Laura Young
ECB Publishing, Inc.
“Jesus, Jesus, like the fragrance after the rain.” This refrain from the song “There's Something about that Name,” during the music portion of the Monticello Community Prayer Breakfast on April 7, was a theme that would emerge again later during the lay testimony.
The gathering was hosted by Aucilla Christian Academy (ACA), and after prayers led by Pastor Ron Cichon and ACA Principal Richard Finlayson, retired educator Roy Faglie of Monticello stepped to the podium.
Faglie shared that he and his wife Shirley, married in 1964, feel like they are still on their first date all these years later. They have had three children – Emily, Hank and Floyd – and four grandchildren.
Faglie shared that he was born in 1947 in his grandmother's house just down the road over the Aucilla River.
“I had good parents, a good mother, a good father,” he said. “They cared for me. I had three sisters that also cared for me, and as I grew older I appreciated them more and more, but we were not a church family. We weren't the ones getting up on Sunday morning and going to church, but I did go to the elementary school in Monticello.”
Faglie told how he became exposed to Bible stories, the 23rd Psalm and prayer in those elementary classrooms and also during vacation Bible school that he attended with neighbors during some summers of his youth. Then, when his father returned from being treated for cancer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., the family went to Sardis United Methodist Church on the Waukeenah Hwy., where Faglie heard his first sermon. Around 1960, when Faglie was 10 or 11 years old, his family would often tune their television to the Billy Graham Crusades.
“I listened to that, and it had an effect on me,” recalled Faglie. “At the end of his service, he would give an invitation. He would pray, and they would sing, and then he would turn and look into the camera, right at you in your living room. He would present the plan of salvation, and I accepted that. I knew enough to know what I was doing.”
Faglie identified that as the point of his salvation, but said he didn't start going to church or living his life for God at that point. Years passed, and when he was a junior in high school, he started regularly attending Elizabeth Baptist Church, where Shirley and her family were faithful members. He started to understand more about salvation, baptism and the importance of making a public profession, which he then did.
“My testimony goes back to a verse in Corinthians, where Paul says, 'I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.' As I was growing up in those situations of elementary school and Bible school and all, there were seeds being planted, and there were people watering. And the point of the Billy Graham Crusades and listening to those sermons and coming to an understanding, God gave the increase, not me. I was a sinner, but now I was a sinner saved by the grace of God through his son Jesus Christ unto life eternal. That became my testimony.”
Faglie shared that as time went by, his family and his career grew, and he was blessed by God even though he didn't always recognize what he was seeing. It was through his children's experiences that he very clearly saw the hand of God.
“When Floyd faced a real storm in his life when he was just on the threshold of adulthood... God opened doors for him. Floyd to his credit... took what God had given him and made a new future for himself. You know there's a saying that when the storms of life come along, it's not a matter of surviving the storm, it's learning how to dance in the rain. And Floyd danced in the rain with God holding his hand, and I'm very proud of him.”
The meaning of salvation became very real to him the day that his daughter Emily lost her life in a car wreck, he shared, because she was a sinner saved by God's grace through his son Jesus Christ unto life eternal.
“At a time like that,” Faglie said, “all the trappings are stripped away, and what you have left is what you have with God. I'm thankful to my wife, because she led her to Christ. And I'm thankful to a church family that cared about children and nourished them. I'm thankful to this school that she attended down here that allowed her to express her faith. I'm thankful to God, who carried her home and has cared for us since then.”
Faglie closed his testimony by telling about his mother, who came to the Lord very late in life and passed away at peace at the age of 86.
“In a gathering like this,” Faglie commented, “everybody has a life story and a testimony, mostly different, but they have one thing in common... Sometimes those stories are shorter, sometimes longer, but they have that same ending... I want my family to be able to say at that time, yeah, Daddy knew the Lord, because that is really what matters.”
The next meeting of the Monticello Community Prayer Breakfast will be hosted on Thursday, May 5, by The Rotary Club at First Presbyterian Church, located at 290 E. Dogwood. For more information, contact Gary Wright, (850) 933-5567.
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