We all have lists. Grocery lists, email lists and things to do lists. Lists at home and lists at work.
Maybe you’re thinking about your list right now. Sometimes we get on a list by mistake. Sometimes we don’t want to be on a list like a jury duty list or America’s most wanted.
Other times you do want to be on a list, like Schindler’s list. Oscar Schindler was a WW II industrialist, German spy, and a member of the Nazi party. Originally, he saw the money making potential of an enamelware factory of 1,700 workers, a thousand of whom were Jewish. Later, he had a deep change of heart and began protecting his Jewish workers by bribing SS officials with lavish gifts to keep his Jewish employees alive regardless of the cost.
Towards the end of the war Schindler made a list of over 1,200 Jewish workers who were relocated to another factory in western Poland in order to save their lives from certain death in the concentration camps. Until the end of the war he continued to bribe officials until he spent his life fortune.
Now, if your name was on that list you are not only grateful, but ALIVE! Today, there are over seven thousand living descendants from Schindler’s list.
On that list was employee #173, Leopold Pfefferberg, who immigrated to LA in 1948 and opened up a small leather and collectible shop. Leo made it his life’s mission to tell the amazing and unforgettable story of his savior, Oscar Schindler. For years he persistently met with Hollywood screenplay writers and producers with hopes of a seeing a movie eventually produced. Leo was able to get some American TV interviews with Oscar Schindler, but hopes of a movie faded with Schindler’s death in 1974.
Then one day Leo met author Thomas Keneally who bought a bundle of manuscripts from Pefferberg which amazingly contained an authentic page from Schindler’s list. Two years later Keneally wrote the historical novel Schindler’s Ark which eventually became the movie Schindler’s List. Before the movie was a reality Leo claimed he called Steven Spielberg once a week for eleven years.
Leo Pfefferberg was Spielberg’s special guest at the Academy Awards when the movie won seven awards.
In the closing tearful scene of the movie Schindler’s deeply grateful employees gave him a ring inscribed with the Hebrew Talmudic proverb, ‘he who saved one life saved a world entire.’
The Apostle Paul also had a list in Romans 16 that at first glance doesn’t seem all that inspiring. It was a list of people that helped him in ministry and life. They were not just a list of names. They were those he was thankful for, people he remembered. People that mattered to him! They were names written on his heart. Names of people we wouldn’t otherwise know existed!
There over fifty thousand names on the Viet Nam War Memorial wall, but they are not just names on a wall to those who linger around leaving poems, touching and kissing the names on the wall, they are family.
Paul was a passionate and affectionate man who cared about the people he served.
As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you, but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.1 Thess. 2:7-8
Paul had a list and so does God. Find out about God’s and yours’ next time?
