Focus On The Good – In Everyone

Just as Mother Teresa had her critics, so also Father Damien was maligned after his death. It was novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, however, who visited the island leper colony where Damien ministered in 1889 and set the record straight. When a Honolulu pastor publicly called Damien a “coarse, dirty man” whose leprosy should be attributed to his “carelessness,” Stevenson rebutted: “You are one of those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to forget the virtues and the real success which had alone introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of mind.” Not all are called to Damien’s heroism, but every Christian must reject a narrow-mindedness that sees only the faults and failures of others.