Facts about presidential inaugurations you may not know

I’m writing this article on the day after our nation’s sixtieth presidential inauguration. The news continues to focus on Donald Trump’s inaugural address, his many executive orders, the presidential galas, and so on. 

Meanwhile, I found some other facts about presidential inaugurations you might not know:

• Five presidents were vice presidents who ascended to the presidency after a president’s death or resignation. Since they never won an election on their own, they never gave an inaugural address.
• William Howard Taft took the oath as our twenty-seventh president in 1909 and later administered it as chief justice of the Supreme Court to Calvin Coolidge (1925) and Herbert Hoover (1929).
• More presidents (thirty-seven) have been inaugurated in March than in January (twenty-three after this week). The Twentieth Amendment moved Inauguration Day to January 20.
• Lyndon B. Johnson was the first president to ask his wife to hold the Bible while he took the oath of office. Every president since has followed suit.
• This year’s inauguration was just the second to fall on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (the first was in 1997).
• The shortest inaugural address was shorter than the length of this article so far. George Washington’s second inaugural address ran just 135 words, about the length of two recitations of the Lord’s Prayer.

All four of the former presidents still alive attended the ceremony, as did the world’s three richest people—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—and a large number of political leaders from the US and around the world.

But when it was over, it was over.

Kite surfer rescues woman drowning at sea

By contrast, let’s consider some people who were anonymous to most of us until they did something truly newsworthy. Their actions have changed lives far beyond the act itself.

• Avery Colvert, age fourteen, started a recovery fund for victims of one of the Los Angeles wildfires. She had no idea her idea would go viral, even making Time magazine.
• Two mothers launched the “LA Lost Stuffy Project,” raising funds to buy stuffed toys and blankets for children and families impacted by the wildfires. They were recently on Good Morning America to tell their story.
• Chad Lorson is the fire chief in Hope, Kansas. In the midst of a recent blizzard, a young man with cancer needed to get to the emergency room, but an ambulance couldn’t get to them, so Lorson used his tractor to transport him to the hospital. “You do what you have to do,” he said to reporters who shared his story across the country.
• Two men in South Africa arranged a rescue mission for hundreds of miners trapped below ground without food or water. They made more than thirty round trips underground over three days, bringing up 246 living prospectors and the remains of 78 more. Their story made the Wall Street Journal.
• An Olympic kite surfer named Bruno Lobo rescued a woman who was drowning at sea. He asked her to climb onto his back while he brought her to safety. CNN picked up their story.

None of these stories affected people beyond those who were helped. But each of them made the news because such altruism touches something deep in us all.

In my view, this is another example of sociologist Peter Berger’s “signals of transcendence,” dimensions of our lives that point to realities that transcend us. We were created for relationship with God and with each other (cf. Genesis 2:18; Matthew 22:39). When we serve those in need, we fulfill our God-given mission in ways that speak to us and to others.

“They are darkened in their understanding”

What is true of physical needs is even more urgently true of spiritual needs. The Bible describes lost people this way:

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity (Ephesians 4:18–19).

It’s as though Paul was reading today’s news.

The Father sent his Son in order that “my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). Now, the Son has commissioned us to continue his earthly ministry until we have made disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19) by being his witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).

Here’s the problem: we can see physical needs much more clearly than we can see spiritual needs.

We know when people have lost everything to a wildfire, need to get to a hospital, are trapped in a cave, or are drowning at sea. But we cannot see souls. And even when the consequences of lostness are apparent, as Paul describes above, we are taught by our tolerance-based culture not to “judge” other people. To claim that they are truly lost—their souls in danger of an eternity in hell—is to be intolerant and counter-cultural in the extreme.

“It’s tough to be a Christian in our world”

This is why I need to pray every day for spiritual eyes to see spiritual realities. It’s why I need to ask God for his heart for the lost people I know and for the courage to respond with compassion and grace. It’s why I need then to model the difference Jesus makes by demonstrating that difference in sacrificial service.

Do you need to join me?

Billy Graham noted that “people often have one of three reactions to the message of the gospel.” Some deny its truth out of pride or fear of committing themselves to God. Some delay their response, assuming they will have a future opportunity that may never come. And some decide for Christ, “even though they know that being a believer may place them in a minority.”

He adds: “It’s tough to be a Christian in our world. We need to be willing to take on Jesus’ unpopularity and the scorn that is often heaped on him.”

But when we do, serving the lost because we love them as God loves us, our Father uses our compassion to alter eternities.

This is how changed people still change the world.