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FORT HUACHUCA — God asks questions of people.
It’s not that God doesn’t know the answers in advance. He’s just trying to see if individuals really know the right answer, the Rev. Richard Foth told more than 500 people at the annual Fort Huachuca Prayer Breakfast held on Wednesday.
When God asks “Where are you?”, it doesn’t mean the location of a person, but where along the path of life an individual is, he said.
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But the Lord does not want to engage in a one-sided conversation. Instead, God seeks a discussion using the avenue of prayer, said Foth, who has a doctor of ministry degree from the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass.
“Prayer is about conversation with God,” he said.
All humans have receptors within their inner being that act as the connection with the supreme being, Foth said.
The son of missionary/educator parents who lived his early years in India, he said there are two main things God wants from humans: to love him and their neighbors.
Men and women have a responsibility, and that is to develop a perspective of life and what they must do, Foth said.
When Foth wants to restore his own perspective, he goes to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Facing the statue of Abraham Lincoln, he looks to one side and sees the great words of the Gettysburg Address.
The preacher began quoting those words from memory. He emphasized the ending, which includes the phrase of America’s importance of being the government of, by and for the people.
When Foth looks to the other side of the memorial his sees the words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the writing of which includes the tension and anguish of America’s Civil War.
It’s the perspective of Lincoln’s words that gives him an increase understanding of two important factors of God — trust and mercy.
“We can’t exist without trust and without mercy,” Foth said, adding those two factors are part of prayer.
In today’s world, leaders do not trust each other, which leads to incidents that have no mercy, Foth said.
“President Eisenhower said leaders of the world will have to pray with each other (to establish trust and mercy),” said Foth, who is looked upon as a spiritual leader for many of the nation’s leaders.
Throughout America’s history, people have reached out to many using God as a font of goodness, Foth said.
During World War II, for example, the community of North Platte, Neb., was a place where trains carrying troops would stop. Women from the community baked cookies and made coffee for them during their short stops at their community. By time the war ended, more than 6 million GIs had been fed by thousands of people who would come from a hundred miles around to do good.
To this day, many of the former GIs remember North Platte, including a man in his 90s who suffers from a form of dementia, Foth said.
When a granddaughter called him and asked him if he remembered the Nebraska town, the elderly man temporarily came out of his dementia and spoke lucidly about stopping and eating in North Platte.
It was as if God lifted that human burden from the man, albeit temporarily, so he could remember a time “when people loved God and loved each other,” Foth said.
The people of North Platte loved God and their neighbors, which in the time of war was manifested to those who stopped for a short time in their community, he said.
And for those who serve today when God asks “Where are you, what do you want and what do you want me to do, the answers should be given in prayer,” Foth said.
Herald/Review senior reporter Bill Hess can be reached at 515-4615 or by e-mail at bill.hess@svherald.com.
shuni wrote on Apr 18, 2008 12:11 AM: