Making your mark
By The Revd David BurgessOne thing I don’t know about this village is whether there are any old Etonians or Harrovians living here. If there are they might be able to confirm the truth of the story I heard the other day.
On wood panelling and desks in both these two famous public schools are signs of where pupils have carved their name or their initials before they leave – literally, to make their mark. This tradition, it’s said, goes back centuries. Amongst the names, almost all roughly scratched in block capitals, two stand out; one in each school. The letters of both are carefully and ornately fashioned in manuscript handwriting.
The name in Eton is ‘Shelley’; that in Harrow is ‘Byron’. These two contemporaries, destined to be giants in society, never met as boys as far as we know, but both of them started life as they meant to go on – making their mark in a distinctive way.
To make your mark is possibly the ambition of everyone who has the slightest drive or enthusiasm about them; the modern version of this is often phrased, “I want to make a difference”. We worry about what resources we have within ourselves and around about to help us as we try to make our mark. We wonder what society, or posterity, or our descendants, will make of us.
I have to admit there have been a couple of times over the last month or two when I’ve wondered whether my legacy here, say, 20 or 30 years from now, will be: “Oh, yes; that was the Vicar who had a stroke”. My recovery time has generally been very positive, but occasionally worrying trains of thought do slip into your mind. Ninety-nine percent of the time I’m confident that, for better or worse, that won’t be the case!
When it comes to making your mark, however, one name in history stands out; and the point here is that he did so with only the most meagre of resources. The words of Martin Luther King – another who made his mark in unconventional ways – bear testimony to this.
“A voice out of Bethlehem two thousand years ago said that all men are equal… Jesus of Nazareth wrote no books; he owned no property to endow him with influence. He had no friends in the courts of the powerful. But he changed the course of mankind with only the poor and the despised.”
History will judge all of us; we frequently won’t know about our legacy for a good many years, and sometimes never at all. But, as in every aspect of our lives, Jesus has gone before us. Making your mark in an appropriate way in God’s service and for the benefit of others can only be a good thing; and whatever time, place or society you live in, this truth is eternal, and something that anyone can aspire to.