Throughout my life, I’ve leaned on my faith to help find my way in difficult times | Opinion

Recently, I have been communicating with a young friend who is going through some health challenges. I pray for her every day and encourage her to keep the faith. I have written about my own faith many times in this space. And I realize that it is much easier to tell someone to “have faith” when it isn’t you that is hurting. I also know that too often we, Christians, use the “I-am-praying-for-you” line when we don’t know how else to comfort someone who is hurting.

Living a faith-filled life is a privilege that is open to all God’s children. Faith is putting our belief in action. It is performance with works. Yet, often, we don’t know how to use our faith, or we sometimes fall short of it when the going gets tough. I speak (or write) from experience.

As a child, I was always curious about what it meant to have faith in God. I wanted to be a “good” person, but all too often I would fall short of my goal. I wrote poems about faith and prayers in my school notebook. I even shed tears in church when I was “touched” by a good sermon, or a hymn. But as soon as my faith was tested, I would revert to my old ways. There must be a better way, I used to think. And there was, and still is.

I was in my early 20’s when I realized that living a faith-filled life wasn’t something that I could wish on myself. The Bible tells us that faith first comes by hearing the word of God, and then believing it. When I first heard that, it seemed that a light came on in my head and opened my spiritual understanding.

Prayers needed to help cope

With that enlightening, I asked the Lord to come into my life; to be a friend that I could talk to, and one who would talk back to me. My prayer was answered. But over the years, my faith has really been tested. First, as a young single mother with two sons to rear, trying to bring them up to be upstanding citizens who believed in integrity and justice despite what was going on in the world around them.

But in the early days of motherhood, I realized that being a parent was a job that I knew absolutely nothing about. When I made mistakes, and there were many times when I did, I would tell my boys, “We are in this together. Nobody gave me a blueprint on parenting… I’m learning right along with you.”

That seemed to work for a while with them. The job of parenting really kept me before the Lord asking for more faith and directions. I would need the Lord’s directions when problems arose that my boys found embarrassing to tell their mother. But by faith, I told them early on that there was absolutely nothing they could not tell me, and I while I might not have all the answers at the time, I knew someone who did. So, prayer became a mainstay in our household. By faith I believed the Lord would see me through and give me the proper answers for my sons’ curious minds. And He did.

Later, I would need faith to carry me through when I worked as a maid and was treated lower than an animal. I needed that faith to keep me from being vindictive when I was mistreated. And when one woman — a good “Christian” career woman who gave a part of her tithes to my church every month — set aside a broken plate, chipped cup, and tarnished flatware for me to use to eat my lunch. The same woman ordered me to clean the bathroom last, before leaving for the day.

I believe it was my faith, and God’s sense of humor, that taught me that I was somebody, that I was God’s child. Therefore, it was OK for me to use the good dishes and nice silverware whenever I ate my lunch. I also cleaned the bathroom first. Just so you know, she lived to be a ripe old age, and never got sick because I ate off the good dishes and cleaned the bathroom first.

Travails as a Herald reporter

I would need to lean on my faith in the Lord even more when I became the first African American female reporter at The Miami Herald, placed in a nearly all-white male newsroom and told to go to work. That was in 1970. On my first day on the job, then-Managing Editor Larry Jinks assigned me to join other reporters to cover Miami’s second racial disturbance.

Looking back, I know it was only my faith in the Lord that took me through those early days as a reporter. Nobody even told me what the deadline was. Or how to head my paper (we wrote our stories on manual typewriters back then). I was sent out on “wild goose chases” — once to the county dump on Northwest Forty-seventh Avenue near Countyline Road.

Back then, it really was a dump, with ugly gray dirt and mounds of stinking garbage piled high with buzzards swarming overhead. I remember praying when I realized that I’d been played a dirty trick. I asked God to protect me as I drove my old Chevy up the dirt road and turned around to go back downtown. I prayed that I wouldn’t get stuck in the dirt because there was nobody to hear my cries of help if that happened.

It was a hot and humid day. I was wearing a dress made of hot, polyester fabric and I had no air-conditioning in my car. But the Lord was faithful. Once back on Forty-seventh Avenue headed back to the office, I was sure the guys at the City Desk were laughing their heads off. But I was angry and frustrated. And scared, too. I’d been given the opportunity to write on a three months’ trial basis. There was no room for failure.

And so, I prayed for the Lord to show me what to do. I didn’t want to play the “Black” card. And just like I am telling you this story, the Lord spoke to my heart and told me to wipe my face and get one of my favorite gospel songs and sing it all the way back downtown. And I did. By the time I got back to the office, the Lord had boosted my spirit so I felt like I was walking on clouds. That’s what faith in God can do.

The county dump wasn’t the end of the prank-playing on the Black woman reporter. So one day I approached City Editor Steve Rogers and told him my plight — that I was a widow with two boys to raise and that I needed this job. He was sympathetic but didn’t know what to do with me. I presented a proposal: Up until that time (1970) the paper hadn’t done a good job of covering the Black community. “Let me tell our story,” I asked. To my surprise, he said “Yes.” Thank you, Steve Rogers, wherever you are today.

As it turned out, I covered more than Black news. Later, while covering the school beat, I received my first honor — the local School Bell Award for my classroom coverage of Miami-Dade County Schools.

These are my musings as I think on faith and how it has been a constant in my life. I hope my young friend reads this and is encouraged.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Hebrew 11:1

Bea Hines can be reached at bea.hines@gmail.com