Choosing Christ Over Comfort
In the modern era, the edification of self is more important than the glorification of God. However, history shows us that the greatest men and women acted in secret—hidden from the public eye—whose sacrificial stories live on today. These acts of sacrifice crossed racial and religious lines, connecting Christians to Jews.
Unfortunately, within the past few years, there have been several “Christians” openly discriminating against the Jewish people to the point where they’re spreading lies about Israel: Reverend Pillay, former general secretary of the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa, called Israel’s treatment of the Palestine people as “apartheid.” This statement was made all the way back in 2016, but it shows the deep anti-Semitism rooted in certain “Christian” churches. We can only wonder what he would say now…
In Joakim Lundqvist’s book, Shine Your Light, he details a hopeful story of a woman’s choice to choose love for her Jewish neighbor and faith in God over fear of the Nazis: “Irena Sendler was born on February 15, 1910, in Otwock, a town near Warsaw, Poland. As a young woman, she pursued a career in social work and eventually joined the Warsaw Social Welfare Department as a trained nurse.
Growing up in a society with strong anti-Semitic currents, she saw firsthand the growing persecution of the Jewish people. But unlike most people of her day, Irena chose not to turn her head and hide behind the argument that this was not her problem. It was. It was her problem because she was a Christian who had been shown mercy by the almighty God. How could she not pass on that mercy to her fellow man in need?
When World War II erupted in 1939, Poland faced brutal occupation by the German Nazis. Seeing the Jewish families now be subjected to even stronger persecution and discrimination, Irena felt compelled to act.
By this time, the Jewish population of Warsaw had been gathered into a ghetto they were prohibited from leaving. Historically, this and other Jewish ghettos turned out to be nothing more than waiting rooms for the upcoming concentration camps and the full-blown Holocaust that would lead to the execution of six million Jews.
Irena realized the people inside the ghetto would eventually perish and that there would be no way to get them out of harm’s way since the gates were strictly controlled by Nazi soldiers. But what about children? Maybe, just maybe, she could smuggle out some Jewish children from the ghetto.
Being a nurse, Irena volunteered to enter the ghetto on a daily basis and help out with basic health care. Even the Nazis saw the point of preventing epidemics that might spread out of the ghetto and become a problem for the general population of Warsaw.
Once inside the ghetto, Irena started secretly meeting with Jewish families, explaining the danger they were in and that she sadly would not be able to help them out of the ghetto nor save them from their upcoming fate. Still, she begged them to trust her with their children, and she promised she would do whatever she could to get them out of the ghetto and spare them a certain death.
Faced with this decision—among the most horrible any man or woman could make—many Jewish parents chose to trust her. They said tearful goodbyes to their own children and prayed they would make it out of the ghetto with the help of this young Polish woman and be saved from the fate of those left inside.
Irena had organized a network of courageous individuals who shared her commitment to helping as many Jewish children as possible to get out of the Warsaw ghetto, and under the leadership of this young Christian nurse, they used every means available to make that happen. When a dead body was brought out of the ghetto, they would place a Jewish child inside the body bag to be carried out alongside the corpse. Children were smuggled out through cracks in the ghetto wall. Irena and her team would even bribe craftsmen who worked daytime inside the ghetto to smuggle Jewish babies out in their toolboxes at the end of the working day. Whatever it took, they were determined to get as many children out as possible, even though by doing so Irena and her friends were risking their lives every single day.
Once outside the ghetto, the rescued children were given new Polish names and forged identity papers and were then hidden in foster homes, orphanages, or convents. Irena wrote down the names of each child and its parents, along with all the information needed to hopefully be able to reunite them after the war. Every night she placed notes for the new children rescued that day in a glass jar and buried it under a pear tree. Eventually, the jar contained over twenty-five hundred notes, representing twenty-five hundred Jewish children who were saved from destruction.
In the last stages of the war, the Nazis finally discovered Irena’s whereabouts, and she was arrested. Knowing there must be documentation of the children she had brought out of the ghetto, including where they could now be found and brought back, the Nazis tortured Irena to give up this information. Her arms and legs were broken, but she would not give up the location of the jar of notes. She was finally condemned to death, but her friends managed to bribe the death squad to release her on the way to execution, and she survived.
Irena always remained humble about her contributions, and it wasn’t until many years later that her story gained wider recognition. In 1965, she was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The international community gradually acknowledged her extraordinary deeds, and numerous honors and awards followed, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Irena Sendler passed away in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight, and I strongly encourage you to Google images of her in her old age. She truly shines with joy! I look at her and think to myself, ‘That is the face of someone who did not live for her own comfort but to shine the light of mercy; someone who never hid behind excuses but, upon seeing the desperate needs of others, immediately asked herself what she could do to help.’
Why? Because she realized she had been shown the same mercy herself by her own Creator and that the least she could do was pass it on to someone else in need.
Irena Sendler’s life is such an inspiring testament to the transformative power of courage stemming from mercy. Her commitment to helping the needy, especially during the darkest days of the Holocaust, shows the profound impact that one individual—one light of the world—can have on the lives of others and on endless generations to come.
Let us always remember that since we have been mercifully released from a debt that we had no way of paying back, the least we can do is look around us, asking who we can help, forgive, support, and strengthen in our turn.
Let us do whatever we can to shine the light of mercy!”
For more information on Joakim Lundqvist’s latest book, Shine Your Light, visit MyCharismaShop.com