What can we learn by reflecting on the daily devotions of Jimmy Carter?
Many of his daily devotions include interesting comments on both his life and historical incidents that happened before, after, and during his presidency, and several humorous stories.
Jimmy Carter reflects on his youth, his years in the Navy serving in the nuclear submarine program, his years as Governor of Georgia, and his years before, during, and after his Presidency.
Jimmy Carter reflects on the Camp David Peace Accords, negotiated with Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, pictured in our thumbnail.
Jimmy Carter reflects on his dealings with the leaders of other foreign countries, including China, Iran, Uganda, Greece, and Saudi Arabia.
Jimmy Carter also reflects on the civil rights and humanitarian efforts during his youth, during his service in the Navy, and during his terms as Governor of Georgia and as President, and afterwards.
We encourage you to buy Jimmy Carter’s full 366 Daily Devotional to benefit from all the lessons Jimmy Carter draws from of our excerpts.
YouTube video for this blog: https://youtu.be/C2LPpDU7udY
YouTube Script with Book Links:
https://www.slideshare.net/BruceStrom1/jimmy-carters-youth-and-navy-years-from-plowing-with-mules-to-nuclear-submarines
HUMOROUS DEVOTIONS OF JIMMY CARTER
We will begin with a few humorous stories by Jimmy Carter.
Day 51. “I heard a story about a priest from New Orleans named Father Flanagan. His parish was close to many taverns. One night, he was walking down the street and saw a drunk thrown out of a pub, one of Father Flanagan’s parishioners named Mike. “Father Flanagan shook the dazed man. Mike opened his eyes and father Flanagan said, ‘You’re in trouble! Is there anything I can do for you?’
‘Well, father,’ Mike replied, ‘I hope you’ll pray for me.’
‘Yes,’ the priest answered, ‘I’ll pray for you right now.’
He knelt down in the gutter and prayed, ‘Father, please have mercy on this drunken man.’
At this a startled Mike woke up fully and said, ‘Father, please don’t tell God I’m drunk.’”
Day 77. A good friend told Jimmy Carter a great story about how a “man and his dog were walking along a hot paved road when suddenly the man realized that he was dead and the dog beside him had been dead for several years.
The pair came to a tall arch glowing in the sunlight with a gate that resembled mother of Pearl. They saw a man at a desk and a sparkly sign that read, HEAVEN. The traveler requested to come in for some water for his dog, but the man said they didn’t accept pets. So, the traveler and his dog walked on.
Eventually, they came to a narrow dirt road leading to a farm gate and saw a man leaning against a tree. The traveler asked for some water, and the man gave both him and the dog a cool drink. The traveler learned that this place was heaven, and that the first place was hell. He asked, ‘Doesn’t it make you angry that they use your name like that?’
‘Nope,’ said the man, ‘we’re just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind.’”
Day 138. “Shortly after arriving in a small town, a new pastor had to conduct a funeral. In preparation,” he visited “the barbershop, the grocery store and everywhere else, asking for nice things to say about the deceased, but he couldn’t find anyone who would say anything good about him. In desperation, when the funeral service started, the pastor invited the members of the congregation to speak up for the deceased. A long silence followed and finally he asked, ‘Can’t anyone say anything?’ Someone stood up in the back and said, ‘His brother was worse.’”
JIMMY CARTER REFLECTS ON HIS YOUTH
Jimmy Carter was born in 1924 in rural Plains, Georgia, to a cotton farmer. Although his father was a segregationist, he permitted his son to play with the children of the nearby black farmhands.
Day 219. “When I worked in the fields with my father, it would have been inconceivable for a white person to drink from the same dipper as a black worker in the same field, even if we played with him, went fishing with them, worked in the same fields and plowed with the same mules. We would never drink out of the same cup.
So, when Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for a drink of water,” this is the story of the women at the well in John, “he was actually doing something extremely significant, Jesus didn’t have a cup with him, so clearly, he intended to drink out of her cup. Remember, the Jews typically hated all Samaritans, and this was a woman ostracized by her own village, in effect, a whore. What a startling demonstration against racial or ethnic or religious prejudice!”
