One Who Saves a Life

“Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern, would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?” Luke 14:5

If we wish to follow Jesus who repeatedly said we had to serve others like He did, we should not be entitled, expecting others to serve us. We have to have the mind set of loving, and caring. We have to have compassion and empathy for others. It’s not easy at all to do, because by nature we see the faults and failures of others, and not the hurting heart that God sees.

In 1945, 13 year old Edith Zierer was freed from a Nazi labor camp in Częstochowa, Poland. She was so weak she collapsed in a busy village train station. Many passed by but no one helped until a young man stopped to give her a cup of tea, bread and cheese. He then carried her on his back to catch a train in the next village bound for Krakow, and accompanied her to where she wanted to go. She wrote his name down in her diary, the young man in a seminarian’s white garb who saved her. 

In 1978, Edith read in a copy of Paris-Match that Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope! She broke into tears when she recognized the name of her rescuer and wrote him from her home in Haifa, Israel. When they finally met again, Edith recited a line from the Torah: “One who saves a life, it is as if he saves the whole world." 

I believe God gives us all opportunities to save lives. It may not be as dramatic as Edith's story, but let us keep a look out for those opportunities all the same!