I took this photo sometime around 5:30 this morning while walking through the SMU campus. I had no idea who Joe and Lois Perkins were. So I looked them up. Joe Perkins made his fortune in business, banking, ranching and oil. He and his wife Lois became significant philanthropists in Texas. Then, in 1945, they gave $1.5 million to SMU’s School of Theology. At the time, it was reportedly the largest gift SMU had ever received and the largest gift ever made to an American school of theology. But the amount isn’t what stopped me. It was what they believed the money was for. In the document establishing their endowment, they wrote about the future peace of the world and their belief that churches and ministers had a role in securing it. Think about that. They accumulated wealth in oil, banking and commerce, then deliberately converted part of that wealth into an institution they believed might shape people they would never meet, decades after they were gone. Lois went even further. In the early 1950s, she supported integrating the theology school’s classrooms and dormitories and helped push the school toward admitting Black students. In Texas. Before Brown v. Board of Education. Before the Civil Rights Act. I walked past this sign before sunrise having never heard their names. Now I can’t stop thinking about them. We spend a lot of time asking how to build something valuable. Maybe there is another question worth asking: What are you building that will still be doing its work when nobody remembers you built it? That seems like a pretty good question for a morning walk.