Remembering Pete

Today would have been my dad’s 93rd birthday. He rests in his eternal home with the Lord since September 9, 2019. I don’t just think of him on his birthday. I have missed him.

While I was growing up, my family went to church regularly, and my parents even made sure that I was in church on Sunday night. It was in Training Union that I received my first exposure to getting up in front of people and feeling comfortable, and it was in Royal Ambassadors on Wednesday nights where I first learned about missions.

My folks become even more serious about their involvement in church work when they agreed to be the first members of a new church plant in our town. It was there as a teenager that I first felt that the Lord wanted me to do something vocationally in ministry.

My dad worked his way into being the treasurer of the church, so he could influence giving to the Cooperative Program. In his retirement on limited income he never stopped tithing, and he always made sacrificial gifts to missions offerings.

I never in my life met or heard of a person who did not like Pete. Everyone knew Pete as a man of integrity and a man who kept his word. His given name was James Wesley Cox, but not many people ever knew that name. They all knew him as Pete Cox. People would say his name so fast and run the name together so that many people thought that he was called by his last name: Peacock!

When I was a boy, I noticed that Pete would raise his pointer finger from the top of the steering wheel when he was driving. One day I asked him why he lifted his finger every time we met a car while driving. He told me that was his way of waving at the driver of the other car, and that he was just trying to be nice to everyone. When I received my driver’s license at 15, I started the same practice, and you know what—many people responded and waved back at me. If I did that today… What a shame that simple things have become complex and even offensive in our culture.

When I was 10 years old Pete started coaching baseball. He loved baseball, but he loved working with boys even more. He coached for about 10 years as one of my brothers is five years younger than I am, and Pete also coached some of his teams. At Pete’s celebration of life service last September, there were several older men at the visitation who were telling baseball stories about Pete and reliving their Little League playing years. Pete had coached all of them.

My dad trusted everyone, and most of the business deals that I recall him making were done with a handshake, not paperwork. One of those handshakes turned out very badly for him. He helped a man start a food vending company, and for 26 years he managed that business and grew it from a small business to a medium-sized business that made a lot of money for its owner and employed 20 people. Pete never received any retirement benefits during those years because the owner promised that he would always take care of him. After Pete had invested 26 years of his life in that business, the owner sold the company to a chain of food vending companies. The owner told Pete not to worry because he would continue to work for the new owners. However, there was never any mention of any pension or retirement payments.

If that happened to me after investing 26 years and expecting someone to “take care of me,” I would have lost it. But not my dad. To make matters worse, the new owner fired Pete a year after he purchased the business. By that time Pete had introduced him to all of his connections and relationships in the vending business.

We were living overseas at that time, so we only had the “air letter” version of the struggles that Pete had getting a new job at age 56. It was a crisis in his life, but his faith kept him focused on the Lord, and his character kept him from living in the past of what could have been or what should have happened.

The Lord was faithful to my dad and mom and they had 72 years together. They did not have a lot of money for retirement, and they were not able to have many of their “wants” during retirement, but the Lord took care of them, and I never heard my dad say that they were short of money or that they could not buy something that they needed.

My dad, Pete, taught me about integrity and having character that others would respect.

He helped me as a young boy to understand that I must have a moral compass that does not waver but holds steady no matter what the situation may be.

Proverbs 28:6 states it well: “Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity than a rich man who is crooked in his ways.”