Monday, July 20, 2009

Same Kind of Different as Me

One of the very best books I’ve read is Same Kind of Different as Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore.

It’s the true story of an unlikely friendship between Hall and his wife Debbie, who were wealthy art dealers, and Moore, a homeless man from a sharecropper family in Louisiana. The story is about how their friendship developed, as Ron and Debbie Hall volunteered at a homeless shelter in Fort Worth, Texas.

An article in The United Methodist Reporter (May 29, 2009) says people all over the world buy the books, maybe at airports, and then order quantities of them to pass out to their friends. What Hall and Moore are hearing in the 200-300 daily e-mails they get is that people’s attitudes toward the homeless are changing.

Hall is quoted as saying, “They begin to look at homeless people and think ‘Could that be a Denver Moore?’ Most people used to look at them as trash; now God is giving people eyes to look at them as potential treasures.”

“God gave us a story,” he said, “and he is using us to affect the way that people look at homeless people.” Their web site describes them as “a dangerous, homeless drifter who grew up picking cotton in virtual slavery”; “an upscale art dealer accustomed to the world of Armani and Chanel”; and “a gutsy woman with a stubborn dream.”

Buy it! Read it! Pass it on to somebody else!

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