Color Speak, Episode 41, What is Faith?

Faith wasn’t what my grandmother covered when she wrote a column for the Los Angeles Sentinel in the 1950s, though the subject would undoubtedly have been more palatable then than it is now. 

The Sentinel was, and still is, a newspaper dedicated to advocating the African American voice. My grandmother who was white, wrote about government. Her column was entitled Our Government: Government OF the People, BY the People, FOR the people.

Neljane, whose nom de plume and familiar name was Jane Ewins, had been a crusader. She’d graduated from college at the age of 16 because she’d taken her university entrance exams after a year in high school and had then done graduate work at USC. After the Second World War, she attended law school at UCLA, thanks to a letter of recommendation written for her by senator Richard Nixon. Later, my grandmother wrote speeches for President Nixon and Dwight. D. Eisenhower, worked as a social worker, held real estate and insurance licenses, and was certified through the Red Cross as a lifeguard, all while raising four children as a single mother. 

She did at the time what most women wouldn’t have dreamed of doing, and even those who might have had an inkling to cover such ground were simply not up to the rigors of it.

I had no idea my grandmother was so accomplished. To me she was my Baba—the one who rocked me in her arms after scooping me up in a towel at bath time and cuddled with me in my bed at night, leaving her rumpled tissues behind in the sheets. She was the one who never missed mass or Wheel-of-Fortune, or her after-five-o’clock scotch and soda, and who loved me in a way that blesses me to this day, long after her departure from this earth.

I had no idea she’d been a journalist, no clue she’d written a column until just last year when my mother dug through some paperwork at home and unearthed the evidence to give to me. 

It was decades after I received my own degrees in communication and journalism,  following my work as a broadcast journalist and writer in San Diego and Kansas City.

But it isn’t just genetic predisposition or even a love of writing that compels me to put words on paper and screen. And to do this, to talk to you. 

I’m fueled by a desire to share hope with others. 

I’m consumed with it, actually.

Maybe you feel the same way.

But a column in a newspaper dedicated to the topic of FAITH? That is just so…God!

What, exactly, is faith?

We all have it, but none of us has enough.  We all know it has something to do with expectation, but now, the concept is open to interpretation. We all know it’s important, but to what degree?

For centuries, most of us understood it was the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 

This podcast sounds a little different in that I don’t have a guest with me. Believe me, this wasn’t my choice. It was God’s! 

I argued with him, of course. How could I do it alone? What on earth could I possibly say, just me, to encourage our listeners? Ew.

Anyway, things came up. Guests had issues, needed to reschedule, my computer crashed, AGAIN…well

J.M. Huxley (Janet Huxley) is an award-winning author and broadcast news anchor. Currently, she is a morning news anchor for conservative radio; formerly, an airborne traffic and news reporter and the operations director for the San Diego and Kansas City offices of Westwood One’s Metro Networks. Her memoir, MILK AND HONEY LAND: A Story of Grief, Grace, and Goats , won the 2019 Author Academy Award for Best Memoir, and the 2021 Readers' Favorite Gold Medal Winner in the Christian - Non-Fiction genre. Her children’s book, RAINBOW LAND , encourages children to see God in the rainbow.

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