A Letter from the Birmingham Jail

Who would have believed that Michael would grow up to change the world? Surely the odds were stacked against a black baby born in the Old South. It helped that his preacher daddy saw him as a special gift from God. Maybe that’s why this child prodigy entered college at the tender age of 15.

But his early success masked the deep scars of segregation. He first felt the sting of the Southern class system when a white friend invited him home. His playmate’s mother chased Michael away while loudly berating her son for bringing a “colored boy” into the house. By the time he was a teenager, he no longer trusted a religion that looked the other way while folks practiced bigotry. The preacher’s kid dismissed the Bible as myth and rebelled against the church.

Everyone was shocked when he announced that he was off to seminary. But Michael didn’t enter the ministry so much to preach the gospel as to use his pulpit to promote racial justice. He organized bus boycotts and peaceful protests. When redneck sheriffs unleashed their police dogs, he responded, “Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you….Beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.”

Just when it seemed that Michael’s nonviolent protests were finally paying off, the US attorney general ordered an investigation. Secret FBI wiretaps suggested his associations with Communist influences. Agents also uncovered evidence implicating him as a serial adulterer. When his wife found out, she threatened to leave him.

By 1963, many of his impatient followers were deserting to militant groups with slogans like “Burn, baby! Burn!” Michael hit rock bottom when he was thrown in Birmingham City Jail. With plenty of free time, he began to reread the Bible had dismissed as a myth. As he studied letters written by a jailed apostle some 1,900 years earlier, he realized that his hope wasn’t in how much he loved others but in how much his Savior loved him.

Not only did Michael experience a conversion in Birmingham, so did the nation. Violent police reaction to his peaceful protests galvanized America. Not long after, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The name Michael appears on his birth certificate, but history remembers the moniker that his preacher daddy later gave him: Martin. By the time he was assassinated in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had unleashed a tidal wave that changed everything.

Every February the United States celebrates his birthday. But maybe you don’t feel like throwing a party, because you still feel the sting of bigotry. Perhaps you are imprisoned in your own jailhouse, shackled to the ball and chain of some disability or disappointment. Could it be that, like Martin, you are deeply aware of you own hidden flaws and failures? Take heart. You just might find courage from a line that Dr. King penned in that Birmingham jail: You must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Paul wrote in Romans 8:28 (NIV), “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

The Treasure of the Salinas de San Andreas

When Billy Ford headed across the Guadalupe River, he couldn’t have known that he was about to push America to the brink of war. Had the sheriff understood the high stakes that night in 1854, he might have formed a bigger posse than seventeen Americans, ten Mexicans, and an Englishman. He surely needed more firepower than his sixty-four-pound howitzer, especially if he was going to seize the Salinas de San Andreas.

Acre for acre, this was the richest land in Texas, worth its weight in gold. As far back as prehistoric times it had been a bonanza. Aztecs and Mayans traveled great distances to extract its riches. In 1647, a Spanish king granted Don Diego de Vivar exclusive rights to mine its wealth, making his family fabulously wealthy.

By 1854, powerful men were willing to sell their souls to possess the Salinas de San Andreas. Bu Sheriff Ford should have known better. For more than two hundred years, Comanches, Apaches, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Mexicans, Americans, and Tejanos had fought to the death over this treasure trove of the Trans-Pecos. Somewhere in the badlands of Texas, Ford’s outgunned posse ran into an army of Tejanos. After a deadly shoot-out, he hightailed it back to New Mexico.

Some twenty-three years later, this simmering conflict erupted again. Like a scene out of the cowboy comedy Blazing Saddles, several small armies converged west of El Paso. Mexican federales crossed the Rio Grande, Apaches rode in from the west, Comanches swooped down from the north, vigilantes stormed out of El Paso, and five hundred Mexican American locals rushed to protect their claim to the Salinas de San Andreas. Just when things couldn’t get crazier, hired gunslingers came in by railroad just as Texas rangers, Apaches scalped vigilantes, Comanches shot it out with gunslingers, and federales fled back across the Rio Grande. The Ninth Calvary, made up of African American buffalo soldiers, finally galloped in to restore order. This fiasco looked like an eye-poking contest between the Three Stooges, but it garnered world headlines and almost caused a war between the United States and Mexico.