In the tradition of the ancient church, the Samaritan woman at the well was St Photine, whose evangelism efforts earned her recognition as equal to the apostles. Tradition holds that she was brought before Emperor Nero to answer for her faith, she was tortured and martyred when she was thrown into a dry well.[1]
Day 204. “During almost ten decades in the South and throughout America very few of us, even in our churches, condemned or criticized total racial segregation. We accepted the legal premise of separate but equal. In fact, our Plains brotherhood meeting, every year or two, invited some distinguished biblical scholar from a prestigious seminary who would prove to us from Scripture that God had ordained the separation of the races. Even the most enlightened pastors would say that’s a social problem, we just preach the gospel. We shake our heads now, but that’s the way we lived back then, and that was the way we had lived for generations. We accepted the fact that we white folks were superior, and that people of a different color were inferior.”
JIMMY CARTER DURING HIS TIME IN THE NAVY
Jimmy Carter volunteered to serve in the Navy submarines from 1946 to 1953, gaining expertise in submarine nuclear power plants. During this time, he supervised the tricky shutdown of a nuclear reactor that experienced a partial meltdown.
Day 95. When I went to the Naval Academy, I had to abide by the school’s very rigid standards. One of them prohibited lying. If you were caught lying, you were dismissed in disgrace with no appeal. Truthfulness was the most important thing. When we returned from leave or vacation, we had to sign a little form that declared, I have not done these things. You weren’t expelled for doing those things, you were expelled for lying about them.
Day 362. “As a young man, I trained as a submariner. To qualify, I had to ascend from the bottom of a hundred-foot-deep water tank. In the dark, our bodies were subjected to extreme pressure, which scared all of us.
We had only a half-inch rope attached to the bottom of the tank, with a buoy attached to the top to lead us to the surface. Each of us had to emerge from a high-pressure container and rise a hundred feet, clamping the little line between our feet to control how fast we rose. We had to exhale constantly, and watch the bubbles in front of us, so we would rise at the same rate. If we went too slowly and got below the bubbles, we would sink to the bottom and risk drowning. If we went up too fast, we would get the bends. I went from feeling fear and trepidation in the dark and oppressive environment, to emerging into brilliant light freedom in normal breathing.”
Day 312. “In 1948, I was a submarine officer when my commander-in-chief Harry Truman ordered that segregation end in all the armed forces. Later, a growing number of citizens said racial prejudice is not right and demanded that everyone be treated as equals, men like my friend ambassador Andy Young and the Reverend Martin Luther King were willing to be jailed for their convictions. Thousands joined them, and eventually the Supreme Court ruled against segregation, and our nation’s laws changed because increasing numbers of people finally said, ‘This is right.’”
Day 223. “When I was leaving the Navy in 1953, Rosalyn and I traveled through Washington DC, where racist congressman called Tick Forrester hosted us. He represented our district and was famous for despising Jews, Catholics, and Negroes. During a tour of the Capitol, the congressman deplored the passing of a law that allowed public housing to be built in his district. It upset him because some government housing just twenty miles south of Plains was in the white folks community. He said that we all know that as soon as these cheap houses are built, all kinds of poor people are going to come in and destroy our town. We said nothing, because we ourselves had just been accepted to live in public housing, as we had little money.”
JIMMY CARTER AS GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA
Jimmy Carter was elected to the Georgia state legislature from 1963 through 1967 during the early days of the civil rights movement. He lost the race for Governor of Georgia in 1966 but was elected in 1970 and served one term.
Day 31. Jimmy Carter remembers, “I ran for governor” of Georgia “in 1966 and lost to a prominent segregationist. Afterward, I felt despondent and alienated from God. My sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, world famous evangelist, came to see me and advised me to volunteer for what we called a pioneer mission program.
I agreed and went to” several states “and the poor neighborhoods of Atlanta. In each place I spent a week going house to house, visiting people, and explaining them how to become a Christian.” “When my traveling companion and I would walk up from a stranger’s front porch, we would kneel down and pray in public for the Holy Spirit to be with us, with cars driving past and people laughing at us. Then we would knock on the door, sometimes it got slammed in our faces, sometimes we’d be invited in. In one town in Pennsylvania, we saw forty-eight people accept Christ in one week.”
Day 206. “As the new governor of Georgia, I visited all state prisons with an enlightened prison director. We entered cells and assembly areas, spoke with the prisoners and guards, and discovered some shocking things.
Some inmates in the Reidsville state prison had been in solitary confinement for as long as ten years. No prisoners had received any career planning and about 35% of them were mentally retarded. In response, other southern governors and I set a goal of seeing how much we could improve the prison systems.
In Georgia, we started giving every new prisoner a psychiatric test, an aptitude test, and an IQ test. Counselors learned what all prisoners wanted to do after their release and arranged training for their future careers. Those eligible for parole were given the opportunity to participate in an early release program. I personally held training courses in the state Senate chamber for service club members who had volunteered to serve as probation officers to visit prisoners, and their families before release, and agreed to find a job for the prisoners. We governors competed over who achieved the lowest prison populations.
