My favourite American President

"There is a hidden chapter of Jimmy Carter's life that no history textbook has ever done full justice to, and once you understand it, you will see the 39th President of the United States in an entirely different light. 

When Jimmy and Rosalynn returned home to Plains, Georgia in January of 1981 after losing the White House to Ronald Reagan, they did something that quietly revealed everything about who they were. Plains Baptist Church, the congregation they had belonged to their entire lives, had spent years refusing to admit Black members. A group of 29 members had broken away and founded Maranatha Baptist Church on a foundation of racial integration, and without a moment's hesitation, the Carters walked through those doors on their very first Sunday back in town and never looked back.

Jimmy Carter then did something that no former president in American history had ever done. He began teaching Sunday school every other week to whoever showed up, and for the next four decades he never stopped. Word got out slowly at first, and then all at once, and what followed was one of the most unexpected pilgrimages in modern American life. People began lining up outside that little red brick church as early as five thirty in the morning just to get a seat. Visitors came from Japan, from Europe, from every corner of the United States, clutching Bibles and cameras, waiting in the Georgia heat and humidity for a chance to sit in a Sunday school class taught by a man who had once commanded the most powerful military on earth. 

On the Sunday after Carter revealed his brain cancer diagnosis in 2015, roughly 800 visitors descended on tiny Plains, and when the sanctuary filled to its limit of around 460 people, Carter walked down the street to the old Plains High School and taught a second full lesson that same morning because he refused to let anyone who had traveled that far go home empty-handed. He was 90 years old and fighting cancer. Meanwhile, Rosalynn was cleaning the church bathrooms every week, and Jimmy was mowing the lawn and fixing broken doors with a hammer after evening services. 

He personally carved the wooden cross that hung in the sanctuary, crafted the collection trays used during worship, and built a small children's table that still sits in the church preschool room to this day. 

Every single lesson ended the same way, with Carter challenging everyone in the room to go out that week and perform one quiet act of kindness for someone else, whether calling a lonely friend, mowing a neighbor's lawn, or baking a cake for someone in need, because he believed with every fiber of his being that small gestures of love were more powerful than anything a president could sign into law. 

He taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist for nearly four decades and never once made it feel like anything other than the most natural thing in the world. That is who Jimmy Carter was when nobody was watching. And it is absolutely extraordinary.

Adapted from Golden glimmers of History