The Unwanted Boy

The Unwanted Boy

Benny was born out of wedlock to an immigrant mother who was abandoned by her lover, a country doctor. It wasn’t easy being the love child of an unwed mother, especially during the late 1800s in rural Tennessee. Teased unmercifully, he learned to fight back with fists and bulldog tenacity. But his hard-shell exterior masked the shame he felt as the town ragamuffin. Mostly, Benny hated the town gossip about the things his mother did at night to make ends meet.

Sometimes the boy would slip into the church house by himself. His shabby clothes and outcast status caused him to hide in the back pew. Most of the time, he would slip out before the benediction. But that day he waited too long, and the aisle was clogged with people. Benny was unable to avoid the preacher.

He grabbed the boy by the shoulder and said, “You must be the child of . . .” Looking perplexed, he repeated, “You must be the child of . . .” Benny shrank back in embarrassment, figuring that it wouldn’t be long before someone chimed in that he was the son of a tramp. But the pastor slapped him on the back and exclaimed, “Now I recognize you. You’re a child of God. You go out there and claim your rightful inheritance!”

A few months later, Benny’s mother put him in an orphanage, and he was later reunited with his father. With the new opportunities afforded by his doctor daddy and a dogged determination forged in early childhood, Benny did go out and make something of himself. But he would tell everyone that when a Baptist preacher told him to go out and claim his rightful inheritance, it was the turning point in his life.

Years later, Benny was living out his last years in the Tennessee mountains of his childhood. One evening, as he left a restaurant, he passed by a vacationing seminary professor, Dr. Fred Craddock, the professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. Benny engaged him in some easy mountain banter. When Dr. Craddock told him that he taught young men how to preach, the old man broke into a wide smile. He told the professor about the preacher who inspired him one Sunday morning when he was an unwanted boy. Then he whispered, “You tell your preacher boys that they can change lives by helping folks believe the best things about their future.”

As Benny shuffled out of the restaurant, Dr. Craddock asked his waitress, “Do you know who that old man is?” “Everyone knows him,” she said. “He’s a legend hereabouts. His name is Ben Hooper, the most famous lawyer in this state, and a two-time governor of Tennessee.”

You can read Ben Hooper’s story in his autobiography, The Unwanted Boy. It proves that there is a transforming power in believing the best things. Please don’t allow the traumas of childhood, disabilities of adulthood, opinions of others, sins of the past, or your own negative self-talk determine who you are. You are a child of God. Go out and claim your inheritance today! Ben Hooper’s triumphant story celebrates this unalterable transforming truth:

The future you see is most often the future you get.

[Jesus said,] “Everything is possible for one who believes.”

Mark 9:23, NIV