Even before college, other lessons came my way. One of the most important was that to be great or really do good in the world, I needed to understand the world beyond myself.
When I was sixteen years old, Bruce Carl—the director of Youth Leadership St. Louis—took me and a few other students to spend the night in a homeless shelter downtown.
Bruce was a former basketball player with a lithe build, a shock of dark hair, and bright eyes. He bounded through life with the happy energy of a man who had good news to share. As director of the city’s youth leadership program, he encouraged us to question authority and to serve. He was one of the first men to teach me that you could be a hero without slaying a dragon or leading a victory charge. You could make a difference in a quiet way and still have a profound impact on others.
Bruce took our group to the shelter because he wanted to impress upon us that it was important to understand how our neighbors lived.
In my mind, I was about to embark on a small adventure. I was sixteen, away from my parents on a mission into the unknown. I was curious to know what was out there. Bruce knew this. He also realized that whether we wanted to or not, we were there to learn what life was like for people who struggled every day.
Before we entered the building, he looked at us and said, “I want you to listen. Learn.”
And so on a winter night in a downtown church, I sipped chicken soup from a Styrofoam cup, crackers floating, softening, and breaking apart as I talked with homeless men. When we bedded down for the night, it was in a room that smelled of urine and body odor, on threadbare green mats laid on top of old cots.
I thought about meals with my family, about holiday dinners with platter after platter of food. I thought about being warm in my own bed, in my own room, secure in the knowledge that someone nearby cared about me. I thought about the used car I’d just purchased with the money I’d earned from mowing lawns, and what a luxury that would be to some of these people. And I thought—with embarrassment—that I had seen men like these before, pushing carts along downtown streets, gathering outside churches and community organizations that served hot meals. But I hadn’t really seen them, not like I was doing here, as I sat with them and listened. And learned.
When one of the men mentioned his job, my face betrayed my surprise, and he said, “You thought none of us had a job?”
My face grew warm. “Yes, I did think that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, young man. How about you just work my shift tomorrow?” He burst out laughing, and the rest of the night he kept telling everyone, “Young man here gonna work my shift tomorrow. He gonna work my shift.”
Later I stood with two men at a window looking out on the freezing St. Louis night. As the shelter doors were locked, I saw a man walking hunched over on the other side of the street. He seemed thin and underdressed as he leaned into the icy wind.
“Tonight’s a bad night to be out,” said one of the men.
Later that night Bruce sat down next to me, a somber expression on his face. “This is terrible,” he said, surprising me. I’d never really seen him down before.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He lowered his voice and leaned in so only I could hear. “They’re giving food and shelter, but they don’t have any job training or substance-abuse programs. They keep running things this way, and these people will stay homeless forever.”
Just as Bruce had challenged us by bringing us to the shelter, he wanted to see the men in the shelter challenged as well. Just as he respected us, he respected the homeless men, and he believed that if you respected someone, you had to ask something of them.
These men, he believed, should be involved in their own recovery.
He thought it criminal that people could grow up oblivious and unresponsive to the suffering of others. “These are your neighbors,” he would say. But he was pragmatic enough to know that having a loving, wide-open heart was only a start. If you wanted to make a change, you had to arm yourself with a plan and with the knowledge and resources to put that plan into action.
All of which pointed me back to the golden ticket to my intended destination: college. There, I thought, I’d learn how to really make a difference. There I’d learn the skills that would help me channel the compassion of people like Bruce to bring about a better world.