Book Review: Same Kind of Different as Me

Same Kind of Different as Me is a great book! The book tells the stories of two men who become unlikely best friends - a wealthy art dealer and a homeless man. As I'm sure anyone who has ever provided any charitable service knows, many times the people you are serving turn out to bless you more than could have imagined, and definitely more than you'd expect. That is definitely the case in this story, as the homeless man shares his outlook on life and wisdom he has gained through his tough breaks in life.

The book also tells a different version of the homeless person's story - one you don't get from driving down an inner city street or watching the news. Often we think that the homeless are responsible for the situations they are in, and surely everyone makes choices that impact their destiny, but some people are definitely dealt a bad hand coming into this life.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

"I know it ain't non of my business, but does you own somethin that each one of them keys fits?" I glanced at the keys; there were about ten of them. "I suppose," I replied, not really ever having thought about it. "Are you sure you own them, or does they own you?"

"There's somethin I learned when I was homeless: Our limitation is God's opportunity. When you get all the way to the end of your rope and there ain't nothin you can do, that's when God takes over." (This one reminds me of being in Africa. On those trips you frequently get so far out of your comfort zone, and that is just when you see what God can do. It also makes sense out of the counter-intuitive "For when I am weak, then I am strong" of 2 Cor 12:10.)

"You was the onlyest person that looked past my skin and past my meanness and saw that there was somebody on the inside worth savin. I don't know how, but you knowed that most a' the time when I acted like a bad fella, it was just so folks wouldn't get too close. I didn't want nobody close to me. It wadn't worth the trouble... You stood up with courage and faced me when I was dangerous, and it changed my life. You loved me for who I was on the inside, the person God meant for me to be, the one that had just gotten lost for a while on some ugly roads in life."

"I used to spend a lotta time worryin that I was different from other people, even from other homeless folks. Then, after I met Miss Debbie and Mr. Ron, I worried that I was so different from them that we wadn't ever gon' have no kind a' future. But I found out everybody's different - the same kind of different as me. We're all just regular folks walkin down the road God done set in front of us."

The whole book also reminded me of how to really make a difference (in the life of a friend, people you're working with through a charity, people at work, whoever, wherever), you have to get out of your comfort zone and get into people's lives. It's really easy to hand out some money or some food, and those things shouldn't be overlooked because people need the basics to survive and have a sense of dignity before they can even begin to move forward in their lives. But people's lives are where changes are made, and people are messy. You gotta get in a get dirty to have a big impact, but it sure isn't easy.