Praying with love - Sampson Independent

On the courthouse steps, a prayer circle formed around Becky Spell Vann as she preached about making Clinton and America a better place with love.

Vann, the leader of Tim’s Gift Love Ministry, was one of several people spreading messages of love and unity for the 68th annual National Day of Prayer. The theme for 2019 is “Love One Another.” Scripture from John 13:34 was used to emphasize the point — “Love One Another. Just as I have loved you.”

“Love never fails,” she said while speaking about personal experiences. “Where is our love? Where is our love in this town? When was the last time you visited another church in this county or this city?

“If we want others to come and to love and to honor God, then we got to share that love,” Vann said. “This place should be packed. Traffic should be stopped out there because people should turn out in numbers to pray.”

Pastor Eddie Barnes of Clinton Community Church spoke about how the 2018 National Day of Prayer, focused on unity, was one of the largest ever for the national task force.

“It spoke to the heart of our nation,” said Barnes, local organizer. “It spoke to the heart of our nation. As a nation, we’re seeing more and more division. Praying about unity was something important and this year as they prayed about what the theme was going to be, Love One Another stood out more than anything else.

“If you look at our nation and where we’re at, the idea of loving one another is more important than ever before,” Barnes said.

Barnes added that it’s a simple idea that shouldn’t be taken lightly as he read from scriptures such as John 13:35 which focuses of Jesus telling his disciples to love.

“The idea is no longer love you neighbor as yourself,” he said. “Love your neighbor as Christ loves your neighbor. See them as such, care for them as such and even in the midst of people who are going to maybe betray you are deny you, love them. The kind of love that gives yourself away.”

On behalf of Clinton Mayor Lew Starling, the Rev. Marcus Becton, mayor pro tem for Clinton, read a proclamation for the observance, which came from an idea birthed in 1775 by the first Congress of the United States. National Day of Prayer made more progress in 1952 through a resolution by the United States Congress and it was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a law to make the first Thursday in May as National Day of Prayer.

Becton, pastor of Way of the Cross Church Ministries, also preached on the courthouse steps about love being powerful, while stressing the importance of diversity.

“This is amazing because of the fact that though we are a makeup of different colors and a makeup of different religions and different denominations … yet we all are striving to go to the same one heaven,” Becton said. “There is no separation of heaven, there’s not a white heaven or a black heaven. There’s not a Hispanic heaven. There’s not a Native American heaven. There’s one heaven and there’s not a section in heaven with a country club or anything of that nature.”

During his sermon he said God wants everyone to come together and spoke about how love never fails and how the love of God leaves a solution.

“My brothers and sisters, how many situations and issues have there been in our lives or we have seen in our lives, where if there had actually been love in the equation, the turnout would have been different?”

One of the examples was the recent shooting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte campus, which took the lives of two students.

Vann encouraged everyone to spread awareness about National Day of Prayer and have a relationship with God, before singing “Jesus Loves Me,” with the crowd joining in.

“He does,” Vann said. “And I pray next year when you come back that we’ll stop traffic on that street and that people will have to get out of their cars to find out what going on and we’ll say it’s all about Jesus. It’s all about Jesus and it’s time that we put him first.”

Reach Chase Jordan at 910-592-8137. Follow us on Twitter at @SampsonInd and like us on Facebook.

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