Today is September 23 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you remind yourself that the world needs people who have come alive?”
People who navigate the chaos like Howard Thurman understand that the world needs people who come alive. Thurman wrote “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Thurman was an influential African-American author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader.
As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century.
Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Howard Thurman was born in 1899 in Florida and spent most of his childhood in Daytona, Florida, where his family lived in Waycross, one of Daytona's three all-black communities.
He was profoundly influenced by his maternal grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who had been enslaved on a plantation in Madison County, Florida. Nancy Ambrose and Thurman's mother, Alice, were members of Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Waycross and were women of deep Christian faith. Thurman's father, Saul Thurman, died of pneumonia when Howard Thurman was seven years old.
After completing eighth grade, Thurman attended the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville. One hundred miles from Daytona, it was one of only three high schools for African Americans in Florida at the time.
Thurman would eventually go on to serve as dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University from 1932 to 1944 and as dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965. In 1944, he co-founded, along with Alfred Fisk, the first major interracial, interdenominational church in the United States.
How often do you remind yourself that the world needs people who have come alive?