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Last month marked the tenth anniversary of President Clinton’s welfare reform law, which imposed time limits for receiving cash assistance and required welfare recipients—including single mothers with young children—to work. Highly controversial at the time, the measure has become so much a part of the political landscape that welfare now hardly figures as an election-year issue.

Maggie Machledt says she experiences God in her internship at Joseph’s House, a community-based hospice for formerly homeless people. The recent Hope College graduate mops floors, does clerical work, cleans bedpans—and on a recent scorching afternoon took some residents out to the National Zoo.

“It just feels really holy being with them at that time, and just seeing where God meets them,” said Machledt of the dying residents.