Daily Verse
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Compassion for the Poor and Needy
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Wednesday's Reflection
Luke 10:33–34 — But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds.
For most of history, no disease carried more fear and shame than leprosy. Sufferers were cast out of their families, kept at a distance, treated as untouchable. Paul Brand grew up in India watching exactly that — as a boy he saw a disfigured man turned away even from his own home. The sight nearly drove him away from medicine altogether. Instead, God turned it into his life's work.
Brand was a gifted surgeon trained in London during the Blitz. In 1946 he returned to India to teach at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, and there he did something almost no doctor would: he chose to work with leprosy patients, the people everyone else avoided. Working in a mud storeroom he jokingly called the "hand research unit," he made a discovery that changed everything. The disease didn't rot flesh, as everyone believed — it destroyed the nerves that feel pain, so patients injured themselves without knowing. He pioneered surgeries that restored crippled hands, performing more than three thousand operations, and spent his life rebuilding bodies and dignity that society had thrown away.
Like the Samaritan who stopped for a man everyone else passed by, Paul Brand went to the very people the world recoiled from — and bound up their wounds. He treated each one as made in the image of God.
Prayer: Lord, give us the heart of the Samaritan and of Paul Brand — to move toward the people others avoid, and to treat the outcast as precious to You. Amen.