Once there was a notion of the "heroic ideal" that we preserved in Western
culture, made the theme of stories we told our children, and cherished in our hearts. It
inspired people at critical moments and enabled them to act both correctly and
courageously. This ideal affirmed to us that a single life could make a profound
difference.

Today we seem to have accepted the notion of personal insignificance — if not
meaninglessness — for individual human life. Our world of six billion people is seen as
being swayed only by large coalitions and power blocs. Thus too many of us not  only
suffer from low self-esteem but actually live as though what we are doing makes no real
difference in the grand scheme of things. 

Occasionally stories are still told that affirm the heroic ideal. They show how
individual acts spread like ripples on the surface of a still lake to reach distant
places. They encourage the rest of us to take our behaviors more seriously.

Schindler’s List is such a story. A bestselling novel by Thomas Keneally that was put
on film by Steven Spielberg, it won the Academy Award for "Best Picture of the
Year" for 1993 by telling the story of one man’s far-reaching heroism. It is the true
story of Oskar Schindler and how he came to save more Jews from the Nazi gas chambers than
any other single person during the Holocaust.

Schindler is not a particularly appealing character at the start of his wartime
experience. He is apolitical and hedonistic. Moving to Poland in order to profit from the
war trade, he buys a factory from Jews who are being dispossessed and herded into the
Warsaw ghetto.

With a woman on one arm and a Nazi official on the other, Schindler serves his own
selfish interests as an entrepreneur making money off human depravity and suffering.
Working Jews in his factory by special permission from the Nazis, he fills contracts for
mess kits and utensils for German troops and accumulates great wealth.

As time goes by, Schindler gets to know first one and then another of the people that
come to be knows as the Schindlerjuden (i.e., Schindler’s Jews). Compassion emerges and
conscience prompts action. Putting principle and the value of human life above his selfish
interests, he puts himself at some personal risk and spends his entire fortune to save
some 1,100 Jews from sure death.

You will probably never save hundreds of people from murder or head a mover-and-shaker
organization. But you can love God with your whole heart and treat your neighbor as you
want to be treated. You can protest injustice when you see it, champion the rights of the
weak when you are allied with the strong, and pay attention to someone everyone else has
ignored.

When you do these things, you will be imitating the One whose single life has given all
of us hope.

When will evangelism really work?

When each individual will spend time in prayer about their own neighborhood; when they
will be willing to offer personal invitations in their own neighborhoods; when they will
be involved in the lives of those in their own neighborhood. It’s an individual
working with friends in heir own neighborhood. That was the way Jesus did it…one-on-one,
day-by-day reaching out. It certainly is NOT an individual waiting for a
‘program’ designed for someone else to reach his own neighborhood.