Dr. Tom Catena is a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, New York. In Sudan’s war-torn Nuba Mountains, where bombing has been part of life and aid has been restricted, he became the only doctor permanently based there. Working at Mother of Mercy Hospital, he was on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, caring for more than 750,000 people. Patients have been known to walk up to seven days to see him. He was estimated to treat around 500 patients a day and perform more than a thousand operations a year. In 2017 he received the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. Plenty of people could have left. He stayed. Love often looks like simply staying where the need is.
Mary Slessor grew up in Scotland and sailed for Calabar in West Africa in 1876. In that region twins were often feared and killed, and Slessor became a champion baby-saver. One of the first twins she rescued, Jane, lived with her for more than thirty years. She once said, “I am ready to go anywhere, provided it be forward.” She then moved inland to the Okoyong, a region where missionaries had found no welcome. She admitted that she often had a lump in her throat and that her courage threatened to fly away. She went anyway. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is going forward with God while your knees are shaking.
Ramabai was born in India in 1858. Girls had no schools, but her parents taught her Sanskrit. During the great famine of 1876 to 1878, both of her parents starved to death. She became so respected as a teacher that she was given the title Pandita, meaning wise teacher. Later her husband died, leaving her an orphan, a widow, and a single mother. In England she came to faith in Christ. In 1889 she founded the Mukti Mission for orphans, widows, and single mothers. In 1896, during another severe famine, she led a caravan of ox carts that rescued thousands of girls and widows. She learned Hebrew and Greek to translate the Bible for poor women, and she died in 1922 just as she finished.
On the morning of July 6, 1885, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was brought to Louis Pasteur’s laboratory in Paris. A rabid dog had bitten him fourteen times. In those days rabies was a death sentence. Pasteur had been working on a vaccine but had never tried it on a human being. Over the next ten days the boy received thirteen injections. Joseph Meister never developed the disease, and he became the first person vaccinated against rabies. Soon patients with animal bites poured in from France and other countries, and that flood of need led to the founding of the Institut Pasteur. A frightened boy received something he could never earn, and it gave him life. That is a picture of grace.
At the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Clara Barton arrived near the Cornfield to find surgeons dressing wounds with corn husks because army supplies were far behind. She handed over a wagonload of bandages she had collected herself. With bullets flying overhead, she cradled wounded men, cooked for them and brought them water. As she knelt to give one man a drink, she felt her sleeve quiver. A bullet had passed through it and killed the man she was helping. She kept working until dark, then pulled out lanterns so the surgeons could go on. She later said she never mended that hole in her sleeve. Real service goes where the need is greatest.
