In 2016, I had the privilege of going to Poland for World Youth Day with a group from Orlando. One of the more emotional experiences that we had came when we visited the concentration camps of Auschwitz. You could really feel the weight of the evil and the darkness that had taken place there. Yet, despite that, the point of the pilgrimage there wasn’t just to highlight the atrocities that had taken place; the main point of the pilgrimage was to bring us to an encounter with heroic men and women who risked their lives for others. One of those men was St. Maximillian Kolbe.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with his story, Maximilian Kolbe was a prisoner at Auschwitz. He was arrested by the Nazis in September of 1939 and sent there. In the summer of 1941, several men escaped from the camp and, in an attempt to deter other prisoners from trying the same, the prison guards selected ten men at random to be punished and were sentenced to death by starvation. When one of the men chosen expressed his anguish because he had a wife and children, Maximilian stepped forward and willingly volunteered to take the man’s place. After two weeks without food or water, the Polish priest was the only one of the ten still alive. At that point, he was killed by a lethal injection.

The history of the Church has countless stories of men and women who have done the same, who have willingly given their lives for others. These martyrs were witnesses of God’s presence and examples of how, even in the midst of darkness, the light of God’s love always prevails.

We’re living in our own dark times – the threat of global war, political upheaval, social unrest, the residual impacts of the pandemic, the emergence of strange ideologies – our world is just so lost, it’s confused. There are so many who are just unaware of who God is and who He is calling them to be. The Lord needs us to be the Maximilian Kolbe’s of our generation, who show a new generation of people the sacrificial love of Jesus. We may not undergo persecution to the point of our deaths, but we will be asked to give our lives in some way for the faith. And that can be an example to others of the importance of relationship with Jesus Christ and it can then lead them to an encounter with the Savior of the world.

Are you and I willing to be those heroic examples that the world needs? Are we willing to show others just how much we love the Lord and offer ourselves in sacrificial love to those around us? May that be our goal in life. That we follow the example of Maximilian Kolbe and follow the example of Jesus, our Savior, and offer ourselves out of love for someone else.

Image: Photograph of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe from 1936. Public Domain.