Donated items for sale

We have several items for sale that we have placed adds on Craigslist from things people have donated. We have a desk for $35, light wood entertainment center for $35, a dual bathroom sink fixture brand new for $65, a used Aqua bug pool cleaner for $45, a tiger picture from Home Interiors for $35, a new lighted Coke sign for $35, Wood Captains Bed with 8 drawers and 2 cubbies along with a nearly new mattress for $175, a Queen sized Quilt made with over $300 of materials brand new just finished for $500, a used black entertainment center for $20, a King sized used quilt purchased for $250 a few years ago for $50, a Thomasville oversized chair purchased 4 years ago at Wayside for only $75, and a wooden rocker for $50. If anyone is interested let us know. As you can see we are busy working on raising funds anyway we can.

The Suburbanite Article

It was in this past Sundays paper, Sept 27th. I have not seen it online yet, don't know if it will be online eventually or not. I purchased 5 copies of the paper last evening at a grocery store. The article was very long, it covered 2 pages and shared our story nicely. Our account at Charter One was mentioned as well as next weeks fundraiser dinner. It feels affirming to see God getting our story which is nothing more than his story as well as our need out. We pray that people will be moved by God to give. The title of the article is " A bundle of Joy".

Telling Joy about you

I just finished watching the recent Hannah Montana movie with my family, ok please dont tell anyone or they will take my man card! As I was listening to the main song about the climb and the struggles we have I thought of all we have gone through on our adoption journey. In my mind I began thinking of many of you, all the money, the time, the prayers, the words of encouragement, the acts of service etc etc. I started thinking about Joy and years from now telling her all of your stories. Like today, we received a $40 check from someone I dont even know that Lisa knows only a little. I cant wait to sit her on my lap and tell her of all the amazing people who loved a little girl they never even met enough to give and give and give. I cant wait to see the smile on her face as she begins to think about all of the people who made it possible for her to come home. Most importantly I cant wait to tell her of a God who moved in all of our hearts to show how much he Loves us all. Even an unknown orphan thousand of miles away.

Donation Update

We wanted to give everyone an update of how we are doing. We had posted how God came through with perfect timing as he provided the last $505 we needed for the dossier fee. That was on a Wednesday, that Friday 2 days later we received $200 from one donor, then on Saturday we received $100 in the mail, Sunday $100 cash at church in the morning and then another $200 later that night. We were told by one of our donors that they had heard a recent challenge to "pay it forward" as in the movie with the same title. This donor had been given $5 to give to someone and they were to pray who God wanted them to pay it forward to. They gave the $5 bill in an envelope along with a check for $195! I think I liked the $5 even more than the check for $195. We love hearing how God moves in the hearts of his people. We love how God is using so many people to help us bring Joy home. Sure in my mind I think it would be nice to have one big check, but somehow its very exciting to see God using many of his children to care for one of his precious orphan kids from far away. We are SO thankful and touched by everyone who is helping us. We have also been given several items to sell for the adoption as well. A nice wooden bed with drawers in it along with a nice mattress, a entertainment center, a cedar chest, a quilt that has over $300 in material alone in it. God is moving, please keep on praying for us. Also, please pray for our travel and that all would go well with the adjustment for Joy with her new Mommy & Daddy. Wow that sounds so good!

The Suburbanite

We have a friend who is a journalist for the Suburbanite, she is writing a news piece about our adoption journey. It will be in the paper most likely next week. We will pass on the link when we get it for all to read. She plans on putting the fundraiser info in the piece as well as listing our West Family Adoption Fund we opened at Charter One. Anyone can go in and donate at any Charter One in the area and just mention our fund by name. We hope this article brings many people to the fundraiser as well as donations to our account.

Fundraiser

Mark your calendars for Thursday night Oct 8th, 6-830pm at the Akron Baptist Temple 2324 Manchester Road, Akron Ohio. It will be a dinner and we may have some other interesting and fun things planned for the night. We really need many people to come and donate to our cause, we are nearing the end of our journey, we are so close, we just need a little bit more help.

