You Were Made to Love More

The silk merchant's son stood before the leper, trembling. Every instinct told him to run. His fine clothes, his merchant's pride, his very sense of self recoiled from the disfigured man before him. But Francis of Assisi, in an act that would define his legacy, dismounted his horse, approached the leper, and embraced him.

This was not the Francis who had once fled from lepers in disgust. This was not the privileged youth who danced through Assisi's streets in expensive clothes, dreaming of knightly glory. This was a man being transformed by an expanding circle of love.

"At first man cares only for himself," wrote Yogi Ramacharaka, "all others being 'outsiders.'" And so it was with young Francis. His world was small. His family. His comfort. His ambitions. But like so many before and since, he began to feel the discomfort of a life lived too small.