My Pilgrimage to Plains

(A shorter version of this story appears in the Jan. 9, 2025 edition of The Press-Sentinel. If you’re in or around Jesup, Georgia, you should definitely subscribe to that excellent newspaper!

Sometime in 2015, I woke up from a vivid dream. Though I don’t recall most of it, I remember seeing Jimmy Carter’s face with clear detail. He was warm and personable, and then I woke up. I thought it was a nice dream, and I went about my day.

At some point that day, I noticed that my friend, Gareth, had posted a picture of his family with Jimmy Carter from a recent visit to his church over in Plains. This had become an annual tradition with Gareth’s family, and it reminded me of the time my grandparents visited the same church in the late ’80s. Jimmy Carter had famously picked up the Sunday-school teacher role nearly immediately after his time in the White House. He had taught Sunday school in Washington, D.C. while serving as president, so it only made sense that he would continue his ministry in his own hometown. I thought that level of commitment was nice, and I went about my day.

A few days later, I heard a story of a commercial flight being delayed and, amid everyone’s frustration, Jimmy Carter went seat-to-seat and offered warm greetings to every single person on that plane. It was something he was prone to doing quite frequently. I thought his kindness was nice, but then I decided I needed to see it firsthand. I needed to visit Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn.

Soon after I announced these plans to my wife, a headline circulated online about Jimmy Carter’s cancer metastasizing to his brain. Pundits were saying it was only a matter of time before he was gone. That’s when I knew my visit to Jimmy Carter’s church in Plains, Georgia, had to be that weekend. It was time to gas up the car, pack up my bag and make a trip to Plains.

My wife had given birth to our daughter a few months prior, so she wouldn’t be going, and my seven-year-old son didn’t quite have the attention span for the inevitable long line at the security checkpoint. I was on my own–a textbook introvert preparing to intentionally enter a social setting that was sure to be packed. If it wasn’t for my fear that more visions of Jimmy Carter would drive me absolutely insane, I would’ve probably talked myself out of the experience altogether. Nevertheless, I plugged in the coordinates to Maranatha Baptist Church and began my last-minute trek.

Prior to driving away from my family, I had called the church to determine the process of attending the Sunday-school class that Jimmy Carter was known to teach. No one answered, but a voice message said that you’d need to swing by the church to pick up a free ticket for the sake of crowd control.

At the end of my drive–marked by four hours of contemplative silence–I pulled into an empty parking lot. No one was at Maranatha Baptist Church. I shrugged, thought the policy might have changed, and checked into the cheapest motel I could find. I remember having this irrational assurance that everything was going to work out.

I made smalltalk with the lady at the motel front desk, mentioning my exciting pilgrimage.

“Oh, were you able to get a ticket?” she responded, seeing my eyes widen with panic.

As I contemplated cancelling my stay for the night and driving back home empty-handed, a chatty man with Habesha features stepped up to the desk, drawing out his Z’s as he spoke. When he turned around from picking up his key, I smiled sheepishly.

“I’m sorry,” I interjected. “Are you from Ethiopia?”

He was, in fact, from Ethiopia, and I told him about the 11 days I spent in various parts of the country to shoot a documentary four years prior. He was eager to meet someone who had visited his homeland, and we discussed how we both traveled all the way to Plains, Georgia, to see Jimmy Carter. Like the eunuch Philip encountered in the New Testament, this Ethiopian had been forever changed by a more inclusive interpretation of the Gospel.

Hearing that I didn’t have a ticket, the Ethiopian man revealed that he happened to have an extra ticket since his friend from Atlanta couldn’t make it after all. If I could meet him in the parking lot thirty minutes prior to the recommended arrival time for Sunday school, he’d be happy to give me the extra ticket. That’s when my survival instinct envisioned all the grisly ways this man could exploit my desperation and leave me lifeless in an ice-filled bathtub. I analyzed the fact that I had no alternative for achieving my goal, I decided that my spiritual pilgrimage was worth the risk and I agreed to meet the Ethiopian man the following morning.

