Editorial July 13, 1987 Issue

Back to basics

William E. Moody

Last year we ran an item from The Boston Globe in our "Second Thought" column. It related what Dr. Robert Coles had discovered almost thirty years ago when he was studying the case of a young girl who had become the first black student to attend the public school in her community. After a desegregation order in 1960, Ruby Bridges, at six years of age, found herself facing an angry mob each day on her way to school. There were obscenities. There were threats that she would be killed.

Yet instead of the trauma one might expect, the girl was at peace. The reason? Her response had been to pray. She had prayed for herself and for her persecutors—and did it every day, three times each day. Dr. Coles was quoted: "We must never forget how much a child like Ruby has to teach us."^{The Boston Globe, June 4, 1985 .}

I've continued to see other articles about Dr. Coles in the press this past year. It's often noted that he has received wide praise as a teacher, and his Christian of Crisis books won a Pulitzer Prize. But there was something else in one of the recent magazine reports about this man's work. The article spoke of his efforts this way: "He had traveled thousands of miles, recorded miles of tape, and written a million words, all of which pointed right back to the Sermon on the Mount. ... He had learned that what matters most comes not from without—the circumstances of life—but from within, inside the heart of an individual man or woman or child."^{See Philip Yancy, "The Crayon Man," Christianity Today, February 6, 1987, p. 19 .}

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