Today, by contrast, the competition throughout America is over which governor can have more inmates in prison, and who can have the most severe penalties for crimes. The result? We have more of our people in prison than any nation on earth.”
JIMMY CARTER RUNS FOR PRESIDENT
Jimmy Carter and his staff saw an opportunity for Washington outsider to win the Presidency since the electorate was weary of the Watergate Affair. He was a true dark horse candidate, few people outside of Georgia knew his name, but he won the election against the Republican Gerald Ford, whose reputation was damaged by his Presidential pardon of Richard Nixon.
Day 236. “During my 1976 Presidential campaign, none of us had any money.” Jimmy Carter was truly a dark horse candidate. Jimmy Carter continues, “To cover more territory, we had seven family campaigns going at once. Rosalyn, me, our three adult sons with their wives, my mother, and her sister visited different places. Rosalyn and I never campaigned together, I would go to one state while she went to another, as did our other family members and volunteers.
Because we were so strapped for cash, we had one simple rule: everyone staying in a hotel had to pay the bill personally. Whenever we got into a town, therefore, we looked for a host family willing to take us in for the night. Our practice helped us to form wonderful and long-lasting friendships with our many generous hosts. Had we stayed in costly hotels, we never would have had made such delightful personal connections.
The first week after I moved into the White House, we had a reception for all the gracious people who had acted as hosts for my family, we invited no one else. More than seven hundred people came. We gave each of them a small brass plaque that said: ‘A member of The Carter Family spent the night here.”
Day 35. Many of us have troublesome siblings, and Presidents are no exception. President Carter’s brother was Billy Carter: his only claim to fame was being brother of the President. He used this notoriety to hawk a line of beer called Billy Beer.
“On his deathbed, my brother Billy called in one of his good buddies from Plains and said, ‘Everybody knows that I only have a few days to live. I don’t want to die with something on my conscience. I have to tell you in complete candor that your wife and I have had an affair for the last three years.’
His friend his friend’s face dropped and gulped a couple of times. Then Billy laughed and said, ‘No, I’m just joking.’ That was Billy.
In real life, adultery is no laughing matter. In fact, I almost lost the Presidential election because of it. As a Sunday school teacher, I felt qualified to explain what Christ had in mind when he spoke about adultery. I said that he was setting an example that would force all of us to recognize our sinfulness. My mistake was that I explained this to magazine reporters,” and he’s referring to the infamous Playboy interview, “who published my edited remarks as an admission that I was constantly unfaithful to my wife by thinking sexually about other women. Once the magazine came out, it was too late for me to correct the misimpressions.”
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Jimmy Carter faced many challenges in foreign affairs. Our thumbnail features his Camp David Middle East peace negotiations with the Israeli leader, Menachem Begin, and the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. He also negotiated the Panama Canal treaty and the Salt II Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, plus the Iranian hostage crisis.
Day 270. Jimmy Carter remembers the Camp David negotiations. “During my presidency, three devout men met for peace talks at Camp David: Menachem Begin, a Jew, Anwar Sadat, a Muslim, and me a Christian. Sadat had a brown spot in the middle of his forehead whence where, since childhood, he had knelt down and put his forehead on the floor to pray. During our thirteen days of private sessions, we often worried we would not succeed. Sadat asked us to remember that all of us were children of Abraham, bound together by much more than what divided us. He said this repeatedly in the process, making Prime Minister Begin a little nervous, but his attitude impressed me very much.
On Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, all three faiths used the same little room for worship. We had to change it multiple times every week, so the Muslims, and then the Jews, and then the Christians could worship. Today, a Chapel has been built at Camp David for that purpose. Sadat wanted to build a common meeting place on Mount Sinai, and had he not been assassinated a few months after I left the White House, I think his plans would have borne fruit. Sadat always made it plain that Muslim believers revered Moses and Jesus Christ, and that Christians and Jews were accepted in in the Muslim faith as children of the book.”
Day 272. “During thirteen difficult days, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and I worked at Camp David to negotiate a historic peace agreement. When we returned to Washington, I was invited to address a special session of the US Congress.
I had no time to develop a lengthy speech, but I decided on the way to the Capitol to quote Matthew 5:9. I wanted to say, Blessed are the peacemakers, but I couldn’t remember what came next, so I asked to be given a Bible upon my arrival. A staff member slipped me a piece of paper that said, For they will be called children of God. I repeated it as I asked Sadat and Begin to stand.