The next morning, I was pleased that my new friend didn’t shank me, nor did he demand some exorbitant amount for the prized ticket. We stood in line together, awaiting a thorough frisking from secret-service men. Finally, we made our way to the sanctuary, where a gruff lady parishioner prepped us for President Carter’s arrival, reminding us that “It’s pronounced ‘ROSE-uh-Lynn!’”

The night before, as I was marveling at the incredibly-coincidental meeting with my Ethiopian friend, it dawned on me that I now had about sixty seconds to speak with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter to express how their chosen lifestyle had affected me. I wrote and rewrote draft upon draft of how their interpretation of Baptist Christianity defied the norms and encouraged my own worldview until I finally got it right. As I sat in the pew by my new friend, I continually pulled this slip of paper out of my pocket to commit its contents to memory. I was here, after all, to let Jimmy Carter know his impact on my life, because how much longer past 2015 was he really expected to live?

As I pondered, our stern mistress of ceremonies grabbed our attention with a call to bow our heads. She led a heartfelt prayer for those in attendance and, when she said, “Amen,” we all opened our eyes to the image of Jimmy Carter, blinking meekly while sitting on a wooden stool in front of us.

Jimmy Carter’s lesson was a Bible story I had heard many times before, being a preacher’s kid who spent nearly half his life in a church building. The method of delivery is what stood out the most. He possessed a genuine passion and reverence for the contents of the Bible, even though it was clear that he had read it countless times over numerous decades. He related at one point the important work that an organization was doing to eradicate the guinea worm from Africa. He also tied in a warning against the various forms of xenophobia that tend to isolate us against our neighbors.

Once his lesson was over, Jimmy Carter scanned the crowd and asked if there were any women pastors among us. Finding a visitor who fit that bill, the president added that the fight for women’s rights was extremely important to him, as theirs was a demographic that continues to be unfairly mistreated across the globe. He then asked his chosen pastor to offer a closing prayer.

After the prayer came a traditional Baptist church service, and after that came “the photo op.” This was the thing that the hundreds of visitors to this tiny church had come for–a chance to meet Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Because the president was undergoing aggressive immunotherapy, we weren’t allowed to touch either of them, but we could pass our phones to the church member on duty, stand next to the couple and quickly get our pictures taken before being ushered on.

This was my moment. I kept eying my pocketed cheat sheet and mumbling my lines under my breath. By this time in my film career, I had already met a handful of big celebrities. Though I kept a respectful distance most of the time, I never found myself being particularly starstruck by any of them.

The second I handed off my phone to the photographer and took my place next to Jimmy Carter, though, my tongue became completely tied. My mind was totally wiped clean, and I had trouble remembering who exactly I was. After faking a confident smile, I took a deep breath, turned toward Jimmy Carter and said with as much sincerity as I could muster: “Thank you for- …and all that.”

That was the complete contents of my disjointed sentence. Once the words left my lips, I saw confusion on Jimmy Carter’s face. What could this ginger-bearded stranger be possibly trying to say to him? Before I could retry my lines, I felt the tug of a lengthy queue beckon for me to hurry up, I shook my head in frustration, and I walked away in shame. The very thing I had come here to do was ruined. Jimmy Carter would never find out what he or his life’s decisions meant to me.

As the years passed since my awkward faux pas, it dawned on me that Jimmy Carter didn’t need my validation. Accumulating “attaboys” wasn’t what got him up every morning to build houses with Habitat for Humanity, or to fund guinea worm eradication, or to speak to global leaders on how their laws negatively impacted their women or minority communities. He wasn’t particularly concerned with where he ranked among the nation’s best or worst presidents. The only validation he sought was the Divine type that comes after someone like him passes on from this life.

The doers of their particular worldview, like Jimmy Carter, are rare. The ones who see systemic injustice and throw their every resource at righting it–those are the ones who are uncommon and absolutely necessary.

Since the 100-year-old president’s recent passing, I expect the headlines will soon move on to new world leaders, more tension between them and more global uncertainty. As another year begins, I predict more intense divisions in the political, religious and economic arenas. Such escalation most benefits those at the top of these arenas while the rest of us are duped into feeding their bottomless coffers. Despite these divisions, I hope to take a page from the Jimmy Carter playbook and “do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can.”

Such an outlook gives me hope, regardless of what challenges might face us within our own brief lifespans.