Love God-Love People-Change the World

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I want to start by saying Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

I went back and forth this last month on the thought of writing something at all for this Holiday: could I, a middle-class white woman, possibly delve into the subject of diversity with any sort of depth or comprehension? Should I just give a historical account of the day, and how we came to celebrate this honorable and inspirational man? Or should I skip it and let the chips fall to another on our team?

Then I went to church this past Sunday and saw that they had installed a new sign in the lobby:

“Love God-Love People-Change the World.”

I’ve been thinking about those words all day, and all the things that Martin Luther King Jr. did for the world in his short 39 years.

My kids are young. My oldest is in Kindergarten, and all he really knows at this point is that he has the day off.

So, I started thinking about how he responds when I ask about his school day. Every day is different. And most days his “Best Friend” has changed several times! Sometimes it is a girl, sometimes it is a boy….it always simply has to do with who played with him on the playground and who was nice to him.

He doesn’t care what color their skin is or what their gender is, he just wants to play and have fun!

This led me to think about how I am teaching him about diversity, if in my “teaching” am I actually showing him differences that he didn’t see before?

Wouldn’t it be a better lesson to first teach him to Love God, Love People and if he does those two things equally with ALL people, he could in fact Change the World.  

Today I want to grab the opportunity to explain to my son that he doesn’t just have the day off but that we are honoring the life of an ordinary man that did EXTRAORDINARY things and that he too can do extraordinary things if he chooses to love people.

This won’t always be easy, in fact most of the time it will be very very hard.

But that is where the loving God part comes in, because I believe that if we first love God then we can have the capacity to love people equally. If we all showed more love in a day than judgment on our differences our generation and those that follow can in fact Change the World.

Today and everyday lets show our kids that people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are heroes, not because they had some super power but because they had the capacity to see an injustice and speak up, even when they were told No. They did this with both dignity and compassion. Let’s empower the next generation to use LOVE as a way to light up the dark. 

Go Forth and….LOVE GOD-LOVE PEOPLE-CHANGE THE WORLD!