The Priest Who Said "We Lepers

In 1873, a young Belgian priest named Damien De Veuster boarded a ship bound for Molokai, Hawaii — a remote peninsula where the government exiled anyone diagnosed with leprosy. No one who entered the colony was expected to leave. Damien went anyway.

He was an educated man with a promising career in the Church ahead of him. He could have served comfortably in any parish in Europe. Instead, he chose to bandage weeping sores, build coffins with his own hands, and dig graves in volcanic soil. He constructed homes, a church, and a water system for people the world had discarded. He ate with them, embraced them, and called them by name when everyone else called them untouchable.

For twelve years, Damien began his Sunday sermons with the words "my fellow believers." Then one morning in 1885, he stood before his congregation and opened with two quiet words that changed everything: "We lepers." The disease had entered his own body. He had become one of them — fully, irreversibly.

This is the shape of the love Paul describes in Philippians 2. Christ, who shared the very nature of God, did not cling to that glory. He descended. He took on our frailty, our suffering, our mortality. The Almighty became one of us — not from a safe distance, but all the way down to death on a cross. And it is precisely that downward path that the Most High exalted above every name.