By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JUNE 30, 2020 | The return of an old friend: Last year, this daylily output was a feature photo in this publication, and now the plant has blossomed for another year. It’s located just outside our kitchen window. Its compatriots, the orange type, develop earlier each year, and we await the red daylily’s bloom with anticipation. We found this about old friends: “Say what you want about aging, it’s still the only way to have old friends.”
John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, was born June 28 in 1703. We in Georgia are steeped in his ministry in the early Georgia colony, along with his brother, Charles. And we remember him often as we see he is the author of many of our church hymns.
He was born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, and his father was a Nonconformist—a dissenter from the Church of England. Wesley studied at Oxford, where he decided to become a priest. He and his brother joined a religious study group that was given the nickname “the Methodists” for their rigorous and methodical study habits; the name wasn’t meant as a compliment, but Wesley hung onto it anyway and managed to attract several new members to the group, who fasted two days a week and spent time in social service.
John Wesley was somewhat like his father, not taking the normal route to the pulpit. Instead, he took to the fields, traveling on horseback, preaching two or three times a day. He began recruiting local laypeople to preach as well, and ran afoul of the Church of England for doing so.
The Georgia Encyclopedia tells us that John Wesley became a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and, along with Charles, sailed for Georgia in 1735. Charles and John traveled to Georgia with James Oglethorpe on his second voyage to the colony. In Georgia, John served as the rector of Christ Church in Savannah. Difficulties arising from Wesley’s strict discipline with his congregation, as well as an unsuccessful love affair, led to his return to England in 1738.
Though there’s no evidence that he actually wrote it himself, “John Wesley’s Rule” does a fair job of summing up his life:
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.
Marlene Ratledge Buchanan of Snellville has a new book out, a Southern cozy mystery, complete with a love story, a murder and a couple of ghosts, which are sure to entertain.
An unexpected inheritance leads a school teacher to find an extended family, long dead, living in the family home place. One demands she leave, and the other asks for protection. A little love, a little laughter, and a great deal of Southern charm leads the reader into a book of hidden family secrets. Here’s a link to find the book.
In this pandemic, food shortages popped up. And of all things, Wendy’s eateries, known for hamburgers, ran out of beef! So, the home office in Dublin, Ohio took action. It started promoting a spicy chicken sandwich, coming with mayonnaise, tomato and lettuce, and at an attractive price: 2 for $5.
We took ‘em up on it, and whammo! It’s a winner, some even saying it’s better than the all-time favorite Chick-Fil-A sandwich. Yummy!
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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