Living This Week’s Gospel:

John 4:5–42  

The Gospel calls us to work on behalf of the most vulnerable people in our world. In this week’s Story of Hope, we visited the town of Baganga in the Philippines and met people whose homes had been destroyed in a storm.

This community offers us a powerful lesson in what it means to serve the poorest among us. Every single person in the town unanimously voted to give the most desperate and vulnerable among them-a family with triplets just days old-the first new shelter … even though they all had lost their own homes as well.

This is a true story of people who sacrificed their own needs to lift up the most vulnerable of their community. And perhaps most surprising of all, those serving the poor, in this instance, are individuals our society would typically deem poor themselves. Putting others’ needs ahead of our own often defies the expectations of our culture.

When we speak of offering compassion to the poor, we often do not speak of drug addicts, the homeless and other social outcasts. Much like the Samaritans-who, at the time of Jesus, had been at odds with the Jews for centuries-these individuals are outcast by our society. Often, their situation is considered a consequence of their own actions and offering them help, a waste of time and energy.

Who are those individuals our culture expects us to ignore even in their times of need? How can we carry this Gospel call to serve the most vulnerable to these margins of society, quenching the physical and spiritual thirst of those whom our world has forgotten?