ePaper Login  |  Tour  |  Sample  |  Help  |  Subscribe        Day Pass BYOC: Build Your Own Classified

AmericanPress.com

  Ads from the print edition: Today's New Ads | All of Today's Ads
  Local Restaurant Guide: Bon Appetit | Crime: Check your area
  Buy Photos: Get prints by our photographers | Fuel: Local prices

SWLA Rec Sports

• Start Home Delivery
• Contact Us
• Advertise

FragranceNet.com

NAKED FAITH

Former American Press staff writer Sunny Brown Farley writes "Naked Faith," a look at faith in its natural form: lived out in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.

 Meet the Blogger

The Baptism of Josey Gonzalez

Posted August 30, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Share

Josey Gonzalez was born into an immigrant family with little means and a lot of mouths to feed.

At a young age, she attended the after-school program at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Tyler. That program, which is still around today, is called Wonderful Wednesday.

It was there that she played with other children who were mostly Hispanic and mostly under-privileged. She ate snacks and learned about Jesus.

At Wonderful Wednesday, Josey found loving Christians and lasting impressions of the United Methodist Church.

She moved from Tyler to Jacksonville and back again. After graduating high school, she enrolled in Tyler Junior College to study computer animation. She said she always knew she wanted to be an artist and found her place among other “gamers.”

Her hopes are to work for Disney or Pixar when she graduates.

Last year, Josey heard from her fellow students about a break-in at TJC’s Wesley Foundation.

She was reminded of her positive experience at the United Methodist Church and she was angry that someone would rob such a ministry.

She called the local news station and told them about the robbery. The news reporters covered the story and the director of the TJC Wesley found out it was Josey who contacted them.

Josey was invited to the Wesley and was thanked by Director Sunny Farley and all the students who are active there.

Josey rapidly became one of the Wesley regulars. She came to Tuesday lunches, hung out with student leaders and took part in all of the Wesley functions.

Josey was sponsored this year, her sophomore year, as one of five student interns at the Wesley Foundation. These students commit to live their lives to the highest Christian standards. They meet frequently with the Wesley director to learn how to be leaders in the church and they are challenged to go deeper and deeper in the Christian faith.

In August, Josey and her entire family attended the first worship service of the semester at the TJC Wesley. The service is called Soul Café and it is a casual mid-day worship experience.

It was at this service that Josey took a big step in her faith journey. She made a public profession of faith, was baptized and joined the United Methodist Church.

She hopes to volunteer at Wonderful Wednesday.

Today is the best day

Posted August 17, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Filed Under Faith & Religion | 1 Comment

Share

Lately, I have been on an exercise kick. I like to get up and walk for an hour before I begin the other stuff that consumes my day.

This morning, I walked through my neighborhood along the usual route and I passed an old guy on the opposite side of the street raking leaves.

A car raced by between us and I heard him say something. His words, though muffled, interrupted my mental assessment of the day ahead.

Up until that point, I had been going over the million, bazillion things I really needed to accomplish.

The car that dissected us passed and he repeated himself: “Today is the best day.”

He didn’t explain himself. He only smiled.

Somehow, I knew what he meant. He was living in the moment, enjoying some yard work.

I agreed. “Today is the best day,” I said. Followed by, “Thanks for the reminder.”

I guess we all need to be reminded from time to time that it is a wonderful thing to enjoy the moment.

It goes so fast

Posted August 15, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Share

Today is my son’s fourth birthday.

Yesterday we celebrated with a birthday party and a movie. We took him to see Toy Story 3. It was his very first movie at the big movie theater.

The movie was great – same as the first and second Toy Story. Woody and Buzz and the gang were hilarious and adorable. Their struggle in the film related to the fact that their special owner, Andy, had grown up and was headed of to college.

I admit, I cried.

It was hard to watch Andy become a college kid and move out of his room, away from his toys and head to college.

In the film, his mom was quite emotional about it.

I couldn’t help but think of how, in the blink of an eye, my little boy will one day be a young man.

Next week, he heads to pre-K. In another week or two, he will be off to college. Isn’t that how it works?

Time goes by so quickly. Too quickly.