What was this treasure that made men crazy with greed? It wasn’t gold, oil, or cattle. But it was the richest salt preserve in North America. Unless you hail from West Texas, you have probably never heard about these shoot-outs. After the Sal Elizario Salt War, America turned to cheaper salt from Kansas. Today Salinas de San Andreas is a deserted stretch of badlands.

In a day of cheap table salt, it’s hard to believe that more wars in history have been fought over salt than have been waged over gold or religion. People can live without gold or oil but not salt. Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). We are to do what salt does: heal, preserve, and bring flavor to life. So get out of the shaker and spread yourself around.

Salty Christians make others thirst for Jesus, the water of life.

The Man of a Thousand Faces

No one could play someone else better than Richard. Born into a vaudeville family, he began performing onstage while still a toddler. By the time he was a teenager, he was a master impressionist who could transform himself into a variety of characters. But it was at home that Richard honed the fine art of the masquerade. Dominated by an overprotective mother, he learned to play whatever role made her happy. By the time he was an adult, Richard didn’t know who he was anymore. Maybe that’s why he plowed through four marriages and his children complained that they never really knew their father.

Who would have guessed that this master impressionist and comic genius was lost and miserable? Toward the end of a brilliant career spanning sixty films, Richard was interviewed by Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show. The puppet said, “Just relax and be yourself.”

Richard responded, “I can’t be myself, because I don’t know who I really am anymore.”

After years of cardiac trouble brought on by anxiety, alcohol, and drugs, Richard was told that his heart was dying. Racing against the clock, he tried to mend fences. He confessed to a son that he shouldn’t have abandoned his first wife. He deeply regretted alienating his kids. Mostly, he wished he hadn’t wasted his life trying to be what others wanted him to be.

Not long after that, Richard collapsed of a heart attack. He was rushed to a London hospital, where he died on July 24, 1980. He was only fifty-four years old. His son Michael tearfully spoke to the reporters about the last days he shared with his dad: “It marked the beginning of an all-too brief closeness between us.”

Michael’s dad was born Richard Henry Sellers. But the world remembers him by his screen name, Peter Sellers. He portrayed such memorable characters as Dr. Strangelove and Inspector Clouseau, the bumbling master of disguise in the Pink Panther movies. Before Sellers died, an article in Time magazine quoted one of his friends as saying, “Poor Peter! The real Peter disappeared a long time ago. What remains is an amalgamation of all the characters he has played, and he is frantically trying to unsnarl the mess to find out who he really is.”

Film critics agree that Peter Sellers was the greatest comedic genius since Charlie Chaplin. No one was funnier than Inspecter Clouseau. Nothing is sadder than the story of the actor who played him. His life is summed in a Smokey Robinson song: “Ain’t too much sadder than the tears of a clown when there’s no one around….I’m hurt and I want you to know, but for others I put on a show.” Hopefully these words aren’t your story too. Don’t settle for brief moments of closeness such as those Michael shared with his dad at the end. You can experience authentic relationships with those who matter, if you remember this: To try to be someone else is to waste the person you were created by God to be.

Psalms 139:13-14 reminds us, “You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous – how well I know it.”

The World’s Most-Admired Woman

No one would have ever guessed that scrawny little Agnes would one day light up the world. Like most folks in her poverty-stricken eastern European country, she seemed doomed to a dead-end life. After her widowed mother had exhausted herself trying to find an eligible bachelor for the mousy girl, Agnes announced that God had called her to be a missionary. Everyone said she was crazy. But 18-year old Agnes headed for the faraway city of Dublin, Ireland. After learning a smattering of English, she moved to Asia where she kicked around from school to school, seemingly consigned to teach schoolchildren forever.

Everything changed when Agnes went on a spiritual retreat to a nearby city. There she stumbled upon the worst slums on earth. She was overwhelmed by the poverty and disease. At 36-years of age, the diminutive spinster heard Jesus tell her to bring his light to this place of darkness. She called other women to join her in ministering to the poorest outcasts in India.

