Changing Lives Issue #11
Inspirational examples of people who used their painful experiences to change lives
Instead of sharing examples from my personal life, which frankly isn’t very inspirational at the moment, I’m doing something different this week. I’m highlighting examples of people who have used devastating experiences in their lives as catalysts for positive changes.
Here are two stories of people who were led to change the lives of others as a direct result of incredibly painful events in their own lives. I hope they inspire all of us to think about how we can use our despair or anger as fuel to help us take actions that change lives.
Candance (Candy) Lightner
You may not recognize her name, but you’re probably familiar with the non-profit organization she founded, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).
In May of 1980, her 13-year-old daughter Cari was killed by a drunk driver in California. He had been arrested less than a week prior to her daughter’s death on another hit-and-run drunk driving charge. When she learned how lenient drunk driving laws were, she was furious enough to do something to change that.
She founded MADD four days after Cari died and later convinced California Governor Jerry Brown to create a task force to study the issue. The following year, the state passed a law that included minimum fines of $375 for drunk drivers and mandatory jail time for repeat offenders.
She went on to serve as a member of the National Commission on Drunk Driving. She stood proudly beside President Reagan when he signed a 1984 law that reduced federal highway funds to any state which did not raise its minimum drinking age to 21. All 50 states did so within the next year.
Candy continues her advocacy work today, though she left MADD in 1985 to broaden the issues she works on. She has started another organization, We Save Lives, that works to prevent car crashes caused by distracted driving. She is also a consultant for others and a public speaker. (Sources: History.com; mommyhighfive.com)
Scarlett Lewis
Scarlett’s six-year-old son Jesse was killed during the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. Before that, he had written on their kitchen chalkboard “Norturting Helinn Love” (Nurturing Healing Love).
Those words inspired her to create the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement, described on its About Us page as a non-profit organization
with a mission to create safer and more loving communities through no cost Character Social Emotional Development programs (CSED) that are suited for all stages of life. We offer programs tailored for any age from toddlers through adulthood.
At the core of it all is a simple formula (COURAGE + GRATITUDE + FORGIVENESS + COMPASSION-IN-ACTION = Choosing Love) that anyone can learn and practice to nourish and strengthen the body, mind, and emotions to cultivate happy, healthy, meaningful lives and to thoughtfully respond to all we meet and improve the world around us.
As reported by the Concord Monitor, during a 2021 speech she talked about how it began:
The whole movement started at Jesse’s funeral when I got up to speak. Everybody had been asking me, ‘what can we do?’ And I said, ‘there is actually something that we can do. Everything starts with a thought in our head.’ I asked everybody that day to start thinking about what they think about and to change one angry thought a day into a loving thought.
She went on to explain, “The only way I could take my personal power back was through forgiveness.”
What we can learn from them
These women are proof that even the most devastating losses can lead to positive changes. There is no way to know how many lives may have been saved by the organizations they founded in response to the unbearably tragic and needless deaths of their children.
I hope you find their stories as inspirational as I do. I hope we will keep them in mind when we feel powerless to change all that is wrong in our countries and the world.
They teach us that one person’s actions can lead to positive changes that affect countless lives. We can do even more when we reach out and connect with others who share our desire to change lives.
What is one thing you are doing or could do to change lives? Please share your thoughts in the comments. Let’s inspire each other to make a difference!
Thanks for sharing these inspirational stories!