Welles Crowther was a young equities trader and former Boston College lacrosse player. On September 11, 2001, survivors in the South Tower’s burning 78th floor sky lobby saw a young man appear with a red bandanna over his face. One survivor remembered him saying, “I found the stairs, follow me. Only help the ones that you can help.” They got up and followed. He made at least two trips to that floor and guided as many as 12 people to safety. Welles could have saved himself, but he died when the tower collapsed. Only later did survivors identify him as the mysterious man in the red bandanna. Heroes don’t always get to see the difference they make.
Rick Rescorla fought in Vietnam as a young Army lieutenant. Years later he was head of security for Morgan Stanley in the World Trade Center. After the 1993 bombing he was convinced terrorists would return, so he created a disaster plan and rehearsed it with employees, sometimes taking heat for it. On September 11, 2001, he led the evacuation of the South Tower offices. Survivors remember a calm voice over a bullhorn singing to steady the crowd. He was last seen climbing back up the stairs to sweep for anyone left behind, minutes before the tower fell. His preparation and courage are credited with saving thousands. Real love goes back for the ones still inside.
In 1854, Florence Nightingale answered a government call for nurses and headed to Scutari, near Constantinople, to care for British soldiers from the Crimean War. What she found was awful. The hospital was dirty and crawling with vermin, and it didn’t even have basic supplies. More men were sick from disease than from battle wounds. Florence and her nurses got to work. They set up food kitchens, washed linen and clothes, wrote letters home for the soldiers, and started reading rooms. The Times reported that at night she walked among the beds checking on the wounded with a light in her hand. That’s how she became the Lady with the Lamp. Greatness in God’s kingdom usually looks like somebody carrying a light into a place nobody else wants to go.
In the summer of 1944, nearly 200,000 Jews were still left in Budapest, and the authorities planned to deport them too. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman with no diplomatic experience at all, arrived on July 9 as a diplomat at the Swedish legation. He started handing out certificates of protection that put Jews under neutral Sweden’s care. He set up hospitals, nurseries, a soup kitchen, and more than 30 safe houses. When thousands were forced on marches toward the Austrian border, Wallenberg often went in person to get people with papers pulled out of the columns. When Budapest was liberated, more than 100,000 Jews were still alive there, mostly because of him and his colleagues. God can use someone who feels unqualified. He just needs someone willing to show up.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on February 3, 1943, a German submarine torpedoed the Army transport ship Dorchester in the icy North Atlantic, with 902 men aboard. In less than 20 minutes it would sink. In the chaos, four Army chaplains, a Methodist minister, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Dutch Reformed minister, moved among the men, calming them, praying, and handing out life jackets. When the life jackets ran out, all four took off their own and gave them to four frightened young men. One survivor called it “the finest thing I have seen or hope to see this side of heaven.” As the ship went down, men in the rafts saw the four chaplains with arms linked, praying together.
