Going Home... to Where I Caught Faith

2 Timothy 1:3-7
I am grateful to God – whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did – when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.


Before coming to Arizona 12 years ago I was actively involved at North Oak Christian Church in Kansas City. It was a great congregation, about the size of Chalice, with a building a lot like this one. They just finished remodeling and I can’t wait to see it. North Oak will be one of the churches I visit on sabbatical. For the 14 years that my daughters and I were members there the pastor was Rick Butler, one of the best preachers I ever heard. As I was fretting one day about program planning for the church he shared one of his bits of wisdom: “Faith is better caught than taught.” That, by the way, is why your congregation needs you to be in church every Sunday & involved in small group ministries – because if you’re not around, how can our young people catch your faith? We first have to be exposed - sort of like the way you catch measles - you have to be exposed.

Were you exposed to faith as a child? I sure was. My parents were right in the middle of everything at our little country church, McCroskie Creek Baptist Church. Every Sunday morning we were there for Sunday school and worship, and on Sunday nights we went back for Training Union and evening worship. On Wednesday nights we were there for prayer meeting. Scattered through the weekdays were Deacons’ meetings for Daddy and Women’s Missionary Union meetings for Mother. When I was old enough there were Girl’s Auxiliary meetings for me. My brother and I were exposed to faith – sometimes we thought we were a little overexposed!

But it wasn’t just from our little church that we caught faith. Like Paul remembers in his greeting to Timothy above, I inherited the faith from my mother Rachel and my grandmother Lura and her mother Molly before her, and even the generations I never knew. (Not to omit my father, Stanley, who comes from another line of the faithful.) When I go home this summer it will be like crawling back into a cradle of faith where I was rocked as a child. I didn’t much care for the strictness of it, but to this day I cherish its constancy and its centrality to who we are as family.