St John of God

John of God has one of the strongest conversion stories in the whole book because the change in him is both violent and fruitful. Before grace laid hold of him, he had been restless, unstable, drawn through rough experiences that included soldiering and long wandering. Then a sermon by John of Avila struck him so hard that his public repentance looked to many people like madness. The humiliation remains important because it is the doorway to the life that followed. John’s vocation was not only to weep for sin, but to turn brokenness into mercy.

In Granada he began gathering the sick poor, the abandoned, the mentally afflicted, and those from whom more orderly people recoiled. He begged, organized, nursed, built, and improvised until a whole style of Christian hospital care grew around him. Yet activism never stands alone. Beneath it all are prayer, love of Christ, self-forgetfulness, and the conviction that the suffering body of the poor is not a nuisance but a sacred trust.