God's blessings!

As Greg said in the last posting, it's crunch time. We were going to mail in only what we have, and we told them that we would have the rest of the 2,800 by next Friday. God is soooooo good. As of tonight, we only needed $505.17 left to pay that entire fee. Well, tonight, we received a check for $500.00!!!! Isn't God great!! We told the agency that if they would give us a deadline, then God would meet it. We have no doubts about that. This is God's plan, he started it, and he's going to have to make it happen. We've done our part on all the paperwork, and now it's time to watch God work. We have no doubts that God is going to bring our baby home soon!!! Thank you all for praying for us, and please continue to do so. We have two fundraisers coming up in the month of October, and possibly two more in the month of November. God is good, all the time!!!

Crunch time

We are officially in crunch time. We will be mailing in the $2100 or so we still have in funds towards the $2800 or so dossier fee along with the mound of dossier paperwork this week. The agency is sending us the paperwork to sign for the official acceptance of our little Joy. Here comes the crunch time, we also have to send a payment plan to them explaining when we will make the payments for the program fee, its going to be something like $3000 every 4 weeks or so until its payed off, then we have the final cost of travel. Please pray hard and give if you can. We will be in a local newspaper soon as well as one of our friends writes for it and will be doing a story on our journey. God is working. We can almost feel her in our arms, looking forward to seeing all of you holding her as well.

LIllibet-Joy West

Before we ever decided to adopt, I (Lisa) had been praying to have more children. I put it in God's hands and let him decide if we would have any more. I knew that God was bigger than a vasectomy. I actually picked out names for this unknown child to be hopefully in our family someday. The name I picked out for a girl was "JOY". I said that part of her name has to be joy, because that's what she would create in our home would be joy. Well, last week, we received a referral from our adoption agency. For those of you who don't know what that means, it means we got a picture of a child and we had to decide to say yes or no to this child. I was actually upset at first receiving this picture, because I didn't want to choose the child. I wanted God to pick her. We actually weren't to the place where they should have sent us a picture yet due to paperwork not being done yet, and a payment of 2,800 not being sent in yet, but still here was a picture of this beautiful little girl. The adoption process is not an easy one. There are many things that must be done, and tons of paperwork to fill out and to retrieve from various sources. I like my ducks in a row. I've been following the papers and doing things in order. The book says that after you turn in the papers, and the 2,800, then you get a referral. So I was upset upon receiving this picture because we don't have all the money yet. And upon receiving the child, you then have to pay a 9,000 payment. All of which we don't have as of yet. So, as you see, that's why I was upset. But I started praying and doing my Bible study the next morning and I told God "If this is the child you have for us, then that's the one I want." I just want to know for sure that this is the one you want us to have. So, later that day I was having dinner with friends, and showed them her paperwork. I went over it again myself, and saw something that I had missed. It said that the meaning of her name was "Happiness at all times". I couldn't believe it. Because we had picked the name Joy so many years ago, and here was God telling me that she was to be the one. This was direct confirmation from God to continue to move forward. So we called Wednesday night to accept the referral of this little girl. So on we march, trying to raise the funds to adopt her in record speed. Please pray that the funds will come in quickly, so she can come home to us as soon as possible. If we had all the money today, it would take 4-6 months to have her home. She is 9 months old now. Please pray for us as this is such a roller coaster ride.

Dad

My Dad died June 25th, this past weekend we went over to his home and sifted through his belongings. It was a bit strange and evoked many memories. Finding some of his belongings that had special meaning to them was fun but also sad. Looking through old photos it was like living my life over again in those brief moments when I was flipping from photo to photo. Finding some old cassettes of music and listening to them also solicited the same emotion. A life lived and remembered. He is gone but his legacy goes on. As I think of my Dad, who was not perfect as none of us are, and what he meant and means to me still, I cant imagine going through life without one. What must be the sorrow of an orphans heart.

Thoughts for the day

Can you imagine your children so hungry that you offer to give them to strangers- just so they will live?

