Laura Young
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Rev. James B. Duval welcomed a crowd of around 50 early risers to Memorial Missionary Baptist Church for this month's Monticello Community Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Jan. 6. The church provided a mouthwatering buffet while everyone enjoyed inter-denominational fellowship.
Voices joined together as Mike Grisham of Gideon's International led the Pledge of Allegiance and an a cappella rendition of “Emmanuel.”
Event organizer Gary Wright then recognized the kitchen crew at Memorial Missionary Baptist Church, which sparked heartfelt applause and cheers from the group.
Rev. Stephen Pessah of Christ Episcopal Church led the group in prayer, expressing gratefulness for a new year full of possibilities and lifting up the names of the sick and distressed.
Guest speaker Floyd Faglie then delivered a New Year's message encouraging introspection, based on the well-known Bible story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11), wherein a son was lost and then was found.
Faglie shared from his experience of learning at the age of 19 that he had a very rare, untreatable eye condition that significantly weakened the central vision, first in one eye and then the other. Losing his eyesight to the extent that he could no longer drive, read or recognize faces in crowds, just as he was gaining independence, brought him to a spiritual crossroads, said Faglie. When prayers for healing did not bring him the result he hoped for, he became disappointed, angry and distanced from God. Then, in the summer of 1996, he found himself in a class with a gifted teacher who brought the story of the prodigal son home to him in a new way.
“We are all in this story,” Faglie recalls the teacher pointing out. “There are four places in the story where we can be. We can be in the fields working (which is where we should be), or we can be on the road to the foreign land (which is a terrible place), or we can be in the pigpen (absent from God), or maybe we can be at a point of realization and heading back to the father.”
The teacher asked Faglie and the others in the class to look at themselves and think about where they were in the story.
“That day I knew where I was,” says Faglie. “Guess where I was? I was in the pigpen. I knew it.” He realized that he was in the pig sty because he had had a bad response to adversity. He asked God to help him see His plan for him, and metaphorically he started back on the road to the Father's house.
While things weren't easy after that, relates Faglie, he did move forward. He finished his college education, met his future wife at a study-abroad program at Oxford, started a career in law so that he could help others, got married, had four children and moved back to Monticello.
Faglie sees God as the source of all these good things, and he finished with the message that we are all the sum of our responses to our struggles, how we have responded in faith. Faglie encouraged the audience to apply the story of the prodigal son to the making of new year's resolutions for living their lives a little differently.
“Take an internal inventory,” he said, “Think about the prodigal son. Where are you today in your spiritual walk?”
The gathering concluded with recitation of the Lord's Prayer and an invitation to next month's Monticello Community Prayer Breakfast, which will be hosted by the Kiwanis and the Jefferson Country Club on Thursday, Feb. 3. State Senator Loranne Ausley has been invited to speak.
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