TIMING IS EVERYTHING

"It is always the right time to do the right thing."
Martin Luther King

The book group that meets at my store, met last night. Diane Ackerman wrote the book we read for December. The Zookeepers Wife. She is a naturalist, and has written several books.

She also writes poetry. Beautiful poetry.

The Zookeeper's Wife, set in Warsaw Poland during the Nazi invasion of World War ll. This is the true story of the Zabinski's. Jan was the zookeeper of the Warsaw Zoo. His wife, Antonina, worked along side him in caring for the animals. When the war broke out and things got bad fast, their family joined the underground movement. Helping save the lives of thousands of people.

They housed people, short term, and long term poviding them with false papers, in their home where they had many hiding places.

Over the month, as I read this book, I kept seeing the Martin Luther King quote, about five or six different times in different places. It kept drawing me back to the fears and horrors that this family lived through. And thousands of others like them. The heroes of the world.

We hear story's like this today, in many place under seige by hate filled people. Heroic folks risking their lives to save others, sometime very unlike themselves.

It is always the right time to do the right thing.

Most of us have never had anything so big to face, but in the small things we face everyday, do we sometime turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, and say nothing.

It's none of my business!

I know we do. And it's true, sometimes it isn't.

But can we make ourselves ready through the little things we're willing to get involved with on a local community level to do the right thing when we see it and know it?

Or on a personal basis, in our relationships, going the extra distance, even though there is no end result in veiw and the fear of exposing our own vulnerablilities is high.

(Do I step back into the shadows, unwilling?)

They say, timing is everything.

Certainly, for those people helped through the underground, the Zabinski's timing, to do the right thing, was everything.