The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CARTER RETURNS TO SUNDAY SCHOOL
He continues teaching after falling, breaking his pelvis Oct. 21.
Former President Jimmy Carter returned to his Sunday school class in good humor, even as he pondered his own mortality less than two weeks after fracturing his pelvis in a fall.
Carter, 95, spoke for his usual 40 minutes Sunday at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains. He entered the sanctuary with assistance from Secret Service agents and sat in a white leather motorized chair that raised him to the level of the pulpit. A livestream broadcast from the church cut away as Carter arrived and departed.
He appeared despite lingering pain from his fall, his third mishap in recent months.
“We did not want him to teach today,” Pastor Tony Lowden told congregants, who came from at least 23 states and two other countries. But Carter insisted, Lowden said, “so that you might see Christ while he is suffering.”
Nevertheless, Carter followed another custom Sunday, staying after the church service to pose for pictures with admirers.
In his remarks, Carter did not
mention his injury, which occurred Oct. 21 at his home in Plains. After being treated at a nearby hospital, he was recuperating at home last week and wasn’t sure when he would return to his class, which routinely draws overflow crowds to Carter’s small church.
On Sunday, he slipped in several sly jokes — praising the quality of local peanuts, for instance — as he explored the Christian concept of eter- nal life.
For much of his life, Car- ter said, he harbored doubts about the biblical promise of life after death for followers of Jesus Christ. But he said a cancer diagnosis in 2015 bolstered his faith.
Carter recounted falling ill while monitoring elections in Guyana and undergoing surgery for liver cancer at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. As he returned to Plains, his doctor called with results from a brain scan: melanoma had spread to his brain.
“I assumed, naturally, I was going to die very quickly,” Carter said. He prayed not for recovery, he said, but for a proper attitude about his fate.
“I found I was absolutely, completely at ease about death,” he said.
A groundbreaking cancer treatment called immunotherapy wiped out the four tumors in his brain, and Carter has been in remission since.
The experience, he said, helped him overcome his doubts about eternal life: “I’m going to live again.” Carter, a Democrat who served in the White House from 1977 to 1981, said almost nothing about politics Sunday. But he noted that three candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have attended the Sunday school class. He said he had asked them to concentrate on peace, human rights, the environment and equality.
“That’s the way to make the United States become a superpower.”