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By Kayla McClurg When I reflect on the life and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr., one thing I’m always struck by is the obvious: he didn’t begin where he ended up. He didn’t start out as a visionary leader, filled with passion and wisdom and generating applause. No, King - like all bold servants of a cause greater than their own lives - slowly, layer by layer, became what God seems to have had in mind for him to become. That he would one day be considered ‘the leader of the civil rights movement’ wasn’t seen ahead of time and only began to grow clear as he accepted the guidance of the community and took the personal risks that came with following the mystery. I heard a psychologist on a talk show suggest an exercise for when we’re dissatisfied but don’t know what we want next of our lives. He said we should ask ourselves again and again, “What do I want?” and answer with whatever immediately comes to mind. He says it’s more difficult than we might think because we tend to criticize our first responses as being shallow or inappropriate. For example, we think we shouldn’t answer “a new car,” even though that’s what we think we want. He suggests that maybe we should accept our first response, no matter how it feels, and then ask, “Once I have a new car, what do I want?” Maybe we’ll say a job that pays more so we can afford having a new car. And then again we ask, “With a job that pays more, what do I want?” Maybe more challenge and the opportunity to be a leader. “And why do I want to be a leader?” I want to make my own decisions. “And once I have the freedom to make my own decisions, what do I want?” Eventually, we get beneath the surface and begin to touch on our real motives and our real desires. We begin to discover that having a new car actually is about our desire for greater creativity and personal power. I don’t know how well the exercise works in general, but I do know that underneath each layer of who we think we are is another question and another answer about who we really are and what we really are here for. Martin Luther King, Jr. pretty much knew what he wanted from his life. He wanted to be a preacher in a local church, serving a small flock of parishioners and each week bringing them sermons that were intelligent and philosophical and basically safe. He had no idea, when he was reading Thoreau’s writings on civil disobedience and hearing about some folks breaking the color barrier that anything else lay beyond his comfortable life. But then Rosa Parks “sat down for what she believed,” and it opened a door for a little-known preacher - someone who didn’t have a reputation as a rabble rouser and an organizer and who wasn’t a threat to the powers of the day and who was young enough and unestablished enough to have the least to lose - to begin to deepen into the questions and the responses of his own life. Within an hour after he ‘just happened’ to attend a meeting of pastors and others discussing the idea of a city-wide bus boycott, King had been named president of the group. When he got home and told his wife Coretta what had happened, he said he knew at a gut level that he was being asked to live what he had been reading by Thoreau - that to stand by and do nothing in the face of evil was the same thing as to be a perpetrator of that evil. Twenty minutes after he told his wife, this man who had always before insisted on hours of careful preparation before preaching was standing in front of about 4,000 people and speaking extemporaneously of the challenges and opportunities that lay before them. Part of what he said was this: There comes a time when people get tired…. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired - tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. For many years we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from the patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.
King thought he just wanted to be a preacher in a church that would appreciate his carefully crafted sermons and thought-provoking ideas, where he could raise a family and be a regular person, but underneath that dream were other dreams waiting to be uncovered. Underneath was his true calling, his true name. And the entire world was changed. That’s what it means to follow Jesus - not necessarily to have our immediate desires met and all our questions answered, but to go deeper and deeper until we begin to sense that who we really are is being revealed. Maybe one of the ways we can honor Martin Luther King this year is to ask each other: What do you really want? How has God been preparing you? What are you waiting for? Kayla McClurg is on staff at The Church of the Saviour and coordinates inward/outward. The information on Martin Luther King, Jr. primarily comes from the book called King, A Biography by David Levering Lewis.
Original content by: http://www.inwardoutward.org/?p=285.
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