Living in 3D

Six months into the pandemic, after countless video calls and “can you hear me’s? ”, me and my team at work finally met again in “real-life”. It was a surreal feeling, seeing my closest colleague arriving on the bicycle. I had been seeing her every day for months on a large computer screen. Yet, when she arrived it felt almost as if this 2D-face morphed into something three-dimensional. Something alive.

In his sermon at the New Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago, Martin Luther King Jr. talked also about three dimensions - three dimensions that make a life complete life.

What are these three dimensions?

The three dimensions of a complete life: Length, Breadth and Height

1. Length

The first dimension is the length of life. This dimension is concerned with ourselves, with our own well-being.

Self-Acceptance

For some, that might sound surprising. Isn’t it normally seen as Christian to turn someone the other cheek when hit in the face?
Well, according to MLK this is not what this is about.

Before you can love other selves adequately, you’ve got to love your own self properly.

In fact, we are not capable of being able to “give love” if we are not loving ourselves properly first.

And you know what loving yourself also means? It means that you’ve got to accept yourself. So many people are busy trying to be somebody else. God gave all of us something significant.

Martin Luther King goes on to give an example of his own life. How as a sociology major at university he got discouraged in a statistics class: when a fellow student had such a sharp mind that he was able to do the homework in an hour. Just like that.

Whereas Martin labored and labored, but wouldn’t be able to do it in the same time.

And I had to say to myself, “Now, he may be able to do it in an hour, but it takes me two or three hours to do it.” I was not willing to accept myself. I was not willing to accept my tools and my limitations.

Doing what we are called to do

When self-acceptance is one side of the coin, then the other side is to uncover our life’s work – what we are uniquely called out to do.

After accepting ourselves and our tools, we must discover what we are called to do. And once we discover it, we should set out to do it with all of the strength and all of the power that we have in our systems. […] We should set out to do that work so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

This is amazing. We are not just called out to do what we are supposed to do, but we are supposed to do it so well that “the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better”.

Even if you are shoe shiner. Then get a PhD in shoe-shining.

What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

Some of you might say. Well, this is all good and fine. But I don’t want to be a shoe-shiner. And maybe the shoe-shiner actually doesn’t want to be a shoe-shiner. And I do agree. It can be read discouraging when MLK says: Now this does not mean that everybody will do the so-called big, recognized things of life. Very few people will rise to the heights of genius in the arts and the sciences. Very few collectively will rise to certain professions. Most of us will have to be content to work in the fields and in the factories and on the streets.

But it is in the addition the he then makes: “But we must see the dignity of all labor.”

Just because a shoe-shiner is a shoe-shiner doesn’t mean he hasn’t achieved “enough” in life. If he dedicates himself to this whole-heartedly, he has achieved everything. And even if he wants to become an entrepreneur and found a shoe-shining factory some day, he will be more content to say: This is my lot right now and I simply fall in love with what I’m doing. But it’s not the end.

2. Breadth

Just like that video image of my colleague wouldn’t have been complete in just one dimension, there is also another dimension to life.

If you have successfully fallen in love (well, or simply found a deep satisfaction with yourself as a person) and uncovered a mission (or an idea of that) for your own life, Martin Luther King reminds us of the service for others.

David Brooks calls this the Second Mountain of Life.

Oh, there will be a day, the question won’t be, “How many awards did you get in life?” Not that day.
It won’t be, “How popular were you in your social setting?”
That won’t be the question that day.
It will not ask how many degrees you’ve been able to get. The question that day will not be concerned with whether you are a “Ph.D.” or a “no D.” […]
The question that day will not be, “How beautiful is your house?”
The question that day will not be, “How much money did you accumulate? How much did you have in stocks and bonds?”
The question that day will not be, “What kind of automobile did you have?”

On that day the question will be, “What did you do for others?”

When we are content with ourselves and doing what we do whole-heartedly, we need to serve others (actually I would say: we would want to).

3. Height

Here we are at the last dimension. This is my colleague arriving with a smile on that sunny Sunday afternoon. In full 3D. Wind in her hair.

There are those who become so involved in looking at the man-made lights of the city that they unconsciously forget to rise up and look at that great cosmic light and think about it — that gets up in the eastern horizon every morning and moves across the sky with a kind of symphony of motion and paints its technicolor across the blue — a light that man can never make.
They become so involved in looking at the skyscraping buildings of the Loop of Chicago or Empire State Building of New York that they unconsciously forget to think about the gigantic mountains that kiss the skies as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blue — something that man could never make.
They become so busy thinking about radar and their television that they unconsciously forget to think about the stars that bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity, those stars that appear to be shiny, silvery pins sticking in the magnificent blue pincushion.

For Martin Luther King, this last dimension is a dedication to something larger than yourself and others. He calls it God, but I’m sure you can call it the Universe. Nature. Spirit. Energy. Whatever works for you. It’s an appreciation of life. Of trust. Of gratitude.

He illustrates this idea with a great example from an 72-year old woman called Sister Pollard. Every day she would walk to and from work during the bus boycott in Montgomery. Every day, her bus driver passes. But one day he stops and asks: “Well, aren’t you tired?” And she replies: “Yes, my feet is tired, but my soul is rested.“

Main Takeaways

This was a very quick introduction into the main ideas of Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon “The 3 Dimensions of a Complete Life”.

To re-cap:

Length of Life - Appreciate yourself, find your calling and commit to that (This is about you)
Breadth of Life - Be of service to others (This is about others)
Height of Life - Orient yourself in something “bigger than human” (This is beyond you and others)

I hope you enjoyed this article. Let me close with a final quote:

If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill,
Be a scrub in the valley.
But be the best little scrub on the side of the hill,
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.
If you can’t be a highway just be a trailI
f you can’t be the sun be a star;
It isn’t by size that you win or fail —Be the best of whatever you are.

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