My mission is to be a voice to the voiceless. Many say they want to be successful, meaning attaining high positions, lofty titles, creature comforts, so forth and so on. I understand that all those things are nice to have, but greatness means a little more to me. Greatness is to love, and if you love somebody you will have no problem serving them. Everybody won't have a Mercedes in the driveway of a mansion by the lake, but anybody can serve another, therefore any and every human being can be great. A Palestinian Jew named Jesus left us with this line: "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant". So as I look at the world and life through the lens of the cross, I take my cue from from the life of Jesus. He was a humble servant who achieved greatness.Martin King mentioned in one of his best oratorical offerings, "The Drum Major Instinct", what the criteria for greatness is. "And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important, wonderful. If you want to be recognized, wonderful. If you want to be great, wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new definition of greatness."
"And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant."
So to come full circle and answer the mighty question, my mission is to love and serve some folk by putting myself last and others first, like Christ.
The greatest commandment is love. The word love appears 314 times in the bible. Jesus uttered it 51 times. We are supposed to love God and our fellow brother, so for me, love is a bittersweet war we fight as humans every day.
Trying to forgive our dear brothers and sisters for whatever wrong they do unto us, not being judgemental, and not harboring grudges and feelings of hatred is hard for us being that we are cracked vessels with crooked hearts attempting to love our crooked neighbors. But we have to familiarize ourselves with real, true, genuine, substantial love.
It's called agape love. Agape love is the love you must house inside of you for every single human being before you look to develop any type of relationship. Agape love can be represented best in one word: unconditional. No matter comes your way or whomever brings whatever your way and I don't care how and you may get or how cynical this person may be or how horrifying an act they performed, if you want to prosper in your life you better start loving and serving some folk in spite of whatever has occurred or not occurred.
And don't get me wrong, it can be very challenging to love all the time. Loving flawed people can be tough, but if you really think about it, loving folk shouldn't be that hard because you are flawed and I'm sure you love yourself, right? What is love? Love is unconditional.