Bob Pierce once said, " Don't fail to do something just because you can't do everything." These are wise words to anyone overwhelmed with the magnitude of human suffering in our world. We are not asked to help all of them at once, just one at a time.

One such child

In the same chapter where the idea of "Somebody Else's Child" is shared, Richard shares this personal story where this really hit home hard.

"One Such Child"

And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward. Matthew 10:42

A few years back I had my own encounter with somebody else's child. I was in Gujarat, India, about six months after the massive 2001 earthquake. We were leaving the last village at the end of the final day of a ten-day, multi-country trip. I was exhausted and looking forward to getting back to the hotel and then back home the next morning. But something happened. As our car began to pull away, and a throng of people crowded around to wave good-bye, a desperate woman rushed up to my window with a little boy in her arms. She held him out to me with a pleading look in her eyes that said, Please help me! Please help my little boy. To my absolute horror, I then saw that her little boy had no feet. His legs had both been amputated below the knee. And then, just as quickly, she was gone, our car was on the road, and we were headed back to the hotel.

Gradually I put her haunting face out of my mind. I was tired. World Vision had helped so many thousands in Gujarat in the months after the earthquake; we couldn't be expected to help every child. That last boy was not my responsibility, I reasoned, and so I tried to forget what I had seen as I flew home the next morning.

Over the next few days, my body readjusted from jet lag, and I returned to the daily demands at my office, but I could not get the disturbing image of this mother and child--someone else's child--out of my mind. It nagged at me and challenged me. Was I just a hypocrite, always talking about the importance of helping every child but not practicing what I preached?

One night at dinner I told my own kids about what I had seen and how it was troubling me. "Can't you do something, Dad?" they asked. That very night I sent an e-mail to our team in India, describing the boy and asking if they could find him, one child in the midst of a billion people. I didn't know his name, and I could not remember even the name of the village where I had seen him. But two weeks later I received an e-mail with a photo of six-year-old Vikas and the story of what had happened to him. During the earthquake, his house had collapsed on him, crushing both of his legs and injuring his mother. With no immediate medical care, by the time help finally arrived, days later, amputation was his only option. To save his life, a relief medical team from Korea amputated both of his legs. Unable to walk, Vikas now could only crawl on all fours or be carried everywhere by his mother or father. So when I arrived in his village that day, a desperate mother waited for her moment and rushed to my departing car, hoping against all hope that maybe this man from America could help.

Believing that He could help--isn't that what grieving parents did when Jesus passed through their village? Like the father who approached Jesus, knelt before Him, and said, "Lord, have mercy on my son"? (Matthew 17:15)

I asked our team in India whether we could help him. The answer came back that he would need another surgery and then prosthetic limbs. It would cost three hundred dollars; would the U.S. office authorize the expenditure? they asked.

"No," I replied. "World Vision would not pay for this; Rich Stearns will pay for this." You see, this was personal. Arguably, in my role at World Vision, I was already doing more than most people can do to help children in need. But God wanted more than my institutional programs and strategic responses; He wanted it to be as a personal for me as it always is for Him. Children are not statistics to God. And so I sent the money.

Four months later, over the Christmas holiday, I was muttering under my breath; someone had sent me a large e-mail file that was taking far too long to download on my home computer. Finally, I opened the file with irritation and saw that it was a photograph--of Vikas, holding his mother's hand and standing on his new legs. I wept as I stared into the eyes of somebody else's child, a little boy I had never actually met but whose predicament had become so very personal to me.

Today, his picture hangs in my office in Seattle to remind me that every child is precious.

Somebody else's child continued

From the book-

" You see, our problem is that the plight of suffering children in a far off land simply hasn't gotten personal for us. We may hear about them with sorrow, but we haven't really been able to look at them as if they were our children. If we could, then we would surely grieve more deeply in our spirits. We would weep for their parents, and we would respond with far greater urgency.

