Berkley Center

Julia Watson Jones: Amber, I invited you to come with me, and I appreciate your saying yes. I want you to tell us, how do you describe your faith?

Amber M. Yeary: Julia, thank you for asking. My faith, I believe, is built over a number of years of instruction from my mother, my father, from the neighborhood that I grew up in, where it was not unusual for particularly the little boys to share experiences in each other's various mode of practice of their religion. We were mixed. We were Roman Catholics. We were Jews. We were Protestants, Methodist, and Baptist. And that group of people, as they grew older, all of them, had some continuing exposure to the faith that they profess. And as a result of that, I've followed that path even to today. I long for opportunities to learn more about God, and I think that there's a passage in the book of Hebrews that says if a man wants to know God, he first has two things that he must have faith in: that God exists, and that God cares about rewarding people who search after him.

Julia Watson Jones: Well, that's pretty darn amazing, but that's why I asked you to come with me. I know you pretty well. With me, I just grew up believing. I think it was my mother's faith that she passed on to me. And she was pretty much everything to me because my dad died in a fire when I was two months old, and I feel like I knew him because my mother talked about him all the time and loved him dearly. And so I've always been a believer. I've always loved my church. Now, I can't be in a competition with you about the Bible because you're a Baptist and I'm Episcopalian, and we don't study the Bible the way that Baptists do. But I'm pretty familiar with it now.

But it's a wonderful blessing to really be a believer because then you know that, number one, God exists, and we Christians believe that He sent His Son to help us. And then we have the Holy Spirit. And if you truly believe in that, whenever anything terrible happens to you and things do come along, in a long life like I've had, nothing is scary or terrible because you know that God is there. And now I've gotten to the point where every time I lose something, which is really often, misplaced the car keys, for example, I ask God to help me and He seems to help right then and there. I don't think it's just that I'm making it up because I want it to be that way. That's the way it is for me anyway.