Tag: hero

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and victims of the recent tragic shootings at a country music festival in Las Vegas.

Updates are available at all news outlets. Tales of ordinary people acting in heroic ways are beginning to emerge. Business Insider profiles some of them, and they warm the heart. They include a woman with paramedic experience named Dawn-Marie Gray, who tended to the injured and dying:

Dawn-Marie, who worked as a paramedic for about seven years, knew that local paramedics would not be admitted entry until the area was deemed safe. She and her husband turned to the wounded, providing CPR, making tourniquets, and checking for pulses on lifeless bodies.

The couple worked together to load victims into cars en route to the hospital.

“It had nothing to do with being a hero,” Dawn-Marie said. “That’s being a human being.”

A Kenyan Muslim teacher who risked his life to shield Christians who were on a bus with him, has died from the gunshot wound he received.

Salah Farah was on a bus travelling through Mandera in Kenya when it was attacked by al-Shabab in December.
The attackers told the Muslims and Christians to split up but he was among Muslim passengers who refused.
A bullet hit Mr Farah and almost a month on, he died in hospital in the capital, Nairobi.

In interviews, when asked why he did this, he replied,
“people should live peacefully together”.
“We are brothers.
“It’s only the religion that is the difference, so I ask my brother Muslims to take care of the Christians so that the Christians also take care of us… and let us help one another and let us live together peacefully”.

Read more at BBC.

We laud his heroism. “Greater love hath no man than this…” (See John 15:13)

Nicholas Winton, a Briton who said nothing for a half-century about his role in organizing the escape of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, a righteous deed like those of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, died on Wednesday in Maidenhead, England. He was 106.

Read more on this Patheos blog.

Also, I was struck by this quote from Time magazine:
We often ask why, during times of war, did people not intervene? The truth is most of us do not stir ourselves to act. We know of suffering in the world and yet continue to live our lives, go to work, take care of our families, and sleep in peace. Some precious souls are moved to a goodness that transcends explanation.