Laura Young
ECB Publishing, Inc.
The Monticello Community Prayer Breakfast program for March began with a prayer for Ukraine, offered by Rev. Stephen Pessah of Christ Episcopal Church. Then Pastor Jared Day of the First Baptist Church of Lloyd, which hosted this month's interdenominational gathering, offered the prayer for the sick and distressed in our community.
When guest lay speaker Katrina Walton took the podium, she introduced herself as someone who had moved to Monticello at age 11. She had been churched her whole life, but when she became a student at Aucilla Christian Academy (ACA), the school played a big part in expanding and deepening her understanding of her faith. Upon graduating from ACA, she immediately started building a real estate business, and married her husband Jake at the age of 20. With their children Joe and Liv, both in college now, they are enjoying a new season of life as empty nesters.
She began her testimony saying, “It is a blessing to live in a community where we can freely talk about God,” and proceeded to talk freely about Bible verses that held special meaning for her. With each verse, her message built step by step toward a call for the community to unite in loving one another.
Starting with James 1:5, she read, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault and it will be given to you.”
Wisdom, she said, is thinking about the consequences of a choice before making a choice. Knowledge comes from instruction, training and experience. Discernment, she added, is the ability to make good choices with our knowledge. Another favorite verse, 1 Kings 18:21, asks the question, “How long will you waiver between two opinions?” Walton explained this verse as a reminder to keep things simple, to choose God and his ways over other clearly ungodly options. This she connected with being called to have a childlike faith, which many verses touch on, including Matthew 18:2, Mark 10:15 and 1 John 3:1.
As Walton worked her way through the various Bible verses, their messages all converged into one key point: Make the simple, wise choice to love.
From 1 John 4:7 she read, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only son into the world so that we might live through him.”
“I want to challenge everyone,” she concluded, “and this is a challenge to myself as well, to just love. If we love, our opinions on race change. Our political stances change... If we love, all of that changes... If we have it in us to bring us back to that, I feel like our community can be one of the strongest communities. Everyone says 'shop local' because you want to get your core solid and support your local businesses. Really, if we just LOVE local, we can be strong, we can get stronger, and our little loving, fabulous community can grow.”
The challenge, she said, is is not to practice religion, but to actually have a relationship with Jesus so that we can spread our love.
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