The Times of Northwest Indiana · https://nwitimes.com/life-entertainment/nation-world/faith-values/article_c970ddf6-fc84-59de-904b-e165f378b3b0.html
Churches are buying medical debt for about a penny on the dollar and burning it. The market said it was worth almost nothing. One mother paid on it for years.
When they couldn't pay, he forgave them both. Which of them therefore will love him most?
Luke 7:42
On Sunday, October 18, Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, held a "debt burning" at its service. Donors to the church's campaign gave $16,228.94 over the summer. Through the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt, that erased $1,681,638.30 in medical bills owed by 1,432 households. Nobody applied; the people whose debts are gone find out by letter.
Marsha Hall got a letter like that in mid-2025, from an earlier Undue campaign in Greenville, and almost threw it out because it looked like junk mail. "I thought it was a joke," she told the Daily Tar Heel. Hall, 51, is a mother of three whose bills started with her first child's birth in January 2008. The family had insurance, and still she sent $55 a month across six accounts for years. Sometimes she waited before taking a sick child to the doctor, to see if it would pass. The letter cancelled about $16,000. "I felt like I had won the lottery," she said.
Unpaid medical bills get sold to collectors in bulk for pennies on the dollar, and Undue says a donated dollar cancels about $100 on average. Whoever held accounts like Hall's had written them down to almost nothing.
She was still paying full price.
Jesus told a story about debt at the table of a Pharisee named Simon. A woman the town knew as a sinner was weeping over Jesus' feet, and Simon was judging her in his head. Jesus gave him a lender with two debtors, one owing five hundred denarii and one fifty, when a denarius was a day's pay. The debts stand for sins, and the question is about her love. Simon gets it right in verse 43: the one forgiven more. The story never says what the loans were worth to the lender. Jesus weighs each debt by how heavy it was to carry, and in verse 47 he turns it on his host: the one forgiven little loves little.
The baby whose birth started the bills is now at N.C. State, hoping to become a veterinarian. "It was something that was gonna trail me for the rest of my life," Hall said. "And I can breathe a little bit." The market priced her debt at what it could collect, but the letter that looked like junk mail reached her at the price she had paid since 2008. In Jesus' story, that is how forgiveness is measured: by what the debt cost the one carrying it, which is also the size of the love that follows.