The Freedom of Surrender
Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest, Martyr
Maximilian Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for sheltering refugees, among them Jews. He was sent to Auschwitz as prisoner 16670.
That July, after a man escaped, the commandant condemned ten prisoners to death by starvation. One of the prisoners cried out for his wife and children. Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place. It was in the starvation bunker he led them in prayer and hymn.
On August 14, 1941, the vigil of the Assumption, he was killed by an injection of carbolic acid. John Paul II canonized him a martyr of charity in 1982.
Maximilian Kolbe once wrote:
See then, […] the tremendous honor of the position that God in his kindness has placed us in. Through obedience we transcend our own limitations and align ourselves with God’s will, which, with infinite wisdom and prudence, guides us to do what is best. Moreover, as we become filled with the divine will, which no created thing can resist, so we become stronger than all others.
Kolbe’s sacrifice is not only a story of human courage. It is a story of supernatural love that becomes possible when a person’s will is perfectly surrendered to God.
When we surrender our will to God’s will, we become more open to His grace. That grace changes and strengthens us, enabling us to love and act beyond our natural abilities, even to the point of laying down our lives for another. This may be what St. Peter means when he says that through God’s grace we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The more our will becomes united with God’s will, the more His life and love can work through us.
© 2026, Lawain McNeil, Mission Surrender, LLC.