BLOOMINGTON - As certain as the sun will rise, a few hundred Christian men gather each Lent for a breakfast and speaker.

With an early Easter, this year's Laymen's Lenten Breakfast started before the sun made the horizon.

Normal-based Immanuel Bible Foundation has hosted the breakfast for 55 years - Wednesday's was at the Interstate Center - and foundation President W. Charles Witte thinks of it as a way to get men's hearts into the holy season.

Jack North

In recent years, the foundation has brought Christian sports stars - Brett Butler and Dave Dravecky, to name two - but this year, it brought forward Jack North, who last year retired as a senior executive vice president for State Farm Insurance Cos.

The idea was to hear a faith message from someone people know rather than someone they know of, said Marc Boon, the Immanuel Bible Foundation's executive director.

And North quickly identified himself as the common person. He said he always rejected the idea that the employees were "the little people."

For those feeling less-than, he said, "Crumple that up and throw it in the trash can on the way out. We are all giants in God's eyes."

Flawed giants, he said.

North grew up in a family in chronic financial trouble, so much that North leveraged potential earnings of a teaching job, fresh out of college, to cosign a debt consolidation loan for his father and finally raise him above the crush of debts and interest payments.

Growing up, he said, North felt the condescension of supposed pillars of the church who looked down on the little people. He learned to accept them as imperfect, he said, but he drifted away from church for a time.

His wife, Kim, pulled him back. They are Presbyterian.

North also spoke of changing the world by changing yourself.

From a faith angle, he urged the 400 attendees to live out the sermons and said Christian messages are better seen than heard.

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Breakfast broadcast

The Laymen's Lenten Breakfast will be broadcast on Cable Channel 20 at the following times:

7:30 p.m. April 2

6 p.m. April 4

9 a.m. April 5

7:30 p.m. April 6