I’m thinking about the late poet James Dickey tonight as I reflect upon Jimmy Carter’s impact on my life.
Dickey became famous for his terrifying 1970 novel Deliverance, about four suburban weekend warriors from Atlanta (Dickey’s hometown and mine) who encounter life, death and a desperate battle for survival on a wild north Georgia river. He even played the hapless local sheriff in the movie version.
Erich Bridges
But Dickey wasn’t a novelist. He was a poet — one of the great American poets of the 20th century in my humble, English-major opinion. Carter invited Dickey to read his poem, “The Strength of Fields,” at Carter’s 1977 inauguration. I believe Dickey wrote it with Carter in mind, as his fellow Georgian approached the colossal task of leading the United States and the free world.
Imagine Carter walking the farm fields by night near his home in Plains, Ga., praying for wisdom and strength for the trials ahead. An excerpt from the poem:
Men are not where he is
Exactly now, but they are around him, around him like the strength
Of fields. The solar system floats on
Above him in town-moths.
Tell me, train-sound,
With all your long-lost grief,
what I can give.
Dear Lord of all the fields
what am I going to do?
The poem greatly inspired me at the time. I was a student at Mercer University in Atlanta with a keen sense of spiritual calling. I knew God was leading me to do something full-time to spread the gospel, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. I only knew I had to obey, wherever it might lead.
Two years later, a week after college graduation in 1979, I became a Mission Service Corps volunteer through the Southern Baptist Convention Home (now North American) Mission Board in Atlanta and took off on a nearly two-year adventure — writing feature stories about other volunteers in 40-plus states to help promote the new program.
“The Lord called me, but Jimmy Carter helped show the way.”
This experience set the course of my life as a mission worker and as a writer. If I die tonight, I’m content knowing I followed the right path. The Lord called me, but Jimmy Carter helped show the way.
Mission Service Corps was a Baptist version of the Peace Corps: Lay people, students, retirees and others gave one or two years of their lives to volunteer mission service at home and abroad, in most cases raising their own financial support.
Carter, already president, promoted Mission Service Corps, too, along with Bold Mission Thrust, the ambitious global mission expansion he helped envision with his friend, Jimmy Allen, then president of the SBC. Carter never hid his born-again, evangelical faith as a politician or as president, and back in those days he was still an enthusiastic Southern Baptist. (Fundamentalist forces only recently had launched their hostile takeover of the SBC, which led to Carter’s eventual break with the national body. But he remained a faithful member of his local church in Plains until the end of his long life and taught Sunday school there until he was too weak to leave home.)
Carter challenged the SBC to do and give far more to support mission work at home and around the world. See this video about Mission Service Corps, which leads off with Carter addressing Southern Baptists in 1977, urging them to support the vision of sending 5,000 long-term mission volunteers.
Perhaps Carter didn’t achieve all he wanted to do as president. Hopes for his leadership soared as he led the country out of the lingering morass of Watergate and Vietnam. He helped broker peace between Israel and Egypt, which is no small thing, but he ran into the harsh realities of Washington politics, the energy crunch, the Cold War and the Iran hostage crisis. I disagreed with him on some political issues, but I never questioned his commitment, his faith and his determination to give his all to others.
He continued serving the country and the world for more than 40 years after leaving office. As a churchman, a Habitat for Humanity volunteer and a passionate advocate for human rights, he showed the global community what a true Christian servant looks like. This is the kind of example we need now more than ever.
As Carter leaves this world to meet his Lord face to face, I think again of “The Strength of Fields,” which ends with these lines:
Lord, let me shake
With purpose. Wild hope can always spring
From tended strength. Everything is in that.
That and nothing but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord
Of the renewing green. That is where it all has to start:
With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
Than save every sleeping one
And night-walking one of us.
My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.
Jimmy Carter’s life belonged to the world, and he did what he could.
Erich Bridges, a Baptist journalist for more than 40 years, has covered international stories and trends in many countries. He lives in Richmond, Va.
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