Peacemakers are very special people; you have to understand and sympathize with others who have different points of view. Begin and Sadat’s countries had been at war for four times during the previous twenty-five years. They hated each other. I kept the two men apart for their last ten days at Camp David because they couldn’t sit in the same room without all the old animosities coming out.”
Day 308. “Yitzhak Rabin, a former Prime Minister of Israel, was assassinated in 1995. He had been a friend of mine for twenty-four years. When I was elected Governor, General Rabin visited Rosalyn and me in Georgia. He was the hero of the Six-Day war in 1967, in which Israel repelled attackers and occupied the Holy Land.
The year after Rabin’s visit to Georgia, Rosalyn and I visited Israel as Rabin’s guest. Our first time there, Rabin arranged in-depth briefings for me with Israel’s top generals and military leaders, so I could learn about the Mideast war environment. Which began my intense interest in the Middle East. Later, after I became President,” we negotiated the “Camp David accords which achieved peace between Egypt and Israel.
Sometime later, Rabin and other Israeli leaders held separate secret talks with Palestinians, which resulted in the Oslo agreement,” in which “the Israelis publicly agreed to withdraw from certain Palestinian territory, despite the convictions of some right-wing Israelis. When someone decided to kill the traitor Rabin, the young assassin said, ‘God wanted me to do it.’
We humans can build up within ourselves a strong element of hatred, even to the point of murder, when we feel deeply about something. It’s easy to say, ‘I’m speaking for God, and anyone who disagrees with me opposes God.’ This attitude can easily lead to horrible violence and conflict, so we must take care not to spiritualize our personal beliefs simply because we feel strongly about some issue.”
Day 10. “In 1978, Deng Xiaoping, Vice Premier of China, and I began months of intense secret negotiations. Finally in December, we announced normalization of diplomatic relations between China and the United States. The next month I invited the Chinese leader to visit Washington. He asked if I had any special favor to ask. I asked him to give people religious freedom and allow Bibles and missionaries to return to China. He pledged to do these things, except that no foreign missionaries could return.
A couple of years later, on a visit to China, I found churches overrun with worshippers in Shanghai. They held four services a day to accommodate all the new believers. They had run out of special paper for printing bibles which the government provided.
Thirty years of intense persecution under the communist regime had forced Christians to consolidate, and their faith became more intense. When they finally received a breath of fresh air, the Christian faith exploded, and still today it continues to grow by leaps and bounds.”
Day 57. “During my presidency, Idi Amin was the leader of Uganda and the most brutal dictator I had ever known. He lied and killed his way to power and then executed tens of thousands of his own people to stay there. We later saw vultures called Marabou storks hanging around a prominent hotel in the capital city. Why? Amin often killed his opponents and had their bodies thrown from the hotel’s balcony, and the birds ate their corpses.
I mean Idi Amin hated me because I had a strong policy of human rights, and I condemned him publicly. One time, to embarrass me, he rounded up fifty-one Christian missionaries and announced to the world that he would execute them. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I talked with some Muslim friends in Saudi Arabia who called Amin and threatened to cut off foreign aid in an effort to convince him to let the missionaries go.
Amin relented and told the missionaries they could go free, but every one of them refused to leave their service for Jesus Christ in Uganda. When I received word of their decision, I went off by myself and wept.”
Day 224. “When Iran took American hostages in November 1979, the affliction of Islamic fundamentalism hit me as President. One of the basic principles of the Koran is that visitors are to be treated with the utmost respect. Some passages say that if diplomats visit your country, treat them with absolute courtesy, but yet the fundamentalist Iranian leader violated these principles by holding our hostages for fourteen months! I thank God that eventually they all returned home, safe and free, but through that experience I learned an unwelcome lesson on fundamentalism.”
Day 314. “St Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the 13th century,” pondered the question, “’What is a just war?’ Aquinas struggled with the verse about turning the other cheek. The definition of a just war that he developed, which has greatly influenced Christians ever since, insists that war should be a last resort after all peaceful alternatives have been exhausted.
I faced this issue as President on several occasions. One example was when the Iranian militants captured and held some American hostages. I prayed more during that year than at any other time. We could have destroyed Iran with our powerful military, but in the process many innocent Iranians would have been killed. There is little doubt that our hostages would have been assassinated by their captors in retaliation against our attacks, so I decided, contrary to most of the advice I received, to try to resolve the issue peacefully, through economic pressure and persistent negotiations.
