I was 17 years old when I discovered Gandhi. I had just graduated from High School and was spending the summer before I went to college working as the assistant head counselor at a religious summer camp in central Ohio. One of our international exchange staff was from Brussels, and he had a tattoo on his back, between his shoulder blades. It was the COOLEST tattoo I’d ever seen. Okay, to be fair, it was one of the only tattoos I’d ever seen…you know, growing up like I did, we didn’t have a chance to see many of those. It was in Hindi, so I didn’t know what it said, but I knew that I LOVED IT.

So one day, at the pool, I got up the nerve to ask him what it said [remember in my mind he was MUCH cooler than me], and he responded that it was a quote from Gandhi — “It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

I loved it even more.

I’d grown up in a family that took the words of Jesus very literally when he said “whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” I was as at home in a mobile kitchen at a disaster site, or in a homeless shelter, as I was in my own home, so this Gandhi guy’s words rang true and settled into my heart, along with William Booth’s charge to his son, upon learning of the homeless in London, to DO SOMETHING.

The words of Gandhi, of Jesus, of William Booth settled into my mind and screamed in my ears as I tried to figure out ‘what I wanted to be when I grew up.’ In the culture of the church I grew up in, there was a HUGE emphasis placed on being “called by the Lord” to do something for God, something to further the religion. So, with Gandhi, Jesus, and William Booth whispering in my bones, I became a minister. Clearly, I’m not in full time ministry any more, and when I left, I had to come to grips with this idea of “being called” and the perception that I’d abandoned my call.

The longer I thought about it though, the more I realized that what the prophets were whispering in my ear, this call to DO SOMETHING, wasn’t necessarily a call to save their souls, but to meet them in the here and now, to do something in THIS MOMENT, in my everyday life. To DO SOMETHING…. the teachings of Gandhi, Jesus, William Booth, and others still call to me in my everyday life – in big and small ways, we can all heed their words.