Developing Horizons Magazine (2).pdf Spring 2015 | Page 5

Letter to Editor 5-28-14 by Roy Perren
……..To my knowledge the Towns County Recreation
and Conference Center has been used by groups for
meetings other than the National Day of Prayer. Quite
contrary to the claim that the use of this facility for the
National Day of Prayer is an abuse of what the author
of last week’s letter calls the separation clause, it can
be stated that Towns County followed the letter and
the spirit of the law by allowing the Recreation and
Conference Center to be used for the National Day of
Prayer. While the event was open to all, no one was
forced to attend. It was great to see the large number
there for the National Day of Prayer exercising their
freedom of speech, their right to peaceful assembly,
and their right to worship God in prayer.
Preserving our Christian values
and mountain culture-It’s worth fighting for.
On a hot, sultry, summer day in July of 1789, in
Philadelphia, when Benjamin Franklin came outside
the Constitutional Convention Hall to address the
crowd, one person asked, “Dr. Franklin What have you
given us?” He said, “A Republic, IF YOU CAN KEEP

IT.” Americans have kept and furiously defended,
through wars and political battles, freedoms granted to
them by THE REPUBLIC conceived that hot summer
in Philadelphia over 225 years ago.
Towns County residents and those of the
Appalachian region have a proud heritage of Godfearing immigrants, many of Irish, Scottish, and
Anglo Saxton descent who came to these isolated
Appalachian Mountains to hammer out a living from
the land through much hardship, developing fierce
independent and conservative Christian values. Their
word was their bond and if a neighbor was in trouble,
they would be there to lend a helping hand “at the drop
of a hat.” I have found that most of our new residents
that have come to make Towns County their home
share these traits and values.
We shall keep the faith and never yield these
inalienable rights of exercising freedom of speech,
right to peaceful assembly and right to worship God
in prayer.
*** Bill Kendall is the Sole Commissioner of Towns County
and former Superintendent of Towns County Schools.

NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER
JOIN PICKENS COUNTY MINISTERIAL
ASSOCIATION
IN THE NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER
MAY 7TH. 2015
12 NOON ON THE
PICKENS COUNTY COURT HOUSE STEPS
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many
years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has
ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in
peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have viably imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.
Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming
and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
--President Abraham Lincoln
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