Virtues to Keep a Nation Alive<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
 
J. Michael Sharman
 
On January 10, 2007, twelve hundred people attended the 41st Annual Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Richmond, which is the traditional beginning for the opening day of Virginia's General Assembly
This year, though, in celebration of America's 400th Anniversary, and as a recognition of the General Assembly's status as the oldest continuously operating elected legislative body in the Western Hemisphere, the General Assembly began its 2007 session at the Jamestown Memorial Church.
Back in 1619, the inhabitants of the Virginia colony gathered to make their choice "by show of hands" for their local representatives ("burgesses"). The elected burgesses then met in the choir of the Jamestown church and began their work as Jamestown's newly elected leaders with prayer: "for as much as men's affairs do little prosper where God's service is neglected, all the Burgesses took their places in the Choir till a prayer was said."[1]
The "verie good preacher"  who offered the prayer, Rev. Richard Buck, was a survivor of the shipwreck on the island of Bermuda that gave Shakespeare the idea to write his play, "The Tempest."
In 2007, the first prayer at the Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast was offered by Capt. Scotty Smiley, a survivor of a Mosul, Iraq suicide bomber's blast. The West Point graduate survived, but he lost both eyes. Though totally blind, he is still an active duty officer: "I'm able to help out with the basic officer leader course [and] initial entry training. I'm also able to speak to lieutenants and soldiers who are just entering the Army and give them a perspective. Give them a real-life example of what can happen and what will happen."[2]
Capt. Smiley told the prayer gathering that he is also still on active duty for the Lord: he said that he had faith in God before he went to Iraq, and he has faith even now after losing his eyes in Iraq. He said he lost his physical sight, but not his spiritual vision.
The main breakfast speaker was Michael Timmis, the co-owner of Talon, LLC, a private investment holding company with combined revenues in excess of $2.0 billion. This very wealthy man told the crowd that about twenty years ago he had realized as a lawyer and a businessman that he'd written hundreds of contracts but, he said, "I'd never read the most basic contract of my life – the Bible." When he did, it radically changed his life. He now works as the Chairman of Prison Fellowship International and his Timmis Family Foundation supports thousands of children in Uganda and the Sudan.
Gov. Tim Kaine ended the prayer breakfast by reading from his morning devotional in the book he'd been using, "A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer", which that morning was about listening: "The beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them. Christians who are no longer willing to listen to one another will soon not be willing to listen to God, either."
When Governor Kaine and the delegates arrived at the Jamestown church later that day, they listened to their keynote speaker, Vice President Cheney, who told them:
"All the accomplishments of that distant generation were possible only because of human qualities that all of us respect -- qualities that all of us would want to be remembered for ourselves: courage, perseverance, loyalty, and trust in Almighty God. Because of those virtues, a young colony was kept alive."[3]
 
Our nation's second four hundred years look promising, then, because those were the same virtues that Capt. Smiley, Michael Timmis, and Gov. Kaine exemplified at the prayer breakfast that launched America's 400th Anniversary.
 
 

[1] Pory, John, PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST AMERICAN LEGISLATURE (July 30, 1619) [Modern language and spelling added.]

[2] http://www.cbn.com/700club/features/amazing/Smileys111006.aspx

[3] Cheney, Richard "Vice President's Remarks to a Joint Session of the Virginia General Assembly" Jamestown Memorial Church, Jamestown, Virginia (January 10, 2007)