The world doesn’t know her as Agnes: after she committed herself to ministry, she changed her name to the patron saint of missionaries, Teresa. Who would have figured that the Gallup Poll would one day declare this pint-size Albanian woman the most admired woman of the 20th century? Or that she would win the Nobel Prize? Or that her order would grow to 4,5000 sisters in 153 countries giving themselves to the poorest of the poor? Who would believe that from her one-room cell in a Calcutta convent, she would oversee a worldwide string of hospitals, hospices, AIDS centers, orphanages, and schools?

When Mother Teresa won the Nobel Prize, reporters asked her how we should promote world peace. She shocked everyone with her simple answer: “Go home and love your family.” When they asked her to describe herself, she replied, “By blood, I am an Albanian; by citizenship, an Indian; by faith, a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to Jesus.”

When a delegation of nuns acme to Calcutta to discover the secret to Mother Teresa’s success, the head one order asked, “Why are you growing while so many other orders are dying?”

Mother Teresa quietly replied, “I give them Jesus.”

“I know that,” replied the woman impatiently. “But can you be more specific? Do your sisters object to wearing habits? What about the rules of your order? How do you enforce them?”

“Only one thing matters. I give them Jesus,” she replied again.

“Yes, yes, I know that!” persisted the woman. “But there’s got to be more than that!”

The little nun walked up to the woman and said in the sternest voice possible, “I give them Jesus! There’s nothing more!”

The purpose of this blog post is not to point out the biblical disagreements I have with the Catholic faith. I want to draw your attention to Mother Teresa’s words, “I give them Jesus! There’s nothing more.”

Jesus alone can change the world. Religion does not save or transform people. Only Jesus does. 2 Corinthians 3:18, NKJV, says, “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.”

A Map to Nowhere

Losing your way can be fatal. George found that out the hard way. This dirt-poor farmer, with dreams of striking it rich, was in Springfield, Illinois, the day fast-talking James Reed held a crowd spellbound with tales of fabulous riches in California. Reed ended with a rousing challenge: “Come on, boys! You can have as much land as you want without it costing you anything.”

Reed’s promise of free land would cost everything for those who followed him, including George and his family. A lineup of wagons rolled out of Independence, Missouri, and by the time they arrive in Fort Laramie, they were already behind schedule. It was now July, and the wagons still had to cross a brutal stretch of mountains and badlands before winter set in. That’s when Reed pulled out a book with a map that promised to cut some four hundred miles off the route to California, even though its author had never seen the trail. Neither had anyone else. Reed’s map was based on rumor and legend. Frontiersmen warned that it was a fraud. But Reed convinced eighty-six people to join him. George was among those most enthusiastic. Maybe that’s why the group elected him as their captain.

Their gamble proved disastrous. Heavy wagons had to be dragged over the rugged Wasatch Mountains and then across the Great Salt Lake Desert. By the time George’s party found their way back to the California Trail, it was the end of September. Their “shortcut” had taken twenty-five days longer than the normal route. Weeks behind schedule and short on food, they reached California in late October.

The weary party might have made it up that last stretch of the Sierra Nevada Mountains had they not been hit by a freak blizzard. It was the first in a series of massive snowstorms leading to the worst winter in California history. The marooned party ate the last of their oxen, only to face five more months trapped. A desperate group, calling themselves the Forlorn Hope, set out for Fort Sutter on crudely fashioned snowshoes. Less than half of them made it.

Four search parties were turned back by blizzards before a handful of survivors were finally rescued in the spring of 1847. The rescuers were appalled to discover the grisly remains of half-eaten corpses. The survivors confessed that they had stayed alive by eating the frozen bodies of the dead. These reports of cannibalism became the fodder for sensational newspaper stories across a horrified nation.

George was not one of those eaten. But it would have only been a matter of time. This dreamer and schemer was found dead and half-frozen on his bed. Some 165 years later, history still recoils in horror at George’s last name, Donner. His notorious name is indelibly etched in the history of the Old West. The bizarre story of the Donner Party is a sobering reminder of what can happen when people opt for the shortcut. The promise of a faster and easier way often leads to long delays. Bestselling author Orrin Woodward makes a lot of sense when he says this: “There are many shortcuts to failure, but no shortcuts to true success.”

Proverbs 14:12 put it this way, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”