When you take time to listen to these men and women you will quickly discover that for a vast majority of them, they no longer know who they really are. Their identity has been marred by a life of desperation. Some used to get their identity in their profession. When for whatever reason, they lost their profession and lost their identity. I remember a man named James that I worked with for several months. He had been a roofer for most of his adult life. However, he had fallen off the roof and hit his head one too many times. When he even thought about getting on a roof, you could see beads of sweat form on his eyebrows. He did not know who he was or what he could do. Along came a social worker who convinced him that he was disabled. Now he had the identity as disabled. This opened up the door to be given a small check every month. No roof would be required. With his feet firmly planted on the ground he could survive. Initially, James was very happy over this discovery. But over the days and weeks with this identity he realized that the social worker was wrong. He had something to offer our community. In his early 50s he knows that he was too young to pasture. After countless conversations, he remembered that at one point he had a hobby of putting together cabinets. One day his face lit up telling the story of the beauty of a cabinet he had built for his mother. It turned out that we had the need for a cabinet for storage. It did not need to be very fancy. But James would not allow any plain work to be done on his watch. Pride lit up his countenance on the day he did the big reveal. It was a beauty and was more than adequate for what we needed.
A few weeks later I was giving a tour and wasn’t really thinking much about the cabinet at the moment, but the person giving the tour noticed the cabinet. I smiled as I told them about James and his work. As I was saying goodbye to the person on the tour, James happened to come into the mission. I introduced them. The long story short, James got a job building cabinets. None of them were that fancy but James was living his best life. He was no longer disabled; he was a cabinet maker. He was a man again.
We can be very quick to dismiss these men and women as liabilities. It is nearly impossible to get back on your feet when you don’t know who you are.
