Mitch Albom and Pastor Henry P. Covington

Farewell, friend. You were too young to die. I saw you just the day before. Now I won’t see you again. Not on this earth, anyhow.

Farewell, friend. We hugged at breakfast. I said “Hennnrrry,” as I usually do, and buried my head into your huge upper chest. You were dressed up. It was a big day. The sun was out in the winter sky.

Farewell, friend. If I had known it was our last meeting, the things I would have changed. We spoke as if we had forever. We talked about Christmas coming up, the programs at your church, the hungry to be fed at your shelter. We got into a car that was waiting for us, like big shots, and it drove us to a TV studio in Rockefeller Center. 

You kept looking out the windows like a little kid, you kept saying, “Wow, New York has gotten really beautiful.” You were happy. That made me happy.

Farewell, friend. I keep saying, “Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I sense something?” But there was nothing ominous about the day. We walked into that studio together, you twice my size, the Mutt and Jeff jokes flowing. And the fuss they made over you! Everyone seemed to know you. The hosts showed pictures of your church in Detroit, the giant hole that was once in the roof, the hole through which rain and snow fell on your congregation of poor and homeless, the hole that we finally fixed, together.

Who knew there was another hole coming?

From Crime to Salvation
Farewell, friend. You were a big man with a big story, big enough for two lives. The first life lasted 30 years. It began with poverty, a mother behind bars, a neighborhood full of trouble. It ended one night in Brooklyn — after years of crime, arrests and addiction — when you lay hiding behind a row of trash cans, holding a shotgun, preparing for your death.

“Save me, Jesus,” you whispered. “Save me tonight, and I’m yours tomorrow.”

You were saved that night, saved from the drug dealers out for revenge, and saved from the spiral of an empty, wasted life. Your soul began its comeback. You got clean. Stayed clean. And you kept your promise. You gave the Lord not only your devotion, but your days.

You became a churchgoer, a student, an elder, a deacon and finally, years later, Pastor Henry Covington, taking over an old, decaying church on Trumbull in Detroit. “It’s too big,” they told you. “And look at that hole in the roof!”

But you had faith. You built a ministry, one soul at a time. You called it I Am My Brother’s Keeper. You drove around Detroit’s worst neighborhoods with food on the hood of your car. You honked so that the homeless would emerge from abandoned buildings. You told those hungry people, “God loves you.”

Because you had felt that love yourself.

You never hid your past. You used your mistakes to understand others. You had been a boxer and as a pastor you fought all doubt. You ministered in your sanctuary and sometimes across the street, sitting on an old stone wall, because, as you said, “Some people just aren’t ready to come inside.”

You went where souls were broken.

Farewell, friend.

Who Continues the Mission?
We were as different as it gets. Different faiths, different skin color. I could fit under one of your massive arms. But we called each other “friend,” we built together, served together, did a book together, called “Have a Little Faith,” and, boy, do I need some faith now, because, Henry, I adored you. I never saw you so happy as that last day, Monday, in New York, back in your hometown. We walked to the famous skating rink and took a photo, and on the way to the airport, you asked if you could stay another day. You wanted to visit family you hadn’t seen in years. It was the holidays. You felt nostalgic.

We changed your ticket. You got a hotel room. And after a long day and night of seeing old faces, you went to sleep there.

And you died there.

Perhaps your heart could no longer carry the weight. Your second life ended after 23 years, 53 years total. Too short, Henry. We were just together. I felt your cheek against mine. Now what? What happens to your beloved church? How do the poor and homeless survive?

Farwell, friend. I know you’d say you are in a better place, but my grief is matched only by a terrible, aching emptiness. I am doubled over, as if kicked in the stomach.

We fixed a hole together. How do we fix this?

Contact Mitch Albom: 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. Catch “The Mitch Albom Show” 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760). Donations can be made online at www.iammybrotherskeeper-pc.org or through the mail at Pilgrim Church, 1435 Brainard St., Detroit 48208.

Mitch Albom and Rabbi Albert Lewis

Ten years ago, if you had asked me about faith, I would have bitten my lip. It was one of those taboo subjects. Keep it to yourself. Don’t reveal too much. Especially if all you have to say about it is cynical.

It’s not that I lost my faith. It’s just that I had wandered away from it. I was healthy. Work was going well. I figured God goes his way, I go mine, we have a truce of sorts. Besides, when I thought about organized religion, I tended to focus on the scandals. The hypocrisy. The bad headlines.

Then, as often happens in life, something random happened. I was giving a speech in my old hometown. A clergyman came to see me. He was 82 now. My family had belonged to his congregation since I was a child, and since I’d never joined another congregation, he was pretty much the only clergyman I’d called my own.

He pulled me aside. He smiled gently. And he asked me the strangest question.

“Will you do my eulogy?”

That began a journey that spanned nine years, a journey that ultimately took me back to, all around, and deeply into faith. As someone who hardly felt worthy of doing a eulogy for the man who does eulogies, I insisted on getting to know this white-haired, smiling, wise old man on a personal level. One visit led to another. One month led to a year. He lived until he was 90, by which point, I was finally prepared to do his eulogy, but not at all prepared for him to die.

Mitch Albom and Pastor Henry P. Covington

At the same time, I was working with the homeless in my current home, Detroit, when I came upon a church that was old, magnificent and falling apart. Homeless men slept on its floor and ate in its kitchen. Its pastor was a large man named Henry Covington, who had once been a thief and a convict, but had turned his life around on a night he thought he would be murdered. Twenty years later, he had traded in the high and dangerous life of a drug dealer and now lived in deep poverty as a pastor, his church saddled with a giant hole in its roof through which rain and snow fell during services.

And over time, through multiple visits, I came to know him as well. And although he couldn’t have been more different than my clergyman — one black, one white, one inner city, one suburban, one Christian, one Jewish — I found what they had in common, and what comforted them in their struggles, was faith. Real faith. Not religious scandal faith. Not hypocrisy faith. Quiet faith.

The kind that made my clergyman believe that despite his decaying body, there was a heaven waiting for him. The kind that led Pastor Covington to believe that despite his decaying church, God would not abandon his congregation.

Slowly, quietly, through righteous behavior — not through lectures and finger wagging — these two men brought me back to a place where faith could be a part of my daily life.

I remember sitting with my wise old clergyman once and hearing a baby scream. He looked at me and said, “Did you ever notice how babies come into the world with their tiny fists clenched?”

Yes, I said.

“Do you know how our sages explain that? They say that babies, not knowing any better, clench their fists because they think they can have everything.”

He smiled. “But now, look at me, an old man. How am I going to die?”

He opened his hands wide.

“Like this,” he said. “Why?”

“Why?” I repeated.

“Because as an old man I know, you take nothing with you.”

That really hit me. Because the difference between his two examples, between a young child thinking he can have everything and an old man knowing he can take nothing, is the gap for which only faith will fill us.

When material possessions mean nothing, when job success, status, accomplishments, homes, bank accounts, envy of your peers, when all that means nothing, you realize the only thing you truly have here on earth that may serve you once you’re gone is your faith, your belief in something larger than yourself.

I was lucky to have two very different men teach me that in hundreds of little ways. And I’ve come to believe faith is something that can pull us together, rather than rip us apart.

This is the story of my new book, the true story, Have A Little Faith. Dr. Phil was kind enough to tape a show with me recently about it. I thank him for the rare and wonderful opportunity to share the events with him — and his audience — and I hope whatever situation you find yourself in, a little faith will help make it better.