Reflections on Character
A recent speech I gave to a church
Recently, I was asked to talk about the idea of character to a small congregation. When it came to planning the discussion, I immediately thought of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man that in many ways exemplified character.
So, in a bit of a break from working on the tools of running a nonprofit, I thought it more appropriate to share these words with you. Please let me know what you think!
On August 28, 1963, nearly sixty years ago, Dr. King proclaimed that he had a dream, a grand vision for his country. His dream included that “his four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
As I reflect on where America has been in the nearly sixty years since that speech, where are we in terms of our judgement on color and character?
On the color front, progress has been made, but more progress is still needed. Our society has made strides to shed a past in which racism and bigotry was still hallmarks of polite society, but we still live in a live a country where individuals can still be shut out of opportunities not only by the color of their skin, but even things such as gender, religion and other factors that one can not change about themselves.
Winning the hearts and changing the mind of people on an individual basis can be a long and tiring task.
But when I think about Dr. King’s words, we often pay short shrift to the concept of character. What exactly is character? Where does character come from?
In my research, the dictionary had fifteen definitions for character, but the one that resonated the most was: “A person with a distinctive strength of mind and of resolution, marked with a sense of individuality and moral strength”.
The definition exudes a person with a sense of power and a sense of fortitude. An individual, regardless of race, gender or creed that acts in the benevolence of not themselves, but for the benefit of their family and their community.
And if we can agree upon that vision of human character, where does such a vision come from?
Such character can be firmly grown and molded through our spiritual development; here we are in one of the many houses of the Lord our community has. No doubt, many souls have been saved and lives changed thanks to the relationships that were built between an individual and their personal savior.
But even those relationships, if they are to take hold, needed something more than just divine intervention. Don’t get me wrong, the Lord can and has done miraculous and amazing things. But the miracles are only seen in the eyes that believe. How do we believe?
May I be so bold to propose that such a sense of belief, that such a desire to form character, that such a wish to create a better world can only be formed by the individual that begins to take responsibility for themselves, their families and their communities?
If we think that character is in short supply in our world, we could easily argue that responsibility is in even shorter supply.
And when I talk about responsibility, I am not merely talking about the misinformed use of the term “accountability”. Accountability, while important, has been transformed to mean to take the brunt of the blame for things that go wrong all the time. Don’t get me wrong, we need a world of accountability. We need to pay penance when our sins of commission or our perhaps, even more, detrimental, when our sins of omission, make our world a shakier place.
But, we need to welcome the concept of responsibility back to our world. We need each man and woman to wake up every morning and understand that we play a role for the world we live in. For every problem we see, we have created some of the conditions for that problem to exist. For every opportunity we see, our humble hearts should give gratitude to God and to others for what we can enjoy.
Responsibility used to be easier. The places and spaces where we used to learn responsibility used to be brimming with people. Churches, I am sure just like this one, used to bring in people of various backgrounds and socio-economic statuses to learn about God, loving your neighbors and applying responsibility to our daily lives.
But as time has marched on, our trust in our physical institutions have eroded. Churches that dot our landscapes, grow empty. Even social clubs, shrink as members get older and lose their emphasis on serving. Organized sports for our children have turned less into places where our kids learn about the fundamentals of teamwork and sportsmanship, into more hyper-competitve environments where families spend full weekends in their minivans going miles and miles for another athletic tournament.
And we have replaced those physical institutions for virtual groups. These groups where one click of a mouse gets us in and we can hide behind an avatar and a screen, shielding the world, and maybe even ourselves, from a real world that is out there.
And who hasn’t been caught up in the faux-community building of social media? I’ll admit, I know I have. I have set foot and yes, even participated in a virtual world that gives out dopamine hits for every comment made in anger, fear and frustration. I am not a better person for it and my world is not made better by what I have done. I have learned hard lessons that it is not responsible to use our words to cause anger in others and it is not responsible to use our actions to create division amongst ourselves.
I want a community where we can all happily take on the burden of responsibility. I want to live in a city where my neighbors are committed to making this a hometown for all people for generations to come. I want to live with people who are generous and willing to lend a hand to those that are working to live in dignity each and every day.
Friends, this can happen, but we have to take the responsibility of our lives and our communities deadly seriously. Because every time we fail to do the right thing, we send this world into more anxiety and nervousness.
It’s a huge undertaking, but it’s worth doing. And if you are serious in undertaking this challenge, I am here for you. I will work my hardest to encourage you, I will do my best to remind you not to compare yourself to who someone else is today, but to compare yourself to who you were yesterday. We will remind each other that there will be times that we will fall short, we all do. But, we will never tire in our task of looking at our lives and our community and doing the next right thing in front of us.
Whether that is picking up a piece of trash on the sidewalk, holding a door open for a stranger, offering a nice word of encouragement, we will pledge ourselves to make our lives, our community and our world one filled with character, regardless of the color of our skin.
I too have a dream like Dr. King. I have a dream where we can all live and thrive in a community where we are known by the strength of our character more than anything else.