My introduction to Joe was a little unusual.

It was my first night as a volunteer at Clifton Presbyterian’s homeless shelter. My daughter Leslie had been volunteering there and suggested I join them.  On that first evening, the people who ran the kitchen quickly and accurately appraised my cooking skills and assigned me to the serving/cleanup crew.

As I was setting a plate of food in front of one of the homeless men, someone grabbed my wrist. The hand holding my wrist belonged to a man with a ragged gray beard, a wrinkled face, a ragged coat, and what I believe was fear in his eyes.

“The food’s not poisoned,” he said.

I thought I had misunderstood him, but I hadn’t. He said it again.

“The food’s not poisoned,”

“No, the food’s not poisoned,” I replied. I didn’t know what else to say. He was still holding on to my wrist.

“Pray for me,” he said.

“I will.”

And that was my first encounter with Joe. I don’t remember his last name, if I ever knew it. Nor what he had been before his brain detached him from the real world. Joe had fallen through any number of cracks in the system we have for dealing with mentally ill people. He was paranoid and fear seemed to go with him wherever he was.

There were still shreds of what Joe had been. For instance, he could still play the piano, and he accompanied the Christmas Carol sing-alongs at Clifton. There was a rumor that he had been a professor at Tech, but that probably wasn’t much more than a rumor. Essentially, Joe was what I saw when I looked to see who was holding my wrist: a man who had to struggle to deal every day in a world that didn’t want to have much to do with him.

But Joe, along with some of the others who gathered at Clifton every evening for a meal, a shower, and a place to sleep, taught us some lessons. And perhaps the greatest service that Clifton did, in addition to providing a bit of safety and comfort for men who otherwise had none, was that anyone who volunteered there never thought about the homeless the same way again.

At a distance it’s simpler to deal with the label. We lump them into statistical groups and discuss them as societal problems. But when you serve them dinner and sit and talk with them, you find that homelessness is a condition rather than a description; it affects all sorts of people. There was the computer programmer I talked with who still had neat clothes, who could still carry on an intelligent conversation, and who, because of his disconnects with reality, couldn’t hold a job. He’d come to Atlanta when he lost his last job somewhere in the north, hoping to find work. But he found himself homeless. There were others who simply seemed to accept their condition, and a few who seemed to find some bitter humor in it.

I don’t know how many individuals and institutions had failed Joe in his descent from the child learning to play the piano to the homeless man who slept at Clifton every night and had to leave every morning. Certainly the governments had failed, seeing him as a problem to be solved rather than a person to be helped. Perhaps his family had, too. Or his friends. There's no way of knowing, but I do know that, except for Clifton and the people who ran it, Joe was alone and adrift.

One day Leslie went into the sandwich shop across the street from her office and saw the girl behind the counter backed up about as far as she could get. Joe, in his ragged clothes and more ragged beard, was begging for a sandwich. He was, to the girl, a scary sight and a crazy man. Leslie recognized him. She bought him a sandwich and took him to a table, where she sat with him while he ate. Then he left to wander until the bus from Clifton picked him up in the evening.

To me, that was the starkest lesson of all—what those two young women saw, and because of what they saw, how they reacted. The girl in the sandwich shop saw a homeless man, unkempt, and possibly dangerous. Leslie saw a troubled man who was grateful for every crumb of compassion offered him. That’s the sort of thing that happens when we can see beyond the labels and recognize the humans behind them

Joe died some years back, and his name is memorialized at Joe’s Place, some apartments for men who, unlike Joe, are able to overcome whatever has made them homeless and to work themselves back into what we think of a normal life.

Clifton continues to do its good work, supported by volunteers and donations. If anybody wants to donate, go to http://www.cliftonsanctuary.com/ .