Communion with St. Paul

That God might be glorified in Addis Ababa | Marvin Olasky

"This is Christ's body, broken for you. This is Christ's blood, shed for you." As we give out bread and wine during the Lord's Supper, the actor is Jesus, the beneficiary is personal: you.

Ads last month on Ethiopian radio spoke of a "cleft clinic," a Project CURE program for children and adults with holes in their faces and their throats. I watched one afternoon as 20 patients, usually brought by their parents, came to Paul Lim, an American plastic surgeon who recently sacrificed security and a colossal income to move with his young family to Addis Ababa, the east African country's capital.

God's mercy is evident in both the Lord's Supper and the fact that most of us are born with faces with the right number of holes. At six to eight weeks of gestation our faces usually fuse. For some reason, in some children, the parts don't fuse. They have extra holes between their noses and their lips. They need additional grace.