It’s not often that Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and the Presidential Inauguration occur on the same day! MLK Day is the third Monday in January since President Reagan signed the bill making it a federal holiday in 1983. The Presidential Inauguration occurs on January 20 and is a Monday in an election year, once every 28 years. Until now, only President Clinton was inaugurated on MLK Day (1997), and the next confluence will be 2053.

Is there a so what? I don’t know…

But let’s focus on MLK Day for a minute. Four years ago I quoted Rodney Stevens, a black writer and life coach born and raised in South Carolina. His comments offer hope and perspective and remind us that Martin Luther King, Jr., and others made a difference. Here’s some of what he wrote:

Many of the authors, commentators and journalists who spend all their energy thinking and talking about race today fail to acknowledge how much has improved with regard to race in this country. There are countless successful black Americans today—doctors and lawyers, entrepreneurs and academics, journalists and artists, compassionate politicians and famous Hollywood actors. Their numbers will keep growing as long as we remember six things:

• First, every life mat­ters. Mine is not one cell more or less valu­able than any­one else’s. That this idea has to be de­bated or de­fended is lu­nacy.
• Sec­ond, racism still ex­ists but it is no longer sys­temic. Those who claim that racism is every­where to­day are delu­sional.
• Third, we tend to think too highly of our in­di­vid­u­al­ity. My color, weight, sex and sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion are four of the least in­ter­est­ing things about me. I am a South­erner and love South­ern food. Now that is in­ter­est­ing.
• Fourth, po­lice­men have to be held ac­count­able for their ac­tions, as is be­ing done more and more.
• Fifth, do what law en­force­ment of­fi­cers ask you to do. Ob­vi­ously that won’t solve every prob­lem be­cause po­lice­men are hu­mans, not an­gels. But that’s part of life. Sim­ply do­ing what the peo­ple in blue ask you to do would dras­ti­cally re­duce need­less con­fronta­tions, in­juries and deaths.
• Sixth, if you must talk about race, be gra­cious and re­spect­ful. Dis­cus­sions about it shouldn’t be an­tag­o­nis­tic—one’s race isn’t a choice, af­ter all—but for some rea­son many pop­u­lar fig­ures in­sist on mak­ing the sub­ject as un­pleas­ant as pos­si­ble. – Rodney Stevens, Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2020

Now into this environment on this day we inaugurate a new President. Some Americans are ecstatic; others, despondent. I hope President Trump will, by words and actions, promote unity – Americans of all kinds working together to make their lives and others’ lives better.

But more importantly, no matter what the President does, I pray that we will do our part. I can’t improve on what Seth Godin wrote on MLK Day in 2020:

Along the way, we’ve been sold on the idea that difficult tasks ought to be left to heroes, often from somewhere far away or from long ago. That it’s up to them, whoever ‘them’ is.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

But it’s not bending itself. And it’s not waiting for someone from away to bend it either.

It’s on us. Even when it doesn’t work (yet). Even when it’s difficult. Even when it’s inconvenient.

Our culture is the result of a trillion tiny acts, taken by billions of people, every day. Each of them can seem insignificant, but all of them add up, one way or the other, to the change we each live through.

Sometimes it takes a hero like Dr. King to wake us up and remind us of how much power we actually have.

And now it’s our turn. It always has been. – Seth Godin

As I reminded us yesterday,

And let our people also learn to maintain good works, to meet urgent needs, that they may not be unfruitful. (Titus 3.14, NKJV)