"You Make Me Want To Be a Better Man"

Virtue and genuine graces in themselves speak what no words can utter.

 –Shakespeare

From As Good As It Gets (1997, James L. Brooks, Director) 

MELVIN (Jack Nicholson):  Okay, I got a real great compliment for you and it's true.

CAROL (Helen Hunt):  I am so afraid you're about to say something awful ...

MELVIN:  Don't be pessimistic. It's not your style…

MELVIN:  You make me want to be a better man

I think Melvin has hit upon something here that is critical in how we go about taking our stands for the kind of world we wish to create, the legacies we wish to leave our children and grandchildren. I believe that our lives--our work, our behavior, our words, and our attitudes--should motivate people to want to be better human beings.

Ask yourself, is there something about me that causes people to want to behave or cease behaving in a specific manner? Does the way I go about living my life, doing my work, raising my children, conversing with others, inspire people? When they walk away from having been with me do they, however quietly or subtly, find themselves asking bigger and better questions about, say, the meaning of life and love, faith and commitment, or goodness and virtue: not simply because of what I had said but because of who I am?

What is it that my presence, your presence, inspires in people? When I consider the effect I have on people in my world, what is it that I appear to be giving them permission to do or strive toward or say… and is it “better”? And, most importantly, toward what and Whom are my words, actions, and attitudes, demonstrably pointing people?

Jesus said that when people saw Him, they were seeing the Father. Jesus came to show us what God was like. From His life, His way of being in the world, we see that God is love; that He isn’t all about condemning the world but, rather, forgiving and saving it; and that He is establishing a realm bright with truth, filled with love, goodness, and beauty, and with justice for all people. Of course when those who hate the good for being good saw Jesus they were motivated to pick up stones and throw them at Him. But true seekers, honest seekers of God, or at least of Truth and Goodness, heard Him gladly and strove to be able to touch or be touched by Him.

Acknowledging all the limitations and frailties of our mortality, and the fact that, unlike Christ, we are not God walking on the earth, should there not be something about us where, when people are in our presence, they are seeing something of what God is like, what living in His realm is like? Shouldn’t there be flashes of the brightness of His truth emanating from our lives and words? Shouldn’t there be a captivating sense of His love for the world without tint of condemnation? Shouldn’t people be able to look at us, listen to us, and sense that, “There is something about his love, her goodness, the beauty of how they are living, that makes me want to discover the Source of it all, to enquire about their God,” or at the very least, “to want to be a better man”? Okay. Some will want to throw stones, but you get my point.

Have you ever known someone who made you want to be a better person? I have. Simply by being in this person’s presence a new world filled with greater possibilities immediately opened before me. And I didn’t merely note these possibilities for growth and expansion as a human being, but was inspired to realize them in my day-to-day life. This is the kind of man I wish to become, the kind of people I think we all aspire to be: an individual whose character and way of being inspires others toward a deeper understanding of Truth, Goodness, Beauty — and of God Himself.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2013