It was before the time when everyone carried a mobile phone with a digital camera. One person took a photograph. I never received a copy. But there are few memories more vividly embedded in my mind.

Thirty-one years ago today, and more than three decades before my association with World Jewish Relief USA, I had one of the most powerful and unexpected spiritual experiences of my life.

I was serving as the Town Manager of Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania. I had been hired when I was just 23 years old to manage a small, old coal town of some 5,200 residents, all squeezed into a half-square-mile area. Mahanoy City’s claim to fame was being the birthplace of cable television. Beyond that, not much happened there. As I often described it, the typical Mahanoy City vignette was an 80-year-old woman sitting on her front porch drinking a beer at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Then I went to work on Monday, June 12, 1995, expecting an ordinary week, and learned that our small town would be receiving a visit that coming weekend from Mother Teresa.

As it turned out, and as I had no previous notion, that half-square-mile of town I managed included a branch of the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s order. The Nobel Peace Prize winner would be visiting and attending Mass that weekend at Saint Joseph Roman Catholic Church.

While Mother Teresa was among the most recognized people on the planet, it’s far from an overstatement that she........

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