The Priest Who Chose the Colony

In 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Damien de Veuster stepped off a cargo ship onto the rocky shore of Kalaupapa, a leper colony on the island of Molokai. The Hawaiian government had banished over eight hundred people there — men, women, and children with Hansen's disease — and left them to fend for themselves. No physician would stay. No official would visit.

Damien did not arrive with grand speeches or political campaigns. He bandaged wounds that others refused to touch. He built coffins with his own hands and dug graves when no one else would. He constructed houses, organized a water system, and sat beside the dying, calling each person by name. For sixteen years, he served without fanfare, without a single newspaper profile for the first decade of his work.

The world called these people hopeless. Damien called them his parishioners. He did not cry out in the streets or raise his voice in the public square. He simply showed up, morning after morning, until the day he discovered the disease in his own skin.

Isaiah describes a servant chosen by the Almighty — one who will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smoldering wick, yet who will faithfully bring justice to the earth. That servant does not overpower. He does not discard. He draws near to the ones everyone else has written off, and there, in the place of deepest abandonment, He opens eyes and sets prisoners free.