It took a while but I finally realized that, while John’s role was to prepare the way for the Lord,[ii] ours is to reflect it. God doesn’t call us to lead people with lectures; he wants us to serve them in love. We know this from 1 Peter 4:10 where we read that each “one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.”

God’s grace was nowhere in the message delivered by the men holding the protest signs. It’s like there was a line between being holy and holier-than-thou and, by crossing it, they pushed away the very people they were trying to reach.

God wants us to get close to other sinners, not close the book on them, I thought to myself as I wrote down my thoughts while waiting for the race to start. Knowing that these pious picketers were in direct violation of Colossians 4:6—which insists that our words be full of grace and seasoned with salt—made me wonder what Jesus would say if he had been standing beside the evangelists.

Even though the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, I found it hard to believe that He would condone using scare tactics to reach out to sinners. God’s love, not fear, opened my eyes to the gospel. Knowing that it was not my mistakes, but being loved in spite of them that led me to Jesus makes me think that He’d have turned, not to the fans, but to the religious fanatics to offer this advice: “As long as you keep scaring people away, you’ll never lead them to me.”

For most of his adult life, Denver Moore scared people away as he did what he had to do to survive. One of the things he had to do was fight people who tried to steal his personal possessions; and Hall drew me back to the present as he talked about the day he saw one of these brawls firsthand. Ron prefaced his story by sharing a conversation he had with his wife a short time before.

“Ron, I had a dream last night,” Debra announced.

“So what was it about?” he asked.

“I saw the face of a man. He is a poor man. He’s a homeless man and he is a wise man,” Debra said, “and by his wisdom, he’s going to save our city. Our city’s going to be changed.”

“And we need to find him,” she added.

“You really—you saw a man?”

“I saw his face,” she stated, “and I want you to go with me and help me find him in the inner city.”

Reluctantly, Ron went with his wife into Fort Worth to look for the man of her dreams. They also began serving at the Union Gospel Mission. It was there that Ron witnessed Denver’s scuffle over a stolen pair of shoes.

“As the fight was winding down,” Ron told attendees, “there was one man left standing and he was in some raggedy old britches. And he had no shoes, no shirt, and he was screaming, ‘I’m going to kill whoever done it! Whoever stole my shoes, I’m gonna kill him!’”

Ron went on to explain how his wife started jumping up and down “like a cheerleader on the sidelines of football games whose team has just scored the winning touchdown.”

“That’s him! That’s him!” she cried.

“That’s who?” Ron asked.

“That’s the man I had the dream about.”

“Which one?” Ron probed as he glanced fearfully at Denver. “Him?”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “And I think God told me that you have to be his friend.”

I can imagine how shocking these words must have been for Ron to hear; and I can guess that I would have felt the same hesitation that caused him to reply: “Debra, I was not at that meeting you had with God.”

Ron did eventually become friends with Denver and, as I listened to the divine circumstances that brought these two men together, I had to ask: Was I judging Denver in the same way that the street evangelists had judged me?

What this homeless-man-turned-author went through and how God delivered him from his circumstances made it easy to believe that Denver preached, not with a holier-than-thou attitude, but out of gratitude for how God had worked in his life. Like the lectures of my childhood, the words I had taken offense to had nothing to do with me at all; and I wondered how many other times my past got in the way of accurately perceiving people in the present.

As difficult as it was to admit, I had a long way to go if I wanted to be like Ron’s wife, who saw through Denver’s poor behavior and fearlessly walked up to him just days after the fight to say: “You are not a bad man. God has a calling on your life and you’re going to live to see it.”

Denver wrote about this experience on pages 92 and 93 of Same Kind of Different as Me when he said: “She was the first person I’d met in a long time that wadn’t scared of me. Seemed like to me she had spiritual eyes: She could see right through my skin to who I was on the inside.”

How easy it is to forget that God has a plan for everyone—the penniless and pious included. Part of the plan is realizing that people can do the wrong things for the right reasons. When they do, God calls us to befriend, not belittle them, as we show that we're not so different . . . after all.