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.
Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She married Pierre Curie, and together they took up the study of radioactivity. Their early work was done under hard conditions. The lab setup was poor, and both had to do a lot of teaching just to make a living. Still, they pressed on and isolated two new elements, polonium, named for her home country, and radium. In 1903 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Then in 1906, Pierre was killed. Marie took his place as professor at the Sorbonne, the first woman ever to hold that post. During World War I she personally worked to use radium to ease suffering. Grief didn’t stop her. She kept doing the work God put in front of her.
For years Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the suffering and poverty she saw outside the convent walls. In 1948 she got permission to leave the school and go work among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. She didn’t have any money. She simply trusted God to provide and started an open-air school for slum children. In 1950 she was allowed to start her own order, and its main job was to love and care for the people nobody else was willing to look after. You don’t need a big budget to start serving. You need eyes that see the hurting and the faith to take the first step toward them.
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.