How might God think about this issue? Does he look at the suffering of a child in Cambodia or Malawi with a certain sense of emotional distance? Does God have different levels of compassion for children based on their geographic location, their nationality, their race- or their parent's income level? Does he forget about their pain because He is preoccupied with other things? Does He turn the offending page to read the sports section- or is His heart broken because each child is precious to Him? God surely grieves and weeps, because every one of these children is His child- not somebody else's."

Somebody Else's Kids

Chapter 9 of the book starts with this story-

Whenever a major jetliner crashes anywhere in the world, it inevitably sets off a worldwide media frenzy covering every aspect of the tragedy. I want you to imagine for a moment that you woke up this morning to the following headline: "One Hundred Jetliners Crash, Killing 26,500." Think of the pandemonium this would create across the world as heads of state, parliaments, and congresses convened to grapple with the nature and causes of this tragedy. Think about the avalanche of media coverage that it would ignite around the globe as reporters shared the shocking news and tried to communicate its implications for the world. Air travel would no doubt grind to a halt as governments shut down the airlines and panicked air travelers canceled their trips. The National Transportation Safety Board and perhaps the FBI, CIA, and local law enforcement agencies and their international equivalents would mobilize investigations and dedicate whatever manpower was required to understand what happened and to prevent it from happening again.

Now imagine that the very next day, one hundred more planes crashed--and one hundred more the next, and the next, and the next. It is unimaginable that something this terrible could ever happen.

But it did--and it does.

It happened today, and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. No heads of state, parliaments, or congresses stopped what they were doing to address the crisis, and no investigations were launched. Yet more than 26,500 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to their poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that. Almost 10 million children will be dead in the course of a year. So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of one hundred planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? And even though we now have the awareness, the access, and the ability to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these kids who are dying are not our kids; they're somebody else's.

Terry's First Guitar Concert

Our good friend Terry Price is learning to play the guitar, he is having a night where he will be playing several songs as well as sing on Saturday August 22 from 7-9pm at the Arabica Coffee House in Hartville. Their right on the corner of Rt 619 and Market Street. He will be donating any funds raised that night to our adoption. Come on out and support Terry as he supports our adoption financially.

Chapter 8 " The greatest challenge of the new millennium"

In this chapter Richard Stearns the author really gets to the point with the world crisis of poverty, disease and famine. He does it however in a way that is meant to get us out of our comfortable chairs and up doing something. I like that about his perspective. The sheer magnitude of the problem can overwhelm and cause paralysis of action when action is exactly what is needed. He discusses 3 key points involved in the problem. Awareness, Access, and Ability. Again let his words speak to you.

" Lack of awareness is no longer an issue. And yet only 4 percent of all U.S. charitable giving goes to international causes of any kind. We have become detached and indifferent toward the constant and repeated images of poverty and adversity that bombard us. In fact, our apathy has even earned its own term: compassion fatigue. But we cannot claim that we dont know our distant neighbor is in need- not anymore, not today."

A few pages later he shares these words-

" Listen to the words of a modern day prophet, and let them challenge you:

Fifteen thousand Africans are dying each day of preventable, treatable diseases- Aids, malaria, TB- for lack of drugs that we take for granted.

This statistic alone makes a fool of the idea many of us hold on to very tightly: the idea of equality. What is happening to Africa mocks our pieties, doubts our concern and questions our commitment to the whole concept. Because if we are honest, theres no way we could conclude that such mass death day after day would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. Certainly not North America or Europe, or Japan. An entire continent bursting into flames? Deep down, if we really accept that their lives- African lives- are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. It's an uncomfortable truth.

This is a prophetic voice, on of both passion and vision. I wish I could say that it belongs to one of the great Church leaders of our day, one who is leading the Church of Jesus Christ to the front lines of the battle against poverty and injustice in our world. But, no, this voice that should shake our churches to the core with its high call to moral responsibility is the voice of a rock star- one who may have done more to advance the cause of the poor in the last 25 years than anyone alive. His name is Bono, and he passionately answers the question who is my neighbor? Then he bids us, as Jesus did, to go out and love them "as ourselves." His impassioned plea gives voice to the moral responsibilities inherent between those who suffer needlessly and those who have the power to intervene.

