There is nothing that I can say about Chadwick Boseman that has not been said already and by people who knew him far better than I. They knew firsthand of his kindness, of his work ethic, his drive, and his understanding of the intrinsic and essential value of purpose. And not to be forsaken was his strength. I say strength on its own because it wasn’t limited to him enduring in silence while he suffered from colon cancer for four years, but the strength he possessed to carry and embody Black legacies on his back with ease. His ability and desire to represent us positively and accurately every time, and his conscious effort to do right by us and by those whose stories he was reliving not only made him a rare talent, but also a testament.

But if kindness and strength are the only takeaways we are able to extract from his life and the way he lived it, then we ought to dig a little deeper – to move beyond seeing him as a man with cancer and look at all he accomplished in spite of the disease that overtook his body. People, in light of his death particularly, keep saying that we ought to be kind because we don’t know what people are going through and what battles they are fighting behind closed doors, but kindness should never have stipulations, conditions, or reasons. There should be no reason needed to be kind to another individual. There should be no context provided in order for us to decide how to treat people. Christ himself demanded that we love our neighbors as ourselves but somehow, we’ve warped its meaning and decided kindness requires information, requires knowledge as if Chadwick Boseman only deserved kindness because we didn’t know he was sick.

We may not have known him personally, but he lived his life in such a way that his values and motives were clear. At the heart of everything he did, in public or behind closed doors, was always altruism, was always with the Black community, our community, in mind, was always love – love for God, love for his purpose and his people. Kindness and strength are the bare minimum of takeaways from Chadwick Boseman’s life. But he always taught us the importance of:

• finding that which God put us on Earth to do. Not only finding our purposes, but never abandoning our standards and principles or compromising our integrity to achieve and live in said purposes.
• humility, of remembering that all we do is not for the glorification of ourselves but of God and that all we do, all the records and ground we break and all the change we bring about is not for ourselves, but for those that come after us, that they might have ease where we had adversity.
• remembering that as Paul says, in Philippians 4:13, we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, and as Jeremiah reminds us in Jeremiah 29:11, the plans God has for us are not to harm us, but to better us and to give us an expected end.

A friend of mine shared with me a beautiful Italian phrase which roughly translates to “Lord, we don’t ask why you took him but we thank you for having given him us.” The world may not have deserved Chadwick Boseman but we needed him and his light – we needed a global example that people like him in a world like ours are real and as fantastic, and as ground-breaking as Black Panther was, we needed to know that all heroes don’t solely exist in comic books and wear costumes. He will be forever missed and forever mourned, but he will also be forever beloved and cherished in the hearts of children who finally got to see themselves on screen as a hero, as a king, as a warrior and as everything the world has worked so hard to convince them they could never be. He will be forever missed by anyone who from afar or close by could see the Spirit of God that lied within him, who could see his kind and gentle spirit and could see a man whose only desire on Earth was to live out the purpose God gave him and help any and everyone he could along the way. 

May Chadwick Aaron Boseman Rest In Peace and Power.

**There are so many clips and movies and interviews that you could watch in the event that you want or need to hear his own wisdom come straight from him, or you just want to hear his laugh again, or you just want to see his light, but I implore you to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIHZypMyQ2s.