One night, according to Dorothy Day, Claver recruited a couple of volunteers to help minister to a dying man whose rotting flesh had been eaten away because of years in chains. When the volunteers saw the oozing flesh and smelled the putrid odor, they ran panic-stricken from the room. Peter cried out, "You mustn't go. You can't leave him -- it is Christ."

Everything around us demands efficiency and effectiveness. We're compelled by "the greatest good to the greatest number" and feel pressured to statistically defend our time, actions, and efforts. Touching a single life is rarely as valuable as an effort to reach the masses - unless that single life has special potential in money or influence.

In our competitive culture, efficiency is everything. Time carefully used; efforts carefully calculated; ministries carefully assessed for maximum effectiveness. And in our strategic planning for optimal results, people become relatively anonymous means to our personal, competitive, ends.

In such a secular setting, a media mogul, company president, or city mayor becomes more prized than the local vagabond. We view CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs as evangelistic trophies while a single mom on welfare is "small change."

God overturns the tables of such trading in humanity. Compassion is not an air-freshener for the masses. Instead, it nurtures one soul at a time. Philip Yancey called this pain-staking approach "holy ineficiency." It's the way of Christ.

While we express regret for the stress-filled lives of the middle-class and the frantic schedules of over-committed families, how might we re-connect with those for whom Jesus felt deepest compassion -- the destitute, the demoralized, and the drunken; the hurt, the homeless, and the hungry; the beaten, the bloodied, and the bewildered?

Dare we run panic-stricken (or walk indifferently) from the room? We mustn't go. We can't leave them -- it is Christ. "For as much as you've done it to the least of these, you've done it to Me."