Listen again to Bono's call to our generation to make our mark on history:

We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies- but will we be that generation? Will we in the West realize our potential or will we sleep in the comfort of our affluence with apathy and indifference murmuring softly in our ears? 15 thousand people dying needlessly every day from Aids, TB, and malaria. Mothers, fathers, teachers, farmers, nurses, mechanics, children. This is Africa's crisis. That it's not on the nightly news, that we do not treat this as an emergency- that's our crisis.

Future generations flipping through these pages will know whether we answered the key question. The evidence will be the world around them. History will be our judge, but what's written is up to us. We can't say our generation didn't know how to do it. We can't say our generation couldn't afford it. And we can't say our generation didn't have reason to do it. It's up to us."

Chapter 6 "A Hole in me"

At the end of chapter 6 in the book the author shares an analogy of how our life of faith ought to be like. I thought I would share it.

" Think for a moment of your life as a house with many rooms. Your faith cannot be just one more room in the house, equal with your job, your marriage, your political affiliation, or your hobbies. No, your faith must be like the very air you breathe, in every room of the house. It must permeate not just your "Sunday worship," or even your vocation and your behavior at home, but also your dealings with everyone around you- including the poor. That's how deep the commitment must be.

So What does God expect of you then? Everything."

A few paragraphs earlier he is discussing the passage in James that speaks of being a doer of the Word not just a hearer and he said this.

" You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that- and shudder. (part of James chapter 2)

Here James stated in black and white that belief is not enough. It must be accompanied by faith demonstrated by actions. My former pastor and good friend Gary Gulbranson once said, "It's not what you believe that counts; it's what you believe enough to do." I think James would have liked Gary's understanding of the gospel in action. "

The whole gospel in action

In chapter 5 the author shares this gripping account of a Cambodian Pastor and his church. It speaks for itself.

"We had traveled for some hours up the Mekong River in a wooden boat. Our purpose was to visit the pastor of a small house church, a man named Roth Ourng. Pastor Ourng was a small man with a big smile. He eagerly bade us to climb the stairs to his small bamboo house on stilts. Pastor Ourng's day job was rice farming, but he pastored a small church of 83 members that he had started a few years back. His congregation met in his tiny home each Sunday morning to worship.

As we sat with Pastor Ourng, we talked about his community, his congregation, and farming. He was eager to know about churches in the United States and whether we had Bible commentaries and study guides that helped us understand Scripture. His only book was a Bible in the Khmer language, a treasure to him. "But" he said, "this is a difficult book, and I would love to have other books to help me understand it." I realized that in comparison, I lived in a nation literally drowning in Christian books, commentaries, and resources.

Pastor Ourng showed us the handmade two-stringed musical instrument that served as his church's "orchestra" For a wedding or special celebration, he said, his church would send runners to two different churches, 30 miles in each direction to borrow their guitars. Then the next day they would run them back. This made me think of my own church's million-dollar pipe organ.

After a while I asked him, "Pastor, living in a country that is more than 90 percent Buddhist, how did you come to be a Christian?" The story he told me was confirmation of the power of the gospel in action.

"Five years ago," he said. "World Vision came to our community and began to work. I was suspicious of these outsiders to our community and was convinced that they had their own hidden agenda. You see, in Cambodia, since the genocide by the Klmer Rouge, we are always distrustful of strangers. But these people from World Vision [also Cambodians] set up a TB clinic to care for those suffering from TB. They improved the schools our children attended, and they taught better agricultural methods to the farmers to improve our yields. But I was still suspicious and even angry, convinced that they were up to no good. Why would these strangers help us? I thought.

