The year begins with the end of a life well-lived. It is worth pausing to reflect in a slightly different way on the late President Jimmy Carter’s place in history and in our Southern present. The “Man from Plains” was the archetype of the modern Southerner.

Like the South itself, Jimmy Carter was a bundle of contradictions. He knew how to grow peanuts and repair nuclear reactors. A lifelong, devout, born-again Southern Baptist, he “(spoke) out for marriage equality at a time when most national leaders in the U.S. still opposed it,” according to Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign. Elected governor of Georgia in 1971 as a white Southern Democrat, Carter rejected racial segregation, the drug of choice for many of his peers at the time.

It is in those contradictions that Jimmy Carter represented the modern Southerner, someone who embodied what the region has become as much as what it used to be. Someone who had lived in radically different worlds before and after segregation. He had indeed seen some things. Those two warring selves coexisted within him for 100 years. Maybe that was because he refused to let the past consume him. Or it could have been that he knew a different future was not only inevitable, but preferable.

Perhaps they were not contradictions at all, but instead the expression of a deeper core belief. They actually drove achievements that overshadowed his four years in the White House. Indeed, Carter’s time in Washington may have been more a part of his journey than a destination. He did not grow up to become president. After his term ended, he continued to grow in pursuit of deeper truth. Somewhere along the way, he shed the all-too-Washingtonian affliction of needing to be the smartest person in the room, though he often may have been.

Perhaps there was something of the “Man from Independence” in the Man from Plains. It was President Harry Truman after all who said in reply to this famous “Give ’em hell, Harry!” campaign slogan, “I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” Like Truman, Jimmy Carter told the truth. Whether we wanted to hear it or not, he told the hard truth about the consequences of how we treat each other. The truths that Jimmy Carter spoke and pursued as a president, as an engineer and as a humanitarian, were manifestations of his faith and the place where he nurtured it. His truth was soul-deep, bigger than any person or institution, including the presidency. That revelation propelled him to even greater heights than those he could realize as leader of the free world.