I was in an airport recently, two hours early for my flight and without a piece of anything to read. I went to the book store to kill time and maybe find something to browse until my scheduled departure.

I searched the novel covers and there--between Hillary Clinton’s, her husband Bill’s, and the latest Stephen King novel—sat the book of Mother Theresa’s letters. I had heard about these letters, how they’d been published after her death, and how this woman had spent her entire life doing God’s work and living in poverty. But the buzz about this book wasn’t that Mother Theresa had done so much for so many for so little: it was that within these pages she’d admitted--via personal correspondence letters with her closest circle--that some days, God was hard for her to find. Some days, she had lost hope for the very world she was trying so hard to make better: that many times she prayed and prayed but felt nothing—felt an absence of God.

This revelation, I have to tell you, was huge to me. It was my Holy Grail of religious reality. As a real person living in the 21st century trying so hard to be a good person but reading the headlines and getting discouraged with all the sickness out there—this was a cup of information I needed desperately: even Mother Theresa got the Catholic blues.

Because I’ve had those blues for a while now. I don’t understand the headlines of this world-- why so many are sick, starving, losing their homes, losing their lives, losing the war (in Afghanistan, in Iraq, on drugs, of faith--pick one, any one). There have been days when honestly I felt like I could just pull out the atheist crayons and color myself heathen. But I don't--I can't because that doesn't fit my M-O. I was raised in the Catholic faith, schooled in it, steeped in it. I’m too St. Mary's School-girl to throw out the baby with the Christening bath water. (Which doesn't mean I think Jewish, Buddhists, Muslims aren't right. Frankly, I think we're all right.) And deep down I do see the presence of God in my life. I feel pretty darn blessed. Yet so many out there aren't...why aren't they?

So for me it’s been hard to keep the faith. And now, thanks to Mother Theresa, I don’t have to. Because her book gives me hope, believe it or don’t, that I don’t have to know it all, or figure it all out, or explain every parable I don’t get to myself (or my kids) in order to believe in God. I mean I get it, I think He's there, but when others are blowing eachother up in His name, what's that? And how do I reconcile the homeless people I see in the streets as I sip my warm latte and hug my healthy kids?

My faith—or occasional weakness of faith—is not abnormal. In fact it is very typically something that even Mother Theresa felt. And just like the woman who made headlines with her miraculous works that defined living sainthood--even I can still be a good faithful person of God—my God, your God, her God—while simultaneously wondering how exactly God works in the first place.

Because Mother Theresa, in all of her greatness, and dedication and devotion to faith in ways I’ll never achieve—even she, a woman who got as close to the Catholic cloth as you can get in this century as a woman and whose one prayer to God is worth about 1000 of mine—even she had her moments. Even she didn’t get it sometimes. Even she had her doubts.

And oddly, strangely, miraculously enough, her very doubts have given me faith.