"One day I decided to confront them, and I went to the World Vision leader and demanded to know why they were here. His answer took me by surprise. He said, "We are followers of Jesus Christ, and we are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are here to show you that God loves you."
"I said in response, "Who is this Jesus Christ that you talk about?"
"The man went and got me this Bible that you see here today and gave it to me. He told me that everything about Jesus was in this book. That night I went home and read the book of Genesis. I was truly amazed because in this Genesis I met the God I had wondered about all of my life. I met here the God who created heaven and earth, the Maker of the universe. The next morning I ran back and told him what I had read but said that I still did not know that Jesus he talks about. He told me he would take me to the city to meet with a Christian pastor that would explain these things to me. Some weeks later he took me and my friend to meet the pastor. He opened his Bible and read to us many passages about Jesus and explained the good news of salvation. At the end, he asked if we wanted to become disciples of Jesus and commit our lives to Him. We both said yes and that day committed to follow Christ as our Savior."

I was overwhelmed by this man's story. His encounter with Christ began with Christians who came to serve the poor--nursing the sick, educating the children, and helping increase food for the hungry. So compelling was this service that it provoked questions in the mind of a curious man: Why are you here? Why are you helping us? The answer to these questions was the gospel, the good news.

"Pastor, that is a wonderful story," I said. "Now, what about the eighty-three peoople who worship at your church; how did they come to follow Jesus?" "I was so excited to learn about Jesus," he said, "that I had to share this good news with everyone I knew. These eighty-three, they are my little flock."

Wow. There, in a bamboo house in Cambodia, I heard echoes of the Great Commission: "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:19-20). And I knew I had just witnessed the whole gospel--in action.

Quotes from the book

In the book there are many quotes at the beginning of the chapters all throughout, I thought I would just share many of them that I liked in no particular order.

Christ has no body on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion for the world is to look out; yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now. Saint Teresa of Avila

Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning.
Frederick W. Faber

The true gospel is a call to self-denial. It is not a call to self-fulfillment.
John Macarthur

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. Frederick Buechner

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. Gail Sheehy

Hell will be full of people who thought highly of the Sermon on the Mount. You must do more than that. You must obey it and take action. John Macarthur

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost

A holy life will produce the deepest impression. Lighthouses blow no horns; they only shine. D. L. Moody

If God only used perfect people, nothing would get done. God will use anybody if you're available. Rick Warren

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world. Mother Teresa

Christianity is flourishing wonderfully among the poor and the persecuted while it atrophies among the rich and secure. Philip Jenkins

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. Helen Keller

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. John W. Gardner

He who is dying of hunger must be fed rather than taught. Saint Thomas Aquinas

Sometimes I would like to ask God why He allows poverty, suffering, and injustice when he could do something about it. Well, why don't you ask Him? Because I'm afraid He would ask me the same question. Anonymous

We've drifted away from being fishers of men to being keepers of the aquarium.
Paul Harvey

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Mankind wants glory. We want health. We want wealth. We want happiness. We want all our felt needs met, all our little human itches scratched. We want a painless life. We want the crown without the cross. We want the gain without the pain. We want the words of Christ's salvation to be easy. John Macarthur

I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap and then you grow wings.
William Sloane Coffin

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. Mohandas Gandhi

A church that lives within its four walls is no church at all.
Pastor Morgan Chilulu

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try spending the night in a closed room with a mosquito. African Saying

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best. Henry Van Dyke

Make your life a mission- not an intermission. Arnold Glasgow

The one who says it can't be done should get out of the way of the one who is doing it. Chinese Proverb

We can do no great things, only small things with great love. Mother Teresa

Chapter 4 " A most distressing disguise"

The author explores the passage found in Matthew 25:40, "And the King will answer and say to them, Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me." He says this;

"The question for you and for me is this: will Christ find evidence of our genuine concern for his beloved poor when he looks at the fruit of our lives on that day? Further, what might He be calling you to do today? What new steps of faith might you take to demonstrate your own concern for the least of these?

One last startling aspect of this passage is the remarkable claim of our Lord that whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine you did it for me. Even the good sheep in this passage were surprised at this. What they had seen as simple human gestures of love to the needy turned out to be gestures to a Christ incognito. Mother Teresa once said in the faces of the poor whom she served, she saw Christ in his most distressing disguise."