I hope and pray that I can appreciate all the time I get with my little guy. He is so sweet and precious.

May we all stop, just for a moment, and appreciate where we are with those we love – right now.

Amen.

Are we listening?

Posted August 10, 2010 at 9:29 am
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Share

There are days that my visual lock on the computer screen is broken by the tinging sound my cell phone makes when I receive a text message.

I am a lover of technology – at least when it works like I want it to, but sometimes I wonder what it is doing to us.

On Facebook, we throw out our opinions in 30 words or less. Twitter is much the same.

Many of us blog our thoughts to the world.

We text one another when we have something to say to someone instead of picking up the phone and actually calling them.

I wonder if it is because we don’t really want to hear what they have to say. After all, we can just check our messages and responses and what’s up with others when we feel like it.

I wonder if we are losing our ability to interact with others on their terms. And, I wonder if we are losing our ability to listen.

Are we listening anymore?

I am challenging myself to listen these days. It’s an important thing to do because there are so many people – indeed everyone in the world – needs to be heard. We long to be understood.

St. Francis of Assisi asked God to help him seek to understand more than to be understood. I believe this understanding of others and God might just happen if we would all stop and listen from time to time.

A look back and ahead

Posted July 30, 2010 at 7:37 am
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Share

The other day a friend of mine and former roommate and colleague from Lake Charles came to see me.

She now lives in South Dakota and we live in Texas. Our lives have taken us in two radically different directions. She moved from Lake Charles to Shreveport to New York to Chicago and now South Dakota. We have gone from Lake Charles to New Zealand to Tyler, Texas to Fort Worth and back to Tyler again.

Before coming to visit, my friend was going through a box of books and stumbled across a little paperback titled “God’s Promises.”

She said I lent it to her years ago and that she found it helpful to her spiritual life as she sought to grow in the faith.

She gave it back to me and I opened it to find a note from another friend who had given the book to me shortly after I committed my life to Christ. It was dated 1997.

It brought back a flood of memories of when that little book and, more importantly, my brothers and sisters in Christ were so helpful to my life as a new believer.

It’s hard to believe that was 13 years ago.

I wonder where my path and the paths of my Christian family members will go from here.

May God bless our journeys and help us to continue help one another along the way.

The Oil Spill

Posted July 12, 2010 at 7:44 am
Filed Under Faith & Religion | 1 Comment

Share

Every day, the news shows the sad, sad state of affairs in the Gulf.

Oil continues to gush into our waters, threatening life and livelihood.

I find myself screaming on the inside. It is a reminder of just how powerless we are a times. I might as well be shouting underwater at the leak itself.

I have seen news accounts of people everywhere praying for divine intervention in the oil spill disaster. I have joined in their prayers and hope more and more people will pray.

I am praying the leak will stop, the spill will be easily cleaned up, the animals and environment will somehow be spared and that the good people of the Gulf Coast will not suffer hardship.

I also am praying our nation will do whatever it needs to do to decrease our reliance on fossil fuel and decrease the chances of these kinds of environmental disasters.

Let us pray!! Amen!

Ahhh, church camp

Posted June 29, 2010 at 12:14 am
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Share

This week I am in the woods at church camp.

In the days leading up to my departure for camp, I spent a lot of time reflecting about what all church camp has meant to me over the years.

I’ve been church camping now for many years – as a camper in my youth to a counselor in my 20s and 30s and now, having risen to the high, high ranks of assistant camp coordinator.

But out of all of my camp experiences, I think my most memorable camp was the church camp I attended in the 8th grade.

You see, that was the summer I learned about love.

There was a cute boy named Brent at the 8th grade camp. I remember he was tan and had kind of wavy brownish-blond hair and most of all I remember we fell in love.

We sat next to each other in worship services. We passed notes.

On the last day of camp, everyone was packing up their stuff and loading bags into church vans and we snuck off behind a tree and had a tiny, little good-bye kiss.

Brent and I corresponded by mail for about a month after camp. It comes as no surprise that after our weeklong courtship, our “love” did not last.

There is another reason, my 8th grade camp taught me something about love.

