The Cost of Changing the World

I was watching the movie, "Invictus" with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon the other day. The movie is based on the the true events of Nelson Mandela who became the President of South Africa after spending 27 years in jail.

So many things came to my mind while I was watching this movie. I saw Mandela, with his compassion and commitment to something bigger than himself, his family, race or his people. I saw him being committed to the human spirit.

At the end of the movie, I was left with a question that I was embarrassed to answer. I saw that Nelson Mandela had spent 27 years in jail. He had endured the loss of absolutely everything you could remove from a human being. His family, his freedom, and his legacy. All of these had been removed from him. Yet, they could not remove his spirit without his permission.

That's when I asked myself a question. If some Divine being approached me and told me that I could cure the evils of the world, but the cost of doing so was to spend 27 years away in prison like Mandela, would I do it? If I would agree to giving up 27 years of my life in a prison away from my daughter, family and friends, many of the evils of the world would be cured.

And I hung my head in shame because I valued my life more than the causes of the world which need cures. We all say we want to change the world, and maybe some of us do. Yet, fewer people still are willing to pay the cost to do so because the cost is ever so great. In fact, it is more than most of us are willing to pay. It's easy to be comfortable and exist inside of the nice bubble that we have been afforded in North America. But that won't make a difference in the world.

Living a legacy like Nelson Madela, (amongst many others) did. And the cost of that is seemingly too high for us to bear...