Trust First: A True Story About the Power of Giving People Second Chances
By: Bruce Deel, Sara Grace / Foreword By: Simon Sinek / Narrated By: Bruce Deel
Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
My first Listen of 2023, and pass the tissues please…!
What’s The. BEST. Way to start a brand New Year?
Maybe with a lump in the throat? A tear or two rolling down the cheeks?
A full-on grab for a box of Kleenex?
And since Father Gregory “G-Dog” Boyle is too busy bringing hope and peace to write another book? Well, how about Trust First by Bruce “Ghetto Rev” Deel to shout in/sob in 2023. After sooo many years of social unrest, blatant and hurtful incivility, a global pandemic that left the rich richer and those just getting by NOT getting by at all any longer? Oh man, was I ready for something, ANYthing to inspire Hope, ANYthing to inspire Kindness as a way to live life on a daily basis.
What starts as a temporary assignment to the rundown and crime-ridden 30314 zip code of Atlanta has Bruce Deel and his wife Rhonda beginning the organization City of Refuge based on inclusivity, non-judgment, and thirtieth chances. Hands are extended to everyone in the area.
Period.
This means not only the homeless, but crack addicts, prostitutes, felons. Deel not only doesn’t turn away from anyone, but Rhonda has the two setting up their own home in the “new” church in the dilapidated and rats-the-size-of-cats area, raising their young daughters amongst the poorest of the poor, those whose choices may have seemed ill-advised but which actually make perfect sense given the context of soul-crushing poverty and desperation.
Souls are at stake; lives are at stake, and believe me when I tell you that this is an audiobook that’ll have you rethinking the way you yourself view others around you. Over here? The ever-growing Central Texas city where I live? When my best friend and I lived here decades ago, "the homeless” were accepted with open arms, laughingly called “musicians whose girlfriends kicked them out”. You just accepted people here, back in the day. Nowadays, it’s illegal to be homeless, encampments blighting the glories surrounding million dollar homes (Which once sold for $100,000). There’s no compassion, no sense of a shared humanity.
But even Ghetto Rev Deel has to constantly tweak his views and opinions as he comes to relax into his true and abiding Faith. He stares down his own prejudices, his own ignorance, his own beliefs that p’raps there’s an itsy bitsy bit o’ truth in “those people” being Lazy at best, Criminal at worst. He gets over that fairly soon, but people being who people are, he’s constantly challenged. Tho’ he institutes practices for overnight shelters where one does NOT have to be dead sober to stay, he learns that the dead drunk, with perhaps a heavy dose of mental illness to go with it all, might do things such as attack, vandalize, defecate on your car. That perhaps such an individual might indeed go too far and safety concerns might have to take precedence. That perhaps such an individual might be thrown into a cruel and inCREDibly punitive justice system. Deel wonders if he did wrong by the man in question, now lost in the system, but then again, he looks at his daughters, looks at the volunteers, and knows: You do what you can.
Over and over and over. Until you just can’t.
But he always does; City of Refuge always does. His vision which he brings to fruition is a one-stop-shop where housing meets health care meets job training even meets sanctuary for those who’ve been victims of human trafficking. THOSE particular women (At first it’s only females, but Deel is seeking to identify and assist males, often forgotten, caught in trafficking) and their stories are touching beyond belief. When they are so traumatized they seek a complete lack of stimulation, curled up under a blanket, unable to meet eyes, and then to hear of them blossoming with care and acceptance, opening up to Faith their own way?
Oh heck! what am I talking about? As tho’ their stories are the only gut-wrenchers. How about the man with such trauma in his past that he can’t get over, where he’s clean and sober for so long and so long only but who comes back to die in Deel’s truck, to die At Home? I mean, jeez! I blubbered like a baby as Deel, narrating this himself, seems to be on the verge of tears when he posits that THAT is the story he’s going with, otherwise it’d be too painful to lose a friend like that.
There’s soooo much pain in this book, but there is just Hope galore. There’s an all-pervading sense of Kindness that’s inspirational; there’s a fullness of Faith that I wholly embraced: This man, his family, the workers and caregivers, live their Faith. Now THAT’S what I call Beauty.
Which is what one is left with when the only 6-hours of audiobook is over and done with. Hearts opened, hands extended, second, third, thirtieth chances given. A crack addict who turns his life around; an alcoholic who cannot but is loved and cared for anyway, because he was made in the image of God, lovable simply by Being.
Beautiful. Simply lovely…
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