Happy 100th Birthday to Jimmy Carter, an amazing milestone for one of the most inspiring Americans with whom we could ever share the planet. As we do this day – what remarkable longevity for a cherished soul with a conscience that can move mountains. There’s probably a lesson in their somewhere. I’ll share another one I heard from him firsthand:
On a weekend visit to my in-laws in South Georgia, we rounded out the family time with something we had always heard about but never done: attending a Sunday School class taught by an ex-president.
It was a beautiful morning, and we made the eight-mile drive from my in-laws’ farm to Plains and the Maranatha Baptist Church, where Jimmy Carter holds forth about one Sunday morning a month. An excellent Squeeze song came on just as we entered town and the speed limit dipped to 35. A couple of blocks past the main drag, Maranatha sits in a pecan orchard just off Highway 45. On a Sunday morning when Carter is in town, there are far more cars than the small country church would normally boast. You can’t miss it.
No one seems too put out by the local deputies parked near the road nor the Secret Service folks at the church entrance—very civilized, only one metal-detector wand. Firm, but fair. We think we’re early, but as we walk up to and enter the back doors, the former president is already talking, asking the crowd of maybe 175 to tell him where they are from—and what religious denominations they profess. We dodge a videographer in back and take up an empty pew a couple of rows further up. The church is nearly full, but there is room.
He’s at the front but not in the pulpit, conversing with the crowd like it’s his natural state. And it must be. The former president is in his 80s and, from the back of the room, both looks it and doesn’t. In his jacket and bolo tie he is at ease and in command. He asks how many of the assembled have traveled to Cuba: one. Then, how many would like to: hands go up all over the room. He tells us that he and Rosalyn have just returned from there and what a mistake it was for the U.S. to have isolated Cuba via embargo all these years. While there, he met with prisoners, wives and mothers of Cubans held in the U.S., as well as members of the thriving Cuban-Jewish community in Havana—which, he reported, is in need of a rabbi. He also met with Raul and with Fidel, who, he reports, is recovering from his intestinal problems quite well. Candid, humble and witty, Carter shares these details not like they are in confidence or evidence of his importance, but simply as one might news of people one had visited while away.
With a word, but little more, of his upcoming trip to North Korea, he seems to have fulfilled the requirement of answering for himself and what he’s been up to, and moves toward the lectern down front and his lesson.
Image: Nelson Mandela, left, and former President Jimmy Carter, right, hold HIV-positive babies at the Zola Clinic in Soweto in March 2002. ILLUSTRATION: Associated Press