Kingdom Stories–The Leper Missionary

The Bible tells us the story of how God set out to make a kingdom and a people for himself, how his people rebelled, and how God came to save us all. But there are stories of his kingdom that do not appear in the pages of the Bible. This is one of those stories.

In the year 1864, a young man from Belgium named Jozef De Veuster stepped off a boat onto the island of Oahu. Two days later he was ordained as Father Damien, missionary to the people of Hawai’i.

Four years earlier, undereducated, with dirt from his family farm still under his fingernails, he made the decision to enter training for the priesthood. His superiors were unimpressed. How would this country bumpkin prove worthy? But he had someone looking out for him – an older brother, already a priest, who tutored him in Latin and anything else he needed to know. He was given a chance.

For three years he studied by day, and at night he knelt in prayer. His heart longed to be sent on a mission, to reach the people who had not yet been reached, to share the Gospel with people who had never heard it. Imagine the conflict in his heart when he heard the news that his brother was being sent to Hawai’i to join the mission there. No doubt, he was proud of his brother. And heartbroken.

But God has a habit of turning heartbreak to joy. His brother had taken ill – certainly not something to celebrate. However, it meant a door had opened. Jozef was allowed to take his brother’s place. His dream of becoming a missionary had come true.

Little did he know what it would cost him. Little did he know the sacrifices he would be asked to make. Little did he know how much love he could show to absolute strangers.

In 1865, King Kamehameha V, ruler of Hawai’i, was facing a threat to his kingdom. A disease had infected hundreds of his people, one that was horrific, uncurable, and horribly contagious. A disease whose power echoed in the minds of all who had read the New Testament. Leprosy.

The King issued a decree that quarantined all the infected from his kingdom to the island of Moloka’i. Hundreds of people were sent to settle on the eastern side of the island, to fend for themselves as best they could while they slowly wasted away.

One man took notice. The bishop of the diocese in Honolulu, Bishop Louis Désiré Maigret, wanted to give the people hope, comfort, help, and above all, the Gospel. But how? Any volunteers he sent would be taking an enormous risk that they too would contract the disease. Perhaps if he asked for volunteers and gave them only short stints on a rotating basis, they could stay safe and still be helpful.

God had a different plan. Father Damien, along with three others, volunteered to go. Damien was selected to go first. Despite many cautions and warnings from friends, despite appeals from family and other priests that he should keep himself safe, Damien went.

The settlement, Kalawao, was separated from the rest of Moloka’i by a mountain range. A man could only get there by mule or his own two feet. What was Damien thinking as he crested the ridge and looked down on the ramshackle houses and broken people milling about below? Did he pray for courage? Did he pray for safety? Did he consider turning around and running away?

Whatever was going through his head and heart as he made his way down the mountain, by the time he reached the people, God had filled him with one resolution – to love these people with the sacrificial love of Jesus. “I come to you as one who will be a father to you,” he said, as the lepers gathered to hear his greeting, “and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you; to live and die with you.”

He would. Damien lived with them, caring for their wounds, building homes and tending crops, teaching school and preaching the Gospel. He sweat with them as they worked to improve the community. He wept with them as he dug graves for the dead. He laughed with them as they told stories around the fire. He fought with them to gain rights and resources from the Hawaiian government. He sang with them as they praised the God who promised them an end to suffering and eternal joy in his kingdom.

He suffered with them as he contracted the dreaded disease. One evening Damien had poured a bath for himself, not realizing he had let the water get too hot. Putting a foot in the water, he was stunned to realize that he could see the skin scalding and blistering… but felt nothing. He had joined the lepers, just as he had told his brother he would. “I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ,” he had written. His prophecy had come true.

The disease only renewed his vigor. He worked doubly hard to establish schools, orphanages, to upgrade homes, to make the colony a place where people could truly live. He welcomed doctors who came with ideas for a cure, hoping against hope that someone would find the secret.

He would never see the cure in his lifetime. In 1889, Father Damien closed his eyes in death, and was welcomed into the arms of the Savior whose love drove him to give everything, his own life, to save the souls of those he loved.