I had a counselor that year named Julie. Julie was an adult – and I don’t mean an older teenager. She was a mom and she slept in nightgowns instead of over-sized t-shirts like the girls.

I remember that Julie slept on a top bunk, which made her cool in my book. I also remember she stayed up late with us every night. She would talk with us and give us advice and she listened to us and took the time to learn all of our names.

Years later, when I was a camp counselor, I reflected back on my time as a camper and thought about how Julie showed the kids at camp a great deal of love.

She really loved God and she really loved us.

First John 4:19 says that we love because God first loved us.

So often, God’s love is presented in this world through us. We are full of the love of God and that love spills out of us into the lives of others and they get filled and so the cycle continues. It’s amazing to think about that isn’t it?

Julie knew the love of God and that love compelled her to serve God and love others. What was it Jesus said was the most important commandment? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength – and love others as your self.

Anyway, I know that my hope for this week – my goal for this week – is quite simple. I want to focus on love. That’s it.

Top of my list is to rekindle my love for God. I don’t know about yall, but sometimes I just get busy and lax and complacent and bogged down by life and I don’t spend the kind of time I should loving God. Out here in the woods, I want to spend some quality time with the Lord. I want to be reflect on God’s amazing love for me and tell him over and over again just how much I love him back.

Secondly, I want to pass on God’s love to everyone here – to the other adults who come out and dedicate a week of their lives to growing our kids in the faith and, of course, to all the kids who come here this week. I can’t wait to see what God does in their lives this week and in the future.

Who knows, maybe they will fall in love this week. And if I catch anyone kissing behind a tree, I am going to try to remind myself that despite their sinful nature, one day, many years from now, they might just grow up to be a camp counselor. Who knows, they might even grow up to be a minister.

Not the same

Posted June 15, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Filed Under Faith & Religion | 2 Comments

Share

So many times, I hear people argue that all religions are the same.

Christianity = Judaism = Hinduism = Islam, etc. etc. etc.

I guess at the heart of this concept is the desire to unify the world by unifying the world’s beliefs, which is arguably good. However, I find it utterly disrespectful of all the religions to say they are the same.

Today, I saw a funny news clip pitting Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert against Boston University scholar Stephen Prothero. It can be found on cnn.com.

It’s a funny exchange between the two men, but at the heart of the matter is something that I believe is serious truth: The religions of the world are not the same.

We have different understandings of what is problematic in the world: sin vs suffering in the case of Christianity and Buddhism, respectively. We also have different understandings of key concepts, such as afterlife: heaven vs nirvana, again in the case of Christianity and Buddhism.

I have not yet read Prothero’s new book, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter, but I look forward to reading it.

Perhaps it will shed more light on the uniqueness of the world faiths and why we should understand and respect their differences.

Thy Kingdom Come

Posted June 7, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Share

So, today I had a long conversation with someone about the Kingdom of God.

It is fascinating to me that Jesus preached the kingdom. We preach Jesus and Jesus preached the kingdom!

It would seem to me that we see glimpses of the kingdom when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

However, the kingdom will not be fully realized until Christ returns. So the kingdom of God is past, present and future.

So what does God call us to do in relation to the kingdom? God calls us to yield our wills to His – doing our part to usher in the kingdom of God!

God, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. They will be done in my life!

Brotherly Love

Posted May 26, 2010 at 9:35 am
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Share

The other day, a student of mine asked me to take a look at Obadiah.

It’s not every day that most of us read Obadiah. There’s not much to it upon first glance – it’s a tiny little book in the Old Testament.

It packs a powerful message though.

Obadiah, a so-called minor prophet, filled his prophetic poem with theological concepts that are so important.

He talks about the pride of the Edomites as they sat back and watched Judah get destroyed by the Babylonians.

Both tribes may be traced back to two brothers – Jacob and Esau. Now, so many years later, the descendants of Esau gloat as the descendants of Jacob are cut down. They even go so far as to loot the broken people of Judah.

Obadiah tells them that God is displeased with their behavior and will bring about His divine justice in the matter.

The story reminded me of how God would like us to treat one another – with brotherly love.

Jesus tells us that the most important commandment is to love God and the second is like it – to love one another as we love ourselves.

keep looking »

Search