This is about you.
This is about anyone and everyone who has (and truth be told, who is there who has not?) suffered a life-shattering loss.
This is about those whose heart has been broken, stepped on, crushed, and who, weeping on their knees, begin, blinded by tears, gathering up the shards of what remains.
And this is where you take those broken pieces in your hands and lift them heavenward and hear again and feel again the ‘tha-thump, tha-thump’ assuring you that in fact your heart is still beating, you are still breathing.
And, therefore, you have a purpose. A reason for being.
This is about you.
It’s about us.
And it’s about your neighbor, the stranger, people all over the world who desperately need to hear and feel that they matter.
Because of you.
The world is waiting for you.
It was on a morning like this, a February 24th morning, that the world changed forever.
Before the sunrise, before even there was a conscious thought by almost anyone, anywhere.
The world changed.
All of history awaited that moment.
All of humanity would be impacted.
All the miracles and dreams and hopes not even yet contemplated, depended on what would happen that early morning.
Two-hundred seventeen years ago today, February 24, 1807, at 4 a.m., England’s House of Commons, by an overwhelming majority of 283 to 16, abolished the slave trade. They rose to their feet, turned to fellow legislator William Wilberforce, and began to cheer while Wilberforce bowed his head and wept.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Nor is it the beginning.
Two days and 11 years previous, on February 22, 1796, Wilberforce had presented his slavery abolition bill in England’s House of Commons.
But on March 7, upon the third reading, the bill was tossed from the committee, 74-70.
“I was very much vexed and incensed,” Wilberforce wrote in his diary.
Those who could have carried the vote were Wilberforce’s friends.
They were at the opera.
Historian Kevin Belmonte (“Hero for Humanity”) writes, “it was probably the carelessness of his absent supporters that hurt most. His opponents, never ones to miss an opportunity, had given free opera tickets to some whom they knew would support his abolition bill” (p.134).
“The failure of his motion at this time,” Belmonte observes as affecting Wilberforce, “was the most devastating defeat of the entire twenty-year fight to abolish the slave trade.”
And it is here, dear readers, we will most assuredly in life at one time and again, find ourselves.
Your wife dies.
Your husband departs.
Alone or abandoned, the grave beckons, sorrow deepens.
You had so many plans and were just beginning to live out your dreams.
And the world waits.
The world waits for you.
For what you will do.
What Wilberforce would fight on to accomplish “would turn the tide of immorality in Britian.”
The pursuit of his dream to set an enslaved people free “would prove to be the hallmark of the Victorian era.”
And inspired by his example of perseverance, individual people, regardless of economic status, would look in the mirror and likewise declare themselves agents of change and likewise assume the mantle to be the solution for the ills they saw around them.
The blind were educated, animals were helped, ailing sailors received treatment, vaccination was promoted, the plight of the poor was addressed, those incarcerated in debtor’s prison were set free.
In a lecture on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., on March 23, 1995, author and social critic Dr. Os Guinness called the Wilberforce ethic “the best model we have for turning around a society and culture.”
“Wilberforce’s life is proof that a man can change his times” one person at a time, each one taking his rolled-up-sleeve responsibility.
As in the movie “Ordinary Angels” now appearing on the silver screen:
“Find your purpose. Change a life.”
Because “you’re not just worthy, you’re a miracle.”
With all your imperfections, in spite of all your brokenness, you are someone’s miracle.
So, gather up the pieces of your broken heart and be the miracle someone needs.
The world is waiting for you.
Post-script: The photo is by JM Simpson who is an award-winning photojournalist and whose beautiful photographs accompany articles by this author for a coffee table book we hope to have published soon. The photo pictured here is the proposed cover for the book.
