Please know this. YOU are important to me!

“There is a destiny that makes us brothers. None goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.” Those words from the classic poem, “A Creed,” by Edwin Markham profoundly impacted the trajectory of my life. 

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather in humility value others above yourselves” (Phil. 2:3 NIV).

The Right Values: Truth, Drew, and Markham

Edwin Markham was born in 1852, a year after a woman named Isabella, “Sojourner Truth,” addressed a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio (1851) and asked the compelling question, “Ain’t I a woman?” The year Markham died, 1940, Dr. Charles Drew published his doctoral dissertation on banked blood, leading to his establishment of the first blood bank.

It is worthy of note, in my view, that Edwin Markham’s life was bookended by these two events in the history of our nation. The words, his words, that I cited above, became indelibly etched in my psyche in my mid-twenties. I took them to mean I could live my life selfishly and be a self-promoter, always asking in matters with others, “What’s in it for me?” Or I could be humble and value others above myself.

Self-help books are among the top-selling books on Amazon today. They rank higher than books on religion and spirituality, politics, and even cookbooks. Only biographies and memoirs rank higher. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve oneself so long as we remember to love our neighbors as much as we do ourselves (Mk. 12:31).

Sojourner Truth, a runaway slave, and an itinerant preacher, was a woman who devoted her life to trying to improve the lot of women and all humanity. Dr. Charles Drew was an African American physician whose work in the 1940s changed the world and made life better for all by laying the foundation for the creation of modern blood banking. Edwin Markham was a white school principal in Oakland, California, and a writer with a social conscious whose words have made an impact for good in the earth. 

Truth, who said God told her to journey through the land and teach the truth, Drew, who nurtured a desire to improve the quality of medical care for all, and Markham who taught us that we help ourselves by helping others, had the right values. Every leader ought to have the right values. Everybody should have the right values. And that means, as God’s word teaches, valuing others above yourself! No matter how important any of us may think we are now, we would do well to remember this:

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages…and have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? … I’ve borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”  –Sojourner Truth, 1851