The splendid example

 The good Lord called his servant home at exactly the right time, as it turns out. Nobody ever said the Big Guy wasn't down with the timing thing, after all.

And so Jimmy Carter went to his reward over the weekend after he'd seen a full century of years, and after he'd gotten to vote in one last election, and after he'd celebrated his savior's birth one last time. Then, finally, he passed away before having to watch a man re-inhabit the White House who is the polar opposite of everything he embodied. 

A craven, grasping charlatan vs. a true follower of Christ: You'd be hard-pressed to find two men more unalike than Donald John Trump and James Earl Carter. One can only surmise Carter was thinking this, as he departed our mortal coil: "Aw, HELL, no. I'm not sticking around for THAT."

Only without the "hell", of course.

Jimmy Carter was the 44th President of the United States, a one-termer whose four years were undistinguished except for the decency of the man who served them. If he was the President on whose watch inflation spiraled into recession and Americans were taken hostage in Iran, he was also the President who got two mortal enemies -- Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat -- to agree to a fragile peace.

The Camp David Accords were the first treaty between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and they won Begin and Sadat the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. They were also the very embodiment of Jimmy Carter's core values as a human being -- a legacy far more impactful than anything he did or didn't do as our 44th President.

In the long reach of history he was not the worst president we've ever had nor was he particularly close; distance lends perspective, as it tends to do, and softens as often as it hardens accepted narratives. In the end, Jimmy Carter comes off merely as a man ill-equipped to deal with Washington's more predatory instincts, not to say its Byzantine snarl of ever-shifting alliances and motives.

And why was he ill-equipped?

Perhaps for the same reason he became America's splendid example: His decency, his faith, and his unquenchable Christian impulse to do the most good for the most people during his time on earth.

The common theme has always been he failed as a President but beat everyone as an ex-President, and even in these stubbornly partisan times you'll hardly get an argument on that. He was a man of faith who lived his faith one Habitat for Humanity home at a time, showing America what America should be with every nail driven or beam measured twice and cut once.

It goes without saying we've needed that reminder often since Jimmy Carter left the White House. And never more so than now, with felons, reprobates and out-and-out loonies about to occupy it again -- and with the full blessing of a certain species of "Christians." 

God bless you, President Carter. My your memory be eternal, and your example forever our north star.