Jim Klobuchar – The Face of an Unexpected Samaritan

A Story By Jim Klobuchar

He was a lanky kid shambling to the microphone. He walked with a gait the young sometimes adopt when they’re going to speak without high expectations of getting it right.

He’d come to Minneapolis from a small town in northern Minnesota to enroll in a basically marvelous program called Urban Homeworks, which in part reclaims boarded or foreclosed houses in the city. With volunteers, it rebuilds the houses to make them livable and affordable for rent or sale to low income families.

Daniel was one of the volunteers, living on site for two years as an urban neighbor, working on the projects, learning a trade and where possible befriending the poor who were trying to reconstruct their lives. Apart from his work, he told his audience, he was committed to doing something once a week to build a community with his housemates and the families. He would also meet with his neighbors to learn about things related to God and the economically poor.

One thing he had learned, he said, is that a gift is not a possession. He did not immediately explain how that truth had come to him.

Apart from its housing, Urban Homeworks tries to rehabilitate troubled men and women with the offer of community and whatever resources are available to it.

Daniel introduced, in absentia, a 55-year-old man we will call Fred, a neighbor of his in the housing development. He came to Minnesota from New York with his brothers and sisters, lived briefly in an orphanage and has been in and out of adult care homes and shelters and homelessness and since. He was diagnosed at different times with depression, anxiety and schizophrenia.

We sometimes call these people losers. Daniel called him a man who struggles to find a spiritual life and hungered for talk sessions over coffee. It was his quiet cry for companionship. Once engaged he was aggressive with his opinions, but Daniel had to admit that he didn’t know many people in today’s society who aren’t. The young man called him a friend.

In midwinter last year the young man and his friends realized that Fred had no coat worth the name. They prowled the thrift stores without finding an adequate fit. Daniel called his family in northern Minnesota and a week later received a box of used winter coats. One of them fit the older man. “It actually met his needs and made it all the way around him. I felt good about myself. After three weeks we’d found the right coat. We’d done something for a neighbor.” They shared congratulations all around.

Two days later Daniel spotted the man wearing another coat. It was dirty and nondescript and barely covered his belly. “What happened to the coat we gave you?” he asked. The older man stared at the floor. “I traded it for this one,” he said.

Daniel remembers the scene and his fury. He demanded, “After all of that work to find it, you did what?” The older man was silent. “Then he raised his head,” Daniel said. “He had an equally frustrated look that seemed to say ‘how dare you? And then Fred, the man who had slept on park benches and in alleys, said “the other guy was homeless. He sleeps outside, and I sleep in here. He needed the coat more than I did.”

The young man at the microphone teared up and stood motionless, recalling the scene, how he had barely trusted himself to speak his apology. The realization came hard, the piercing truth of a life’s lesson learned. It came from a man who was mentally troubled and couldn’t read, now saying of another man he’d met “he needed it more than I did.”

It was there in front him, the young man said, “what loving your neighbor as yourself looks like.” What he saw was the beauty and the humanity of the power of love when it shines clear and unmistakable in the eyes of a battered man.