When you love the month of November as I do, I just can’t wait to write about my Thanksgivings and as has become one of my traditions, a chance to write my thanks about people who have influenced my life and folks that I am thankful to God for their lives, witness and friendship. Since I began this type of public thanksgiving for friends I have been amazed by those that are taken back when they see their name in print and me publically acknowledging their influence and my thanks and appreciation for their impact in my personal life. I believe it is very important that we practice such a moment in our lives as people need to hear a witness if you will, or a testimony about what we have observed in their lives and the difference they have made in ours because they gave, shared, or extended friendship.
Friendship is no easy thing. Early times in my life I would have thought that having friends is easy, and while the Bible says to have friends, one must show themselves to be friendly, that alone doesn’t give us a promise that we will have friends, but it does give us a beginning point to establish friends. I have been blessed to have had the influence of mentors in my life that really made a difference.
Dr. Samuel Benjamin Patterson. He was the Bishop of the AME Zion Church and the District that covers Eastern Tennessee. “Dean” was a person that always smiled, and he didn’t believe in taking up the tithes and offerings in church using plates. He taught that plates just don’t hold much, and to prove his point he would say go to the buffet line and you will come to a point where you just can’t put anymore on, even if you want to. He liked taking up tithes and offerings using baskets, and he believe in big baskets, “harder to fill” I can still hear him say, when thinking about a congregation, but “no problem” for God, he taught me. He preached several times at the Horse Creek Road Baptist Church in Corbin, and while he was from Morristown, Tennessee, he had a real love for the folks in the land of blue, and his spirit was one you just could not get enough of. He died at the age of 42 and is missed by this student quite often as I travel down life highway.
Bill Cox, the leader of a ministry called Concoxions, and located in South Carolina is the first person to teach me that Jesus Christ wanted a personal relationship with me. I was just a child at 8 years of age when he would pick me up in a station wagon and take me to Vacation Bible School at Crockett, Kentucky, when the coal camp was still booming back in the 1970’s. This effort grew from the heart of Dr. Alastar Walker, who served as Pastor of the First Baptist Church Middlesboro in the 1960’s, before he became pastor of the First Baptist Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and served there over 30 years. I am so thankful to Bill because when the entire world around me falls and crumbles I am reminded that I have something that no man can take away, my personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and Bill introduced me to that guy named Jesus!
In this modern age of living, I have three friends that can only be mentioned as a group. I can speak of them individually and their accomplishments, but when it comes to friendship and what they and their families have extended to me, they all three stand tall and on the same level in my world. Nathan Zettler, a police officer in Hamilton Ohio, Michael Ernst, a corporate representative in Louisville, KY, and Ken Fritz, an executive with Northern Kentucky University are true friends, tried, tested and passed! Hard to think about how my life would be without tried and tested friends who have your front, back and every side as a part of their friendship.
November is a great month to sit down, do some reflection, think about your life, where you have been, and where you are headed, and who is going with you on that journey. The course of life itself lends to moments that are marked historically in your life that cannot be repeated or traveled again. Moments that you will never be able to live again, but moments cherish in your memory bank forever. To be thankful for the friendship once shared and to look for the new ones that are developing around you daily are all a part of this thing called life.
Until then
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S. Benjamin Patterson is my uncle. to set the record straight he was not a Bishop but he would have made a great one. He is greatly missed by many but most of all his family. He had a profound impact on this world that is left unfilled. in a few days it will be 14yrs since his death and for me sometimes it feels like yesterday.
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