I have a friend named Mary who is in the process of saving a stranger’s life.

Normally, when someone saves the life of another person, it is a spontaneous response to an emergent situation that doesn’t call for any thought. It’s a response directed by those instincts imbedded in most everyone’s existence. We react to situations, mostly to take ourselves out of harm’s way, but the same reaction results in actions that save others from a myriad of possibly fatal situations.

Since no thought is wasted on computing all the possibilities associated with whatever inappropriate action they are about to take, scores of folks pay the ultimate price in a brief quest to save someone else. It’s a selfless act, in all cases.

Mary, on the other hand, has had a lot of time to consider the consequences of her actions and is increasingly excited about the outcome. She is donating one of her kidney’s to this stranger as part of a team involved with getting her niece a kidney transplant. Today I commended her for her actions and her comment was, “I’m just an ordinary person.”

She almost had it right. The correct word is ‘extraordinary’.