In recent years, we have been treated to a great deal of public moralizing from some who have postured as our self-appointed moral authorities. But as certain televangelists have proven, moralizing and morals are two different things and sometimes are not found in the same person. Individuals who pontificate about the morals of the rest of us while living their own lives to the very standards they prescribe do certainly exist, but I suspect that the greatest influence for good comes from those quiet folks who make morals, not moralizing, their vocation.

An item from a newspaper seven years ago caught my eye because it made this very point. The story came from the little town of Conyers, Georgia. When school officials there discovered that one of their basketball players who had played 45 seconds in the first of the school’s five post-season games had actually been scholastically ineligible, they returned the state championship trophy the school team had won a few weeks before. If they had simply kept quiet, probably no one else ever would have known about it and they could have retained the trophy.

The really amazing thing was that the team and the town, dejected though they were, rallied behind the school’s decision. The coach was quoted as saying, "We didn’t know he was ineligible at the time … but you’ve got to do what’s honest and right and what the rules say. I told my team that people forget the scores of the games; they don’t ever forget what you’re made of."

In the minds of most, it didn’t matter that the championship title was forfeited. That coach, and the team were still champions, and in more ways than one. We should ask ourselves, "Could I have mustered the courage to do the same?"

I could spend all day telling you real-life stories of real people whose personal examples made all the difference in the world. I have traveled to some 42 countries, meeting and interviewing presidents and cabinet ministers. But let me just share with you one story from a country with which I feel a strong, emotional bond—Poland. I have been fortunate to visit it twice, once in 1986 to spend time underground with activists in the banned Solidarity movement, and later in 1989 after the changes that brought Solidarity out of hiding and democracy to the nation.