Of all the books I have read in my now eight decades on the planet, I am quite certain that none has caught me so entirely off-guard as this. I did not anticipate that it would take on almost a devotional quality, the reading of which somehow brought me into times and places that were lifegiving, filled with purposeful hope in the midst of a world that desperately needed it not only during the times the story of Hansen House spanned but every bit as much as the very days in which I sat and read in the gentleness of the early morning hours.

This is a book of the Outsider. It is also a book of the journey home. A book  Of Outsiders. For Outsiders. By Outsiders. Even the central character in this story, Hansen House, is an Outsider, its very presence  a reminder of  society’s failure to care for its own.  Its story comes alive in extensive excerpts from the goldmine of archived wealth of letters  sent to the Moravian headquarters in Herrnhut, Germany from the directors and nursing staff describing in vivid, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious, yet often matter-of-fact detail just how it was to live, work, and care for, as foreigners in a land not their own, those whom no one wanted to be near. Woven into the reports and letters were often the stories of the Hansen’s patients themselves, reminding the reader that these were real flesh and blood people who laughed, cried, and loved, even as their own bodies were disintegrating. As a Christian missionary, serving for half my life in a land not my own, the story of Hansen House brought this outsider a little closer to home.