Good morning…

“‘I had a dream last night,’ Deborah Hall told her husband. ‘A wise man who changes the city. I saw him.’ She gazed at him warily, as if afraid he might think she was losing her mind. Ron Hall knew better. His wife was the sanest person he knew. ‘You saw a man in your dream?’

‘Yes,’ She said cautiously. ‘I saw his face.’

It was the face of a homeless man who came to the shelter where they served meals once a week. A street bum who refused to sleep inside or talk to anyone at the shelter. An angry, dangerous loner who frightened everyone he came in contact with. His name was Denver Moore…a man who grew up in virtual slavery, picking cotton for ‘the man’ as late as the 1960’s. A man who never attended a day of school, never was paid for his years of back-breaking labor, who saw surviving on the streets as a step up in life. And never dreamed he’d be friends with an SUV-driving, Starbucks-sipping white man” (excerpt from the jacket cover of Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore).

This moving book, Same Kind of Different as Me, became a New York Times bestseller before being filmed as a movie with A-list actors. To coordinate with a February movie release, a team of us are tasked with organizing a city-wide event to raise awareness and funds to combat homelessness in Atlanta. As we sat down at last night’s preliminary planning meeting, we were handed a sheet filled with “Denver-isms,” statements revealing the God-given wisdom of Denver Moore.

From the full page list, these are my favorite six quotes laid on the lips of a man who describes himself as “…a nobody…trying to tell everybody…about somebody…that can save everybody.”

1) “We are all homeless just working’ our way home.”
2) “You never know who’s eyes God is watching you out of.”
3) “When you turn the cross upside down, it becomes a sword.”
4) “God is in the recycling business of turning trash into treasure.”
5) “Nobody can help everybody but everybody can help somebody.”
6) “The things you keep forever are the things you give away for nothin’.”

Now there lived in that city a man poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom…So I said, “Wisdom is better than strength” (Ecclesiastes 9:15-16, NIV).

…Sue…