Homeless Man Now Feeds Hundreds a Day: Finding Our Empowering Purpose Through Service
By Jim Denison
Anthony Delgado lived on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, panhandling to feed his drug addiction. One day, a man and woman told him he should go to the VA hospital. No one around him saw the couple, however. He started panhandling again but developed chest pain. A man stopped to help and gave him a token for a train ride to the hospital. When Delgado stepped onto the train, the man had vanished.
Delgado made it to the hospital, joined a rehab program, and got help from a pastor. He told the minister the story of the vanishing couple and the man who gave him the train token, and the pastor replied, “Believe it or not, there are angels.”
Delgado got a job and then, after a church service about obedience, took bags of bread to the spot where he used to sleep on the streets. Within forty-five minutes, all the bread and pastries were gone. “As I was driving back, I started crying,” he said. “Thank you, Father God, I found my purpose in life.”
Now Delgado has seven employees, two buildings, seventeen freezers, and two trucks in the organization he founded, I Care Atlanta, Inc. His nonprofit feeds hundreds of people a day and also has a GED training center and financial planning center. During the holidays, they’ve been distributing new toys to kids and holding food drives.
Delgado told a reporter, “We all need to help each other. We’re in a bad state right now. . . . Open your heart. Help your neighbor. Don’t be selfish. This me, me, me attitude is not gonna get us anywhere. It’s just not.”
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Jim Denison Ph.D speaks and writes on cultural and contemporary issues. His daily column is distributed to more than 113,000 subscribers in 208 countries. See more on the website
www.denisonforum.org. Copyrighted and printed by permission from Denison Forum.
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