I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Clarence Jones the speechwriter for Marin Luther King speak a few years ago.  I have pondered some of his thoughts and wanted to share them.

“There is nothing greater than freedom and the struggle for freedom is important for all of us.”

“The most tragic bigotry is silence – therefore we must speak and write the truth, for the truth will set us free.”

“Where is the commitment in our society to real truth in the written word?  To real morality in the written word?  To real integrity in the written word?”

“We must never become a nation of onlookers.  Speak up and act for the freedom of all man, who are created equal in the site of God.”

As a world traveler and requested speaker, Dr. Jones is often asked about race relations in America. He shared that in spite of all the issues we face in America, we still live in the greatest country in the world.    As a nation we are working to create equality among our people.  We strive to value human lives, no matter the color of the skin.  He made me proud to be an American but also challenged me to think about what part I can have in seeing people as “Created in the Image of God”.

Let me introduce you to another man who is known worldwide for his fight for  freedom to write about the truth, his journey and his impact on a nation and on the world.   His written materials described by others as “Mightier than a Bullet”, “Bolder by the day”, “Racing against Time”, “Waiting for a Great Outcry”, and “Words as Weapons”.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and outspoken writer and critic of the Soviet Union, especially its totalitarianism and oppression of its people.  He helped to raise global awareness of Russia’s gulag forced labor camp system of which he was imprisoned for many years. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.  After his first publication he continued to write about freedom in a Cancer Ward 1914.  In 1970 he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature.  He became known worldwide for the ethical force with which he had pursued freedom of speech and the written word. Afraid to go to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize for fear that he wouldn’t be allowed to reenter; he did not go to the ceremony.

Finally, as a free man he wrote about being given the Nobel Prize for literature. Listen to his words carefully as it is full of wisdom and demonstrates his deep faith in God.

“All my life I had been tortured by the impossibility of speaking the truth aloud. My whole life had been spent hacking my way to an open space where I could tell the truth in public. Now, at last, I was free, as I had never been before, no axe was poised above my head, and dozens of microphones belonging to the world’s most important press agencies were held out toward my lips.  Say something!  It would indeed be unnatural not to say something!  Now I could make the weightiest pronouncements, and they would be carried far and wide, to the ends of the earth…  But inside of me something had snapped.  Perhaps because I had been transplanted so quickly that I hadn’t even had time to decide how I felt about it, let alone to prepare a speech.  That was part of it. But there was something more.  I suddenly felt that I would demean myself if I indulged in abuse from a distance, if I spoke out where everyone speaks out, where speaking out is permitted. My words came out of their own accord:

“I said quite enough while I was in the Soviet Union. Now I shall be silent for a while…”

His silence reminds me of an ancient text  “there is a time to be silent and a time to speak”.  I think of Jesus when he was writing in the dust with his finger while the Pharisees were calling down judgement on a women caught in sin. I have often wondered what He was really doing.  May I suggest that He may have simply been listening for His Father’s voice and asking, “What shall we say to this crowd and to this dear woman?”.   His response is still being heard around the world today.

Great lessons for all of us that have the freedom to speak and write in this great United States of America wouldn’t you agree?

Lord help me to hold my tongue at the appropriate time and yet speak up for Truth without shame at the appropriate time.  Truth is worth sharing.