Irena Sendler

It is a beautiful Sunday!  Another crisp morning with the sun shining all day.

I began my day by attending church.  The teaching really touched me today.  It was about "Being Available".  The pastor stated "that God makes himself available to us.  He makes the riches of his grace and his abundant blessing available to us so we might make ourselves available to others. There's a world of people all around us who need us, and when we make ourselves available to them, God makes our lives meaningful".

The pastor talked about how Jesus made himself available to the leper man; available to the Roman Officer's servant; available to Peter's mother-in-law and available to so many other people.

Being available is rewarding, but it is also exhausting, hard work and sometimes puts us in risk of losing our own life.

Just this week, I heard a story about a Polish nurse and social worker who served in the Polish Underground in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II.

She smuggle approximately 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and then provided them with false identity documents and shelter outside the Ghetto, saving those children from the Holocaust.  

She was an employee of the Social Welfare Department and was able to enter the Ghetto to check for signs of typhus and conduct other inspections of sanitary conditions.  Sendler and her coworkers smuggled out babies and small children.  They were smuggled out sometimes in ambulances, potato sacks, tool kits, suitcases and other means.  

She and her co-workers buried lists of the hidden children in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities.  The aim was to return the children to their original families when the war was over.

The German occupiers eventually discovered her activities and she was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and sentenced to death.  Through all of this, she never betrayed any of her comrades or the children that escaped.  Her friends saved her life by bribing the guards on the way to her execution.

After the war, she and her co-workers gathered all of the children's records with the names and locations of the hidden Jewish children.  However, almost all of the children's parents had been killed at the camp or had gone missing.

She lived in Warsaw for the remainder of her life, until she died on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98.  

This is a woman who was "available" and was willing to pay the price so that others could live and have a meaningful life.

I am making myself available!  Will you?