I never went to bed during the last three days of my presidency, working nonstop for the release of the hostages. At 10 AM, on my last day of office, they were released to board an airplane, but Ayatollah Khomeini wouldn’t let the plane depart until I was no longer President. Five minutes after noon, the plane took off, and all the hostages came home safe and to freedom.”
Day 160. “Habitat for Humanity workers were excluded from India until I signed an official declaration to the Prime Minister that they would not promote Christianity. It’s also against the law in Greece to convert an Orthodox believer to Protestantism. When I was President, I had a serious problem because one of our mercy ships docked in Greece. An officer gave some Protestant pamphlets to a teenager who came on board. His mother learned about it and told the authorities, and they arrested and imprisoned the officer. Fortunately, I was able to use my Presidential influence to get him released, but it was a surprising thing to see happen.”
Day 105. “Roslyn and I have visited Saudi Arabia several times. On one occasion, we” “visited King Fahd in the desert. From our helicopter, we looked down upon many Bedouin camps. Although Saudi Arabia is a wealthy country, most Bedouins still live in their goat hair tents just as their ancestors did. Nowadays, you might see a British Land Rover next to the tent and a satellite antenna so the family can watch Al Jazeera, CNN, or cartoons.”
When different flocks come to a central water hole the sheep all mixed together. When the shepherds move their flocks, they stand aside, whistle, and their sheep come to them. An intimate relationship exists between sheep and their shepherd.”
Carter is referring to the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, and the Old Testament stories about how the patriarchs often met their spouses at watering holes, where their sheep and camels drink water from the well.
PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER AND DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
Jimmy Carter also faced many challenges domestically. The country was coming out of a deep recession with persistent stagflation and energy supply issues.
Day 213. “The poor are often assigned court lawyers for trial. This happened to Mary Prince, who has helped my family ever since my days as governor. One day, when she took a short trip to see her aunt, a shooting occurred. As Mary was the only stranger in town, she was arrested for the crime, although she had nothing to do with it. On the day of her trial, her court-appointed attorney met her for the first time and said, ‘Mary, just plead guilty and we’ll get you a minimum punishment.’ She did so and received a life sentence.
When I became President, the original trial judge agreed to look into Mary’s case. Soon she was found completely innocent, but by then she had served six years in prison. After receiving a full pardon, she was released.”
Day 218. “Business leaders in the third world nations rarely have enough money to bribe outsiders, so most such bribes come only from the world’s rich nations. I saw this clearly during my presidency. During my early months in office, we passed a law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices act, making it a serious crime for any American business to bribe a foreigner in order to make a sale or gain an advantage. Many objected to the act, even good friends thought they would be at a severe disadvantage if they couldn’t offer bribes. In fact, after the act passed, Delta Airlines had to cancel all its flights to Mexico and Jamaica, partially because airport officials there wouldn’t service its planes unless the airline bribed them.”
Day 340. “One day my press secretary Jody Powell said to my mother Lillian, ‘A very important reporter from the Washington Post wants to interview you, she’s going to write a very good article about you.’” She was reluctant but finally agreed.
“The reporter began asking some not so friendly questions.” She asked whether her son “was always truthful. Mama said, ‘That’s right, even when Jimmy was a small boy.’ The reporter asked, ‘You mean he has never lied?’ His mother Lillian replied, ‘No, except maybe a little white lie now and then.’
‘Aha,’ the reporter exclaimed, ‘a white lie! What do you mean by that?’
Mama replied, ‘Remember, when you came to the door a while ago, and I said, you look very nice and was glad to see you?’”
JIMMY CARTER AFTER HIS PRESIDENCY
Jimmy Carter was in his late fifties after his Presidency, but he did not want to retire. He continued informal diplomacy, continued his involvement in Habitat for Humanity, providing housing for the poor, and founded the non-profit Carter Center.
Day 241. “After the tragic attacks on September 11, 2001, authorities arrested about sixteen-hundred people living in America, mostly of Arab descent, suspecting that they might be guilty of terrorist activities. They were imprisoned for months without being charged, with access to lawyers or even their families. Some of their loved ones made calls to human rights organizations, including the Carter center, saying, ‘I don’t know how to contact my husband. He was taken away and is being held incommunicado.’ Many others were captive in different parts of the world or were locked in wire cages at Guantanamo Bay. Some of them still remain without being tried and proven guilty. The Secretary of Defense announced the Geneva principles regarding treatment of prisoners did not apply to anyone suspected of terrorist activities.”
