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Vermilion Faith Community of Care Uniting the faith community of Vermilion Parish in service |
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An Umbrella over the World Series I moved to Louisiana in 1972, to work for an organization that did community development work. I soon joined a local Baptist church, but later in the year was drawn to prayer meetings that were being held at a local Catholic church. This was the time that the Charismatic Renewal was in full swing in the Catholic Church throughout Louisiana. Prayer meetings were quite lively, lives were being very deeply touched, and participants were finding the faith to believe in ‘miracles’ in new areas of their lives. |
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© Eric George, The Newark Advocate. Used with permission. |
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One day in the spring of 1974, by which time I was a regular attender at these prayer meetings, one of the leaders, Mr. Cliff Hebert, stood up at a meeting and told us of a prayer request. The Babe Ruth World Series was coming to Abbeville that summer, a great event for our little city. He said that he had taken on the responsibility of housing all of the visitors – baseball players, coaches, family members, etc. – with local families during the series. He reminded us that, since we usually have a lot of rain during the summer, bad weather could seriously disrupt the series, so he asked us to join with him in prayer throughout the series that all game activity would be protected from the rain. In an atmosphere where we saw many prayers for physical healings and other changes in peoples’ lives be answered in dramatic ways, this was not an unusual request. Not being much of a baseball fan, I didn’t pay much attention to the course of the games. I did see that there was a lot of rain throughout the parish during those days and, while I joined in the prayer for protection of the games, I did not know what was actually going on with them. At the first prayer meeting after the games had concluded, Cliff stood up and thanked us for our prayers. The games had been totally protected in the midst of intense rains very close by. I was impressed. Within a few days, I went by Cliff’s house to get some more details. He told me that there had indeed been absolutely no interference with the games from the rain. On the last day, when participants were leaving, when the last bus was loaded, he had to open his umbrella to protect himself from the rain, which was just starting to come down. What a wonderful conclusion to this delightful story! As I have pondered these events in the days and years that followed, my thoughts have mainly gone along two lines:
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