| Time to bring faith into focus  By Calvin Williams The following are excerpts from the address given by the conference lay leader at the June 8 session of annual conference. Some 10 months ago, Sept. 11, to be exact, our world was turned on its heel. Everything and everybody came to a full stop. If we had ever taken our many blessings for granted we had to stop, look around and think anew. The acts of terror brought all of us to a standstill. Each of us reacted differently. For me, it was a time to go down on my knees. It was prayer time. In this time when the fear and anger linger, it will not be sufficient to parrot a few religious or patriotic words or accept the sayings of others. If there was ever a time when we must look in the mirror and really assess what we see, and what we are, the time is now. We must bring faith into focus, not just on special occasions and not just when it seems to suit our purpose, but every day, every hour and every minute. We must believe, like Martin Luther King Jr. did, that faith is a living and unshakable confidence that Gods grace is sufficient. In the city of Baltimore and other places in our conference, we have a mountain of iniquity, drugs, prostitution, violence and all forms of corruption. I wonder if we have forgotten, or if we just dont believe, Matthew 17:20: if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed ye shall say unto this mountain, remove hence to yonder place and it shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto you. We cant do it without Christ. With Christ we cannot fail. Yes, faith is all we need, but that faith must be for this day. It is natural for us to look to the future, but every now and then we must stop and be present in this moment this day. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray he taught them to say, Give us this day our daily bread. I believe he wanted them to recognize this day as the day of need. This day we need to put our complete faith in the Lord. We church folks are sometimes pointed out as good talkers but crippled walkers. We talk the talk, but dont walk the walk. I pray that God gives us the faith for this day so we can clean up Baltimore, faith for this day to feed the hungry in African countries and other places where children are dying from starvation, faith for this day to let go of racism and bring all people called Methodist under one umbrella, faith to move mountains. Calvin Williams is lay leader of the Baltimore-Washington Conference and a member of Good Hope Union UMC, Silver Spring. | 
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