WHOSE BOY ARE YOU?

“I was about 12 years old when a new preacher came to my church. I would always go in late and slip out early. But one day the preacher said the benediction so fast I got caught and had to walk out with the crowd. I could feel every eye in church on me.

“Just about the time I got to the door I felt a big hand on my shoulder. I looked up and the preacher was looking right at me. ‘Who are you, son? Whose boy are you?’

“I felt the old weight come on me. It was like a big black cloud. Even the preacher was putting me down.

“But as he looked down at me, studying my face, he began to smile a big smile of recognition. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘I know who you are. I see the family resemblance. You are a child of God.’

With that he slapped me across the rump and said, ‘Boy you’ve got a great inheritance. Go and claim it.'”

Ben Hooper would later say, “That was the most important single sentence ever said to me.” Ben Hooper would one day be elected and re-elected Governor of Tennessee.

–Jamie Buckingham, Power for Living.