of letters written by Mother Teresa of Calcutta reveals for the first time that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God. “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear,” she wrote the Rev. Michael van der Peet in September 1979.

Due out on September 4, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” is a collection of letters written to colleagues and superiors over 66 years. In the United States it will be published by Doubleday, an imprint of Random House, which is owned by German media group Bertelsmann. Mother Teresa had wanted all her letters destroyed, but the Vatican ordered they be preserved as potential relics of a saint, a spokeswoman for Doubleday said.

Mother Teresa has been beatified but not yet canonized.

“I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love,” she wrote to one adviser. “If you were (there), you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.”‘ The book was compiled and edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a proponent of her sainthood and senior member of the Missionaries of Charity order that she founded. The letters likely would do little to affect her cause for sainthood as church history is dotted with saints who have been tormented about their faith.

The Mother Teresa letters stand in marked contrast to her public image as a selfless and tireless minister for the poor who was driven by faith. “I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented,” the Rev. James Martin, an editor at Jesuit magazine America and the author of “My Life with the Saints,” told Time.

A couple examples include:

“Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead,” she wrote in 1953. “It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.” Then in 1956: “Such deep longing for God — and … repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.” And then in 1959: “If there be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then Jesus — You also are not true. I utter words of community prayers — and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give — but my prayer of union is not there any longer — I no longer pray.”

Too many people are wrapped up in DOING, when what My Jesus, My God, your Jeus, your God, just want intimacy with us. The “other stuff” will follow.