Personal morals are derived as a child listens, looks and learns. They are based on what we are taught by our parents, preachers, teachers and leaders. Influenced by the religion we are brought up within and in the laws enforced in our communities, our personal morals can also come from what we watch on TV, see on the news and witness within our culture and tradition. They come from politicians and the government that either protects or threatens us. Still, most of our morals come from the need to be social human beings.

Here, in the USA, I find my personal morals have changed in the time it takes for our society to rearrange its views and issues. Sometimes it takes experience and witnessing the need for change that rearranges our personal morals into new and improved values. In fact, in the past it would have been immoral for me to befriend an African American or someone who happens to be gay. I’d say, “My parents didn’t raise me that way.” Thankfully, time has a way of changing minds and lives.

If I dared to go out on a limb and befriend someone with a different color of skin in the 60’s, everyone within my community would have frowned on it and condemned me. Because this was true, it limited my view and moral truth, but today that same community believes it’s immoral not to befriend someone based on the color of skin. As Martin Luther King advised, today we strive to pick our friends based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, so I can honestly say my personal morals have come a very long way. Since what society taught me in the 60’s, I’ve come to believe that it would be immoral for me to close my mind and eyes to other views and moral issues which might be different than mine.

After all, my personal morals could change based on my circumstance and by chance. Today I believe it would be immoral for me to steal, but if my children were hungry, I’d rob you blind. As immoral as it seems to lie, I’d lie through my teeth or even commit a homicide if someone threatened my child’s life. That’s why personal morals have a lot to do with our society’s reality at any given time. In times of war, it’s no longer immoral to kill, but we still pay the price. A price must be paid for breaking the basic human values we achieve in our lives.

My society today no longer looks down on an unmarried woman who chooses to have a child, but even today, that same single parent must struggle through the issues that arise from parenting a child without a mate. Some things we choose to do are always mistakes and we always pay for our mistakes, even when we are not disgraced. That’s why biblical times advised parents to get married in the first place, and when it comes to being gay, there will always be people who think it’s strange even if it’s no longer immoral today. That’s why my gay friends still feel set apart from the rest, and at best, they remain simply tolerated by the society we live within.

If I lie, cheat, steal or kill, I still have to live with myself, no matter how justified I might be for cheating, stealing from or killing another human being. That’s why I’d say the best way to achieve a society that values our human need to behave in the way we personally believe is morally right, is to simply keep respect in the forefront of our minds at all times. Hold onto hope and faith in the first place.

With hope and faith, God provides the amazing grace it takes to find other ways to deal with our society’s reality other than to lie, cheat, steal or kill. Hope and faith provides insight and shines the light of truth. It provides a new and improved vision of truth, so that men like Martin Luther King can teach the rest of us how to see beyond what makes us afraid. Just one moral mind can change mankind by changing one mind at a time. That’s when an entire nation changes its social morals and values, which changes mine too.

What may be true for you may not be true for me, but I can at least tolerate what I can’t understand until I do. When I respectfully tolerate the way you behave, what you say, how you dress and the views you express, I allow you to be who you were meant to be, which might even teach me a few things about morality. The truth always comes out eventually, but it’s the degree of our faith in what we believe to be morally right that determines our destiny in life.