Special to the St. Charles County Post

State Rep. Bill Luetkenhaus, D-Josephville, joined local, state and national public leaders Wednesday afternoon in a bipartisan time of prayer and reflection. "I can say he has been my counselor," Luetkenhaus said, "I've never been let down."

     Leaders of the St. Charles Businessmen's annual Prayer Breakfast decided to bring their group together at Bogey Hills Country Club to discuss God and country and to "reenergize" as one public official put it "from the stresses of the country's current unrest, leadership and public life." 

The group's last meeting was its annual prayer breakfast, held Sept. 11, the day terorists attacked America.

Luetkenhaus told the group that God puts rulers "in their places of power and that "one of the responsibilities of elected officials is to stand up for the defenseless."

Luetkenhaus said in all his years in the Missouri House of Representatives, the practice of prayer in the state government fascinated him the most. "I thought, 'We can't have it in schools, but we can have it here. This is awesome. He added: "Too much tolerance has caused us to drift away from our Christian values. Our forefathers believed in Christian values and they lived by them. If we followed them more closely today, we wouldn't need so many laws or police."

St Charles County Executive Joe Ortwerth said that remaining true to his faith, his God had brought him through the darkest hours of his own life. The executive has lost two siblings and a son in the last five years.

Ortwerth said he had known since the third grade that he would somehow serve God, not only in his private life but publicly as well. Ortwerth studied eight years in the seminary to become a Catholic priest before concluding that he was called into public life.

Ortwerth quipped that his seminar colleagues accused him of reading the book "From Playboy to Priest" backward. He said he's found humor in his life in the public arena, and his clergy-turnedpolitician status. "But I've found that church politics can be more brutal than civilian politics," he joked.

Nevertheless, Ortwerth said in more than 20 years in the public arena, he had become increasingly disillusioned by the continuing losses of the "good guys" and the "winning out of the principles of selfinterest and selfindulgence."

Referring to God, Ortwerth said, "I had to come to admit to myself in this moment of despair that I didn't know this guy I was working for. I was this general on the battlefield instructing him to show up when I needed something."

Ortwerth said at that point, he relinquished control of his private and public life to Jesus Christ, and since has known a "new life filled with fresh ideas and surmountable challenges and the courage and ability to meet them both."

Former U.S. Rep. Jim Talent, RChesterfield, who plans to run for the Senate next year, said he was raised to believe in God and "that's about it." Shortly after undergraduate school, Talent said he began reading the 20pound, coffee-table Bible he found in his parents' home. The book supplied the answers he sought as he argued right from wrong with professors and fellow students in college.

"I knew a lot of things were basically right and basically wrong, but I didn't know why," he said. Talent reflected on an argument he had with a teaching assistant in college who said that Joseph Stalin's starving out millions of people in the 1930s was necessary for the good of the country to industrialize the nation, that "the good of the whole was more important than those individuals."

"I read the Bible as a young lawyer without any preconceptions," Talent said. "The Bible stands up pretty well.

Talent said he got his answers from the book. He said others would do well to reflect on the Bible and on their own lives before and since Sept. 11, 2001. "You know why the teaching assistant was wrong, don't you?" he asked attendees of the luncheon. "The countries of the world are not as important as the People. Which were created in God's image, the Countries or the people? Which did Jesus die for? Which will live forever?"

       Christian singer and entertainer Randy Mayfield performs "America the Beautiful" and other spiritual songs at a special event Wednesday at Bogey Hills Country Club.