The Dentist Who Opened on Saturdays for Free

Every Saturday morning for eleven years, Dr. Grace Okafor unlocked her dental clinic in East Cleveland at 6:00 a.m. — not for paying patients, but for anyone who walked in without insurance. She called it "Grace Saturdays." No paperwork. No questions. Just care.

Her colleagues thought she was foolish. The overhead alone on a single Saturday could run twelve hundred dollars. But Grace had grown up in Lagos watching her grandmother share rice from a pot that never seemed to empty, and she carried that same quiet confidence into her practice. "God gave me hands that can fix teeth," she told a reporter from the Plain Dealer in 2019. "Why would I hoard what was never mine to begin with?"

When the pandemic shuttered clinics across Ohio, Grace kept her Saturdays running — masked, gloved, and undeterred. When supply costs tripled, donations appeared from former patients she barely remembered treating. When a local landlord tried to raise her rent beyond reason, three churches pooled funds to buy the building outright and lease it back to her for one dollar a year.

The psalmist writes that the righteous person "has distributed freely; he has given to the poor." But notice what follows: "his righteousness endures forever; his horn is exalted in honor." Grace never chased honor. She simply opened her door every Saturday and trusted that the God who provided would keep providing. And He did — not because generosity is a transaction, but because the heart that fears the Almighty becomes a channel through which His abundance flows to others.