Always be willing to serve

The original Children’s Defense Fund logo came from a drawing I saw in a gallery window during a walk through Cambridge, Massachusetts, where CDF had its beginning.

The artwork was by 5-year-old Maria Coté and shows a bright sun shining on a tiny boat adrift on a very wide sea. Above the boat in Maria’s handwriting is the ancient fisherman’s prayer: “Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide, and my boat is so small.”

In 1974, when CDF completed its first report, I asked permission from Maria’s mother to use the drawing on the cover. A few years later, after someone suggested CDF ought to have a logo, I looked at Maria’s drawing hanging above my desk and realized it reflected the Children’s Defense Fund mission more truthfully than any abstract piece prepared by the graphic arts firm we’d consulted ever could.

Maria’s mother agreed to our trademarking her daughter’s piece.

After 40 years, this column will be the last in the weekly Child Watch series. Today is not yet the conclusion to the reasons this column began, nor to the need to stay vigilant.

The call still remains for faithful readers who are willing to stand for children every single day; ready to do their part to ensure every child a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start, and a moral start in life; and determined to build the bigger boat with stronger oars that will finally leave no child behind.

I share one more time the following grateful prayer for every servant-leader carrying on this good work.

Lord I cannot preach like Martin Luther King Jr. or turn a poetic phrase like Maya Angelou and Robert Frost, but I care and am willing to serve.

I do not have Harriet Tubman’s courage, or Eleanor Roosevelt’s and Wilma Mankiller’s political skills, but I care and am willing to serve.

I cannot sing like Marian Anderson or Fannie Lou Hamer or organize like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, but I care and am willing to serve.

I am not holy like Archbishop Tutu, forgiving like Nelson Mandela, or disciplined like Mahatma Gandhi, but I care and am willing to serve.

I am not brilliant like Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or as eloquent as Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington, but I care and am willing to serve.

I have not Mother Teresa’s saintliness, the Dalai Lama’s or Dorothy Day’s love, or Cesar Chavez’s gentle tough spirit, but I care and am willing to serve.

My mind and body are not so swift as in youth and my energy comes in spurts, but I care and am willing to serve.

I’m so young nobody will listen, I feel invisible and hopeless and I’m not sure what to say or do, but I care and am willing to serve.

God, use me as You will today and tomorrow to help build a nation and world where every child is valued and protected, where everyone feels welcome and justly treated and no child is left behind.

Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund.

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