Dr. Benjamin Mays (an influential theologian and an outspoken advocate for racial equality) was President of Morehouse College in 1944 when a gifted 15-year-old student was admitted to the school. The young boy planned to study medicine and law, but under Dr. Mays’ mentoring, he changed his mind and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the ministry. At the age of 19, the gifted student graduated from Morehouse and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. In 1950 he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. He served as president of his senior class (predominately white) at Crozer and also received a prestigious fellowship which enabled him to enroll in graduate study at Boston University. He completed his studies at Boston in 1953, and received his doctorate in systematic theology in 1955 at the age of 26! That student was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
When the gifted 15-year-old Martin Luther King enrolled in Morehouse College, I was a one year old, just beginning to walk and talk! Twenty-six years later in 1970 (just twenty years after Dr. King’s graduation) I, too, graduated from Crozer Seminary. Dr. King was not the Commencement speaker for my graduating class, though he might have been had he not been gunned down in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was 39 years old then, and I was 25!
King was arrested more than twenty times (I have never been arrested for any cause). He was assaulted four times. He received five honorary degrees. He was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1963. At the age of 35 he became the youngest recipient to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Benjamin Mays delivered Martin Luther King’s eulogy, later known as “No Man is Ahead of His Time.” “If Jesus was called to preach the Gospel to the poor, Martin Luther was called to give dignity to the common man. If a prophet is one who interprets in clear and intelligible language the will of God, Martin Luther King, Jr fits that designation. If a prophet is one who does not seek popular causes to espouse, but rather the causes he thinks are right, Martin Luther qualified on that score. No! He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else’s time. Jesus had to respond to the call of God in the first century A.D., and not in the 20th century. He had but one life to live. He couldn’t wait.”
My morning pondering: No! I am not ahead of my time, nor behind. No man is ahead or behind his time. Every man [woman] is within his or her star. Each must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else’s time.
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