A phenomenon we all needed came into our view at National Prayer Breakfast 2013, and it couldn’t have come along at a better time.
The phenomenon in the person of Dr. Ben Carson didn’t just upstage President Barack Obama when he spoke at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast, he restored amazing grace to a loudly-lauded event.
How can we take to heart an event touted as “inspirational” and beneficial to federal government officials when they piously break breakfast bread before returning to careers duking it out in House and Senate?
How sincere can proclaimed Christianity be in an atmosphere where the Ave Maria is sung at a 3,500-attendee gathering presided over by a president who champions partial birth abortion?
The laughter that greeted Obama’s remarks that “I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we’ve been talking about the whole time at prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten. On the same day of the prayer breakfast,” had died down before Dr. Ben Carson took to the podium.
The celebrated Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon began his address by figuratively operating on the life-and-culture-threatening tumor called “political correctness” before tossing it to the medical waste on top of the trash heap.
Noting how people are “afraid to talk” anymore, “Merry Christmas”, he said, is a salutation and a greeting of goodwill and it makes no difference the religion of the person to which it is offered.
Speaking openly about “the moral decay of America”, Carson issued a warning alert to all lemmings headed toward a Rome-like fate; confronted the danger of America’s debt and current fiscal policy—right in front of a sometimes frowning Obama, who was sitting just feet away from the speaker’s podium.
“Our deficit is a big problem,” he said to crowd applause. “Think about it—and our national debt—$16 and a half trillion dollars.”
“What about our taxation system—so complex there is no one that can possibly comply with every jot and tittle. When I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe—God—and he’s given us a system. It’s called tithe.”
The son, raised by a single mother, in abject poverty as a truculent student, turned his life around at the urgings of a Mother, who expected two weekly book reviews from two sons who borrowed their books on a card from a Detroit library. Sonya Carson, mother, who had only a Grade 3 education and raised her family as a hard-working domestic, check-marked and highlighted her sons’ book reviews without them ever knowing she couldn’t read them.
Carson described how his Mother, who discovered that her husband was a bigamist with another family, went on in later life to earn a college degree and is, in her own right, a doctor, refused to feel sorry for herself and shunned the role of ‘victim’.
Sonya Carlson’s life motto is: “Learn to do your best and God will do the rest.”
Dr. Ben Carson doesn’t let a breakfast stand for his Christianity but chooses “Jesus Christ as my role model”.
Inundated by messages of praise after his National Prayer Breakfast address, Dr. Carson remains with both feet planted squarely on the ground. Asked by Sean Hannity if he would run for president, Carson answered, “If the Lord grabs me by the collar, I would, but it is not my intention.”
Lauded by Hannity for saying what he had to say, without mincing words, in front of the president, Carson said:
“It really didn’t matter who I was sitting in front of. Before I speak, I ask God to give me the right things to say.”
A refreshing breeze blew through the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday.
All those who heard it send this message to the senior doctor in the family: “Dr. Carson you certainly gave America one of its best ever sons.”