Day 264. “In just a few days of genocide in Rwanda during 1994, more than half a million people died. Roslyn and I later visited a killing site, a small church with a few outbuildings. Tutsi women and children had crowded into this church while their husbands fled into the swamps and woods. The men imagined that their families would be safe in the church, but the Hutus killed all of them with axes, spears, and machetes. Today, visitors see big piles of skulls inside the building, and outside there were layers of rotting clothes, human hair, and bones in a deep hole where several hundred bodies were dumped.
“Only one woman survived. She came to the church with the baby in her arms and one on her back. They killed her two infants, slashed her neck, and buried her under a pile of corpses. Periodically, the killers returned to examine the bodies, checking to see if any remained alive. She lay still. I spoke with her at length and asked her if she knew who ordered the massacre. She said she did, it was her neighbors who gave the orders, neighbors she had known all her life.”
Bible scholars say the human race is fallen. In practical terms, that means we all have a staggering capacity for evil. Biblical history reports that things got so bad that God wiped out the whole race and started over with Noah and his family.”
Day 119. “My sister Ruth Carter Stapleton believed in the ceremony described by James” where sick people were anointed by oil “because it brought people together in a spirit of humility. She asked” when she was deathly ill for “her friends to pray not that she would recover from her fatal disease, but that she’d be strong enough to accept the will of God. She wanted to embrace God’s will with joy and not as a tragedy.”
Day 129. “Garth Brooks is a friend and a dedicated Habitat for Humanity volunteer. One of his greatest hits is Unanswered Prayers, which describes his gratitude when he meets a former sweetheart who chose someone else many years after he had married his second choice. He thanks God that the Lord denied his earlier prayer. Garth says happiness isn’t about getting what you want, it’s about wanting what you’ve got.”
Day 284. “Roslyn and I took up skiing at an advanced age. Our friend, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington, let us use his ski lodge overlooking Aspen’s beautiful slopes. We took our grandchildren, and Bandar’s place amazed them! It had an indoor swimming pool, many servants, wonderful food, and a game room for the kids. One morning at breakfast, one of my grandchildren, Jeremy, a particularly outspoken child, said in a loud piping voice, ‘Papa, are you going to die someday?’
My heart pounded with pleasure as I thought, Here’s my little grandson worried about his papa’s health. I replied, ‘Well yes, sweet boy, everybody’s going to die someday, but I hope it won’t be anytime soon.’ Deathly silence followed, and I couldn’t wait to hear Jeremy’s response. Finally, he asked, ‘Papa, when you die, can we still come to Bandar’s place?’”
Day 329. “In 1981, I was asked to make a small speech at a small Methodist College in southern Japan. I had been out of the White House only a few months and they had felt overawed that a former President would even visit their school. Everyone was nervous: the professors, the administrators, the students, and the parents, so I decided to begin my speech with a joke.
It takes a long time to translate English into Japanese, and the Japanese sense of humor differs markedly from ours, so instead of my funniest joke, I chose my shortest one. After the interpreter translated it, the whole audience collapsed into laughter. I had never had a better response to a joke, and I couldn’t wait to finish my speech so I could ask the interpreter how he translated it.
When I later inquired, however, the man ducked his head looked the other way and changed the subject. When I persisted, he finally said, ‘Mr President, I told the audience President Carter told the funny story. Everyone must laugh.’”
Day 343. “For thirty years, I’ve been a professor at Emory University, which has a very fine religion and theology school. The university has been careful to assure that professors who teach in the theology school are not all cut from the same cloth. No one has to sign a creed that says, ‘I will teach this way and no other.’ In the past, our seminaries customarily let people and pastors express their own ideas, as long as they believed in the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It’s becoming less prevalent today: one major Baptist seminary recently fired every professor who believed that women might be pastors deacons or even teachers.
I believe these kinds of changes conflict with the idea of the priesthood of all believers. Each of us has a sobering responsibility to study the scriptures and come to our own conclusions, through prayer and meditation about God’s mandates. This is religious freedom.”[2]
Our other reflection on his devotions:
Jimmy Carter Inspirational Daily Devotions: Bible Stories, Reflections on Historical Events
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-inspirational-daily-devotions-bible-stories-reflections-on-historical-events/
https://youtu.be/b24kTvwmuU0
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritan_woman_at_the_well
[2] Jimmy Carter, Through the Year With Jimmy Carter, 366 Daily Devotions from the 39th President (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Zondervan , 2011) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center
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