Father Damien and the Colony at Molokai

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien De Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the shores of Molokai, Hawaii. He had volunteered for an assignment no one else wanted — to serve the leper colony at Kalaupapa, where the Hawaiian government had exiled hundreds of men, women, and children suffering from Hansen's disease.

The colony had no doctor, no proper shelter, and no one willing to touch the afflicted. Damien built houses with his own hands. He bandaged wounds that made others recoil. He dug water systems, constructed a chapel, and organized farms so families could eat. He dressed the dead for burial when no one else would come near the graves.

For sixteen years, Damien shared his life completely with those the world had abandoned. He eventually contracted the disease himself. On the Sunday he confirmed it, he began his sermon not with "my brethren" but with "we lepers."

Isaiah 58 asks a piercing question: What does God actually want from our devotion? Not empty ritual, not showy piety, but this — "to loose the chains of injustice... to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter." The fast that pleases the Almighty is the one that costs us something real. Damien understood: true worship is not performed in comfort but lived out among the broken, where your light finally breaks forth like the dawn.