Inma Cuesta. Smc.
Sister Teresina Minelli spent decades in Africa, in places where there wasn’t much of anything. Not many resources, not many programs, not many of the supports that modern missionary work often relies on. And in that poverty of means, she discovered something essential about mission that gets easily buried under layers of planning and preparation.
The essential thing is contact with the Lord
“In the mission field, in Africa where I was, there weren’t so many means for so many things to help,” she recalls. “The important thing was just to trust in the Lord, simply. Me with Him, because there wasn’t so much help.” Then she adds something that might sound almost heretical to those who equate missionary preparation with endless courses and training: “You can’t trust with too much support in mission. Courses, no courses, whatever. Your contact with the Lord is enough.”
Your contact with the Lord is enough. It’s a statement so radical in its simplicity that it challenges the entire infrastructure of modern missionary formation. Not that training is bad, not that preparation doesn’t matter, but that at the end of the day, when you’re in the field and the courses are over and the supports have fallen away, what remains is just you and God. And somehow, mysteriously, that turns out to be sufficient.
This isn’t romantic primitivism or a rejection of proper formation. It’s something deeper—a recognition that the essence of mission isn’t technique but presence, not expertise but relationship. Sister Teresina learned this not from a book but from the brutal honesty of life in places where you can’t fake it, where the poverty strips away everything non-essential and you discover what actually matters.
Everything comes later
But there’s another dimension to this theology of poverty in mission, and it comes from Sister Paola Glira, who speaks about prayer with a frankness that’s both refreshing and a bit unsettling. “I have the fortune of finding Him every day in prayer, that’s truly my strength, and then the rest comes by itself.” So far, so good—this is what we expect missionaries to say. But then she adds something unexpected: “Sometimes maybe nothing really happens in prayer, but it happens afterward, during the day that brings you back there. So I feel that I don’t want to lose it.”
Nothing happens in prayer. Let that sit for a moment. How many of us have experienced exactly this—showing up faithfully for prayer and feeling absolutely nothing, wondering if we’re doing it wrong, if God is absent, if we’ve somehow lost the connection? Sister Paola names this experience with complete honesty: sometimes, in the moment of prayer itself, nothing seems to happen. No consolation, no insight, no felt presence of God. Just showing up, sitting there, waiting.
But then comes the crucial part: “it happens afterward, during the day.” The prayer that seemed empty, that felt like nothing, turns out to have been working all along. Not in the way we expected, not with immediate payoff, but gradually, mysteriously, throughout the ordinariness of the day. Something shifts. A patience you didn’t have before. A clarity about a decision. A capacity to love when you thought you were empty. The prayer was working, just not on our timetable or according to our expectations.
Loyalty despite everything
This is the pedagogy of the desert, and it’s particularly relevant for mission work because mission is full of these moments—times when you show up faithfully and nothing seems to happen, when you pray for people and situations and see no visible result, when you invest yourself completely and can’t point to any obvious fruit. The temptation is to conclude that it’s not working, that you’re failing, that God is absent.
But Sister Paola’s experience suggests something different. The showing up matters. The faithfulness to prayer even when it feels empty matters. Not because we’re earning something or because God requires our discipline, but because something is happening beneath the surface of our awareness. The prayer is doing its work “afterward, during the day,” in ways we can’t track or measure in the moment.
Sister Teresina and Sister Paola are talking about the same reality from different angles. Sister Teresina discovered that in the poverty of means, your contact with the Lord is enough—not as a feeling or an experience, necessarily, but as a reality. Sister Paola discovered that this contact works even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working, that the “nothing” of prayer becomes the “everything” of daily life.
This has profound implications for how we understand missionary spirituality. It’s not about achieving certain states of prayer or accumulating spiritual experiences. It’s about faithful presence—to God in prayer, to people in mission—even when nothing seems to be happening. Especially when nothing seems to be happening. Because that’s when the deepest work occurs, beneath our radar, beyond our control, in the hidden ways that God works when we finally stop trying to manage the process.
The missionary vocation requires this kind of faith because mission constantly confronts you with your own insufficiency. You don’t have enough resources, enough skills, enough wisdom, enough patience, enough love. The courses end, the support systems are far away, and you’re left with just yourself and the people and the situation. And that’s when you discover what Sister Teresina learned: your contact with the Lord is enough. Not because you’re holy, but because He is faithful. Not because your prayer is powerful, but because He works even through the prayer that feels like nothing.
Listen to Sisters Teresina and Paola share their experiences on Instagram @comboniane