Do you remember Billy Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s brother? In Jimmy Carter’s book, “An Hour Before Daylight,” Carter says that when his campaign for president began in 1976 Billy seemed to enjoy entering the spotlight as a somewhat shocking character whose deliberately outrageous statements were frequently quoted as serious comments. Once during the campaign when a reporter remarked that Billy was a little odd, he replied that his mama, Miss Lillian, had been a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India, one of his sisters went around the world as a holy-roller preacher, and his brother thought he was going to be president of the United States. “Which one of our family do you think is normal?” he quipped.
Of course, despite having a somewhat unconventional family, Jimmy Carter won the presidency in that election cycle, and he later enjoyed sharing a story about his inauguration day. It seems that as the formal inaugural ceremony concluded and his family left the reviewing stand to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, a reporter approached Miss Lillian and asked: “Miss Lillian, aren’t you proud of your son?” She tartly replied, “Which one?”
Sometime later, when Billy’s new beer business had planned its ribbon cutting ceremony, Lillian was asked if she intended to attend. She quickly responded, “I attended Jimmy’s inauguration didn’t I?”
Isn’t there something marvelous about Miss Lillian’s almost fierce defense of all her children? She refused to admit to distinctions between her sons that would elevate one’s significance to her. She loved them both – equally.
Of course, as John Buchanan noted, when he commented on this years later, the contrast between the two sons was clear to everyone and made great news copy. Jimmy was bright, focused, proper, an Annapolis graduate, nuclear submarine officer, successful farmer, governor, and now president of the United States. Brother Billy, on the other hand, was hard drinking, irreverent, seemingly unfocused, not-so-proper, and rather eccentric.
But those sorts of distinctions, which the world is quick to note, and which are frequently accompanied by judgments of worth, have no meaning at all to a mother who cares for each son equally and deeply, and whose hearts beats with love for both. Her love does not take into account any of the criteria and categories the world uses in its assessments of value.
We dare to hope that God loves like that. We cling to the belief that there is such an amazing grace in the great heart of God that it overlooks those marks of distinction the world is all too quick to see.
Of course, if we were to love as God loved, the world might look different to us. There would be no young or old, no rich or poor, no male or female, we would simply honor one another equally as God’s children. We would love indiscriminately without crediting the external distinguishing characteristics that currently divide us. We could be asked if we were proud of someone supposed to be nearest and dearest to us, and reply with perfect sincerity, “Which one?”