See Video: Obama: Lessons Of Prayer Breakfast Should Have Longer ‘Shelf Life’ (4731 hits)
By Mary Bruce @marykbruce Follow on Twitter Feb 7, 2013 11:03am
In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the annual National Prayer Breakfast brings leaders from both sides of the aisle together in prayer. This morning, President Obama said he hoped lawmakers could maintain the spirit of the event a bit longer.
“I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we’ve been talking about the whole time at the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten, on the same day of the prayer breakfast,” Obama said to laughter.
“I mean, you’d like to think that the shelf life wasn’t so short,” he said. “But I go back to the Oval Office and I start watching the cable news networks, and it’s like we didn’t pray.”
The president urged politicians to act with humility “every day, every moment.”
“In a democracy as big and as diverse as ours, we will encounter every opinion. And our task as citizens, whether we are leaders in government or business or spreading the word, is to spend our days with open hearts and open minds, to seek out the truth that exists in an opposing view, and to find the common ground that allows for us as a nation, as a people, to take real and meaningful action,” he said.
“We have to do that humbly, for no one can know the full and encompassing mind of God, and we have to do it every day, not just at a prayer breakfast,” he said.
