• Originally published May 27, 2008 at 9:37 p.m., updated May 27, 2008 at 9:37 p.m.

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “Life’s most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?”

Winston Churchill once growled, “I have nothing to give but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

And, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, “To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.”

You might well wonder, why all this stuff about self-sacrifice?

They were brought to mind, oddly enough, by a recent fundraiser for the Lone Tree Volunteer Fire Department.

At the barbecue and auction, the firefighters hoped to make enough money to cover their operating expenses for the year.

All over our part of Texas, similar fundraisers are commonly held for volunteer firefighters who, for the most part, are self-sustaining and get little or no financial help from other sources.

And yet, look at the “special quality” of their sacrifice, as Mrs. Lindbergh called it. At all hours of the night and day, and sometimes at the cost of their civilian pay by leaving their jobs, when the fire alarm goes off, they are on their way. “We like it and we try to help out the community,” one Lone Tree firefighter told Advocate reporter Bj Lewis at the barbecue and auction.

Many times, we’ve seen these unpaid volunteers save homes, barns and other property by knocking down wildfires and other blazes – sometimes in support of paid firefighters, sometimes all on their own.

And many of them are trained as emergency medical technicians, saving lives at the scene of trauma and transporting victims to area hospitals.

Hats off to all these local heroes, and we use the word in its genuine context.

One more quotation comes to mind, this one from Albert Einstein.

Even the master physicist could look up from his equations and say, “Only a life lived for others is worth living.”

Thank you, volunteer fire departments, and all your people who are living those worthy lives.

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