Jimmy Carter
speaker
288 appearances
16 recordings
12 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 1 May
Jimmy Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I can see the various aspects of a deep Christian faith. I realize that as I was at the age of 15, I'm still searching. I'm still trying to learn. I'm still trying to stretch my heart, stretch my mind. I learned two or three times in my life that my faith could sustain total doubt in God. I rejected God a few times. I felt that God had betrayed me, that I could not depend on my faith at all.
And I had to go through a very difficult and unpleasant healing process. I've learned over a period of a long lifetime, 50 years of marriage with Rosalyn, how sadly mistaken I was in dealing with her. When we first got married, I was an arrogant, young Naval Academy graduate. Rosa was a very shy, timid, younger person from Plains, Georgia. I totally dominated her.
I didn't show any sensitivity when she was distressed. I was just impatient. When decisions were to be made about our family's life, I didn't consult with her. I just made a decision and informed her of what we were going to do. That was in my formative stage as a mature human being. I've learned to correct some of those mistakes.
So prayer life for me has paralleled in awareness and growth and in significant my evolution as a human being. And I hope that I'll continue to improve in the remaining years that I have.
One of the most distressing times was in 1966. I had been a state senator two terms. I thought after prayer that I should run for governor of Georgia. I had mounted a massive campaign all over the state frantically, shaking hands, asking people to support me. My opponent was a racist.
named lester maddox whose symbol was a pick handle that he used to beat african-americans over the head if they tried to come into his restaurant and buy some fried chicken when the results came in lester maddox had won and i had lost and i couldn't believe that the georgia people preferred him i couldn't believe that god would let this happen so i had a complete renunciation of of um
of my faith. And my sister, who lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Ruth Carter Stapleton, was a very famous evangelist. My mother called her and told her that I had this attitude. So Ruth came down to Plains, and we went out in the woods. And Ruth tried to console me, which was impossible.
And Ruth quoted a couple of verses from the second chapter of James, which was a foundation of Ruth's ministry, which was a very happy ministry. Anyway, James says, according to God, that no matter how horrible a mistake we made or how total our failure might be,
or how abject our despair or how great our loss, that if we have, first of all, courage, and then if we have patience, and then if we are wise enough to seek wisdom from God, any catastrophe can be changed into a blessing. I told Ruth that this was a complete baloney. That wasn't the word I used. That it was ridiculous. And Ruth said, Jimmy, you have to have faith that this is true.
She said, why don't you just forget about politics for a while and just respond to any opportunities you have. So just a few weeks later, I was asked to go as a lay witness to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. A group of volunteer Baptists from State College, which is where Penn State University is, had called every family in the phone book.
And they had identified 100 families, none of whom had any religious faith. And I was asked to go and visit them. those families so I knocked on the door some received us with open arms some wouldn't open the door and at the end of a week I had experienced for the first time in my life a genuine presence of God a sense that the Holy Spirit was with us we had 48 people who accepted Christian faith
And that was a turning point in my life. I then began to see that no matter if I was elected to any future office or not, that there were other things in life. When we do have a setback in politics or in business or whatever, we need to have faith that we can find an alternative that would give us much more significant priorities in life.
Well, it was after I left the White House that we found Rosalind. that we would be confronting each other in the same house all day long and not have a job outside, although we do a lot of things now outside that we didn't anticipate then.
Also, when I lost the election in 1980, I discovered to my horror that a very successful business that I had put into a blind trust when I went to the White House was now a million dollars in debt. We had moved back to Plains, Georgia, a town that had a population of 600. Our last child was leaving home. We didn't have a job. We didn't know what in the world we were going to do.
And so Rosa and I have evolved our lifestyle over, after some difficulty, I might admit, in adjusting to each other so that we respect each other's privacy. We know now, after a number of years, what times of day we get together. But during the work periods, when we're writing a book, for instance, books, that's how we make our living now, writing books, we respect each other's privacy.
And we don't encroach on it.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I wrote about that in the book. My father, my mother, both my sisters and my brother all died from the same illness, and that is cancer. They all smoked cigarettes, and they died, most of them prematurely. I've never smoked, and that's one reason I have better health, I think.
But when my family members approached death, all of them, for some reason, approached it with great equanimity. My sister, Ruth, was a famous evangelist, Ruth Carter Stapleton, My brother and my mother were great humorists, and they were still telling jokes and kidding back and forth with the family members around their bedside when they were approaching death the last few hours.
My oldest sister, Gloria, was an avid biker. She had a home, you might say, for motorcyclists who were on the way down to Daytona to race, and they would spend two or three days with Gloria while she fed them and took care of them and repaired their jackets and so forth. When Gloria was on her deathbed in the hospital, we all knew she was going to die with pancreatic cancer.
She had two bikers moved into planes, and two motorcyclists were at Gloria's hospital deathbed. room, door, 24 hours a day. And when Gloria finally died, her funeral procession was a hearse, and in front of the hearse were 37 Harley-Davidson motorcycles. And carved on Gloria's tombstone in Plains is She Rides in Harley Heaven.
Showing 221–240 of 288 · page 12 of 15
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