The Reverend James Milton Stradford - A 114 Year Truth

Kairos Moments: Big Dad with Big Mother

By Eric Stradford, U.S. Marine Corps, retired 

May 18, 2021,  Muscogee -- You didn’t choose me. I chose you!”  This truth, heard on more than one occasion, recalls some words to live by for The Reverend James Milton Stradford.

On May 18, 1988, the story of a peculiar preacher begins with his recollection about a visit.  Chronologically, the story of James Milton Stradford might have begun May 18, 1907.  He was born to Judge and Deanna Belton Stradford in a little coal mining town west of Birmingham, Alabama. Today’s traveler might discover Short Creek, Alabama up Highway 68 in Marshall County. But, remnants of yesteryear’s coal miners have since given way to a medical history of American laborers exposed to Black Lung Cancer.

The May 18, 1988 date on an alternate timeline seeks to discover value in spiritual beliefs as well as the obvious reality across an individual’s lifetime.  As a point of reference, ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos, which refers to chronological or sequential time and Kairos, which signifies a space between time.

Depending on one’s relationship with the teller of stories, one might zoom in on the date May 18, 1917 from James’ chronological timeline.  It was about a month after the birth of Alma Catherine Thomas, his bride of 57 years.  He was but a 9-year young lad, running about doing boy stuff when he encountered a high-powered electrical fence.  The life-threatening incident knocked him into his first near-death experience since leaving his mother’s womb.

Somehow, young James survived his shocking encounter to grow taller and stronger into his calling.  By May 18, 1936, he had lived 26 years. He had married Walter and Ida (Jones) Thomas’ 13-year young daughter.  Together they had figuratively started producing “lovely fruit” in the form of their first born, Bernice (July 23, 1931), and three siblings, Gloria (April 1, 1933), Catherine (September 12, 1934), and James David (November 27, 1935).   

The young couple, described as being “po as Job’s turkey,” followed the money to the next coal mining town from  Alabama and later to West Virginia.

He believed God called him to ministry at this Kairos moment of his Chronos time. He would continue to work as a laborer and go on strike when the union called for it. They paid some bills, and he called on his beloved Alma to produce more “lovely fruit.”   By the May 1988 start date of our Kairos recollection, James was approaching 82.  He was resting at Cleveland’s Mount Sinai Hospital when he recalled, in vivid detail, “The Visit.”  He had ministered to historically disadvantaged Americans at Smoot Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in West Virginia, then to Greater Avery African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cleveland, OH before briefly pastoring the Grace Mission AME Church.

Retirement from the Northeast Ohio Annual Conference as a “super-annuated elder” may have positively impacted his physical reality.  But, some time spent in those coal mines certainly enhanced his economic security. We’ll want to explore the impact of Black Lung on the temporal economy of The Reverend James Milton Stradford as a foundation for the endowment to “third and fourth generations” of “lovely fruit.”

For those who have yet to share “The Visit” by The Reverend James Milton Stradford, it was included in TheEnterpriZe from slaveship to spaceship, a published work by Eric Stradford and Stephanie A. Walker Stradford.

Economic means to “life more abundant” might be discovered in the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969.   Black lung, also called Black-lung Disease, or Coal-workers’ Pneumoconiosis, is a respiratory disorder.  It’s a type of pneumoconiosis caused by repeated inhalation of coal dust over a period of years. The disease gets its name from a distinctive blue-black marbling of the lung caused by accumulation of the dust. Georgius Agricola, a German mineralogist, first described lung disease in coal miners in the 16th century, and it is now widely recognized. It may be the best known occupational illness in the United States.