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BY JOHN COLEMAN
SPECIAL TO THE UMCONNECTION

After 13 years in the Marine Corps, including combat duty in both wars against Iraq, Roderick Dorsey left the disciplined life of the Marine Corps in 1997 and moved to Washington D.C. Then he lost his way.

The former sergeant’s life spiraled downward into drug addiction, divorce, unemployment and homelessness, and he soon disappeared into the streets and shadows of the nation’s capital. He drifted from job to job and lived in the men’s shelter on 2nd and D streets.

He also disappeared from his family: his ex-wife and their two daughters, his mother and grandmother, his father, sister and two brothers, everyone.

Then two years ago Dorsey, now 46, found his way to Emory UMC on Georgia Avenue. He came for the hot meals and warm fellowship the congregation offers to its homeless neighbors on Sunday afternoons. And thus began his Amazing Grace journey from lost to found.

“Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread,” said noted ecumenical evangelist D. T. Niles. News of Emory’s Sunday dinners spreads by word of mouth among the homeless.

Guests and church members feast together on hot entrees, salads and desserts, usually while enjoying a rented movie and conversation. They’re also encouraged to participate in the noon worship service that precedes dinner.

“I came for the food at first; but then I started coming more for the Word and less for the food,” Dorsey said. “I enjoyed Pastor (Joseph) Daniels’ preaching, and I began reading the Bible. I would ask him every Sunday for a word for the day, and he would give me a piece of Scripture to study. Proverbs became my favorite book.”

A trained cook in the Marines and in D.C. restaurants at one time, Dorsey began helping out with preparations for Sunday dinner, setting up chairs and tables in the downstairs fellowship hall, working in the kitchen, even doing some of the cooking. Then his volunteerism moved upstairs. After joining the church a year ago, he recently became an usher and began singing in the men’s chorus.

But it’s a full-time, paying job that has brought him to the church almost daily for the past year — or rather, to the next-door office of Emory’s non-profit, affiliated community outreach program, the Emory Beacon of Light. For the past year Dorsey has been a proud member of the Beacon Clean Team, a close-knit cadre of seven homeless and formerly homeless men who work together to clean and beautify the streets, sidewalks and storefronts of Emory’s extended community.

Funds for this program come from Washington, D.C.’s Neighborhood Investment Fund.

Uniformed team members are paid to remove debris, do light landscaping and help business owners improve and maintain the appearance of their storefronts along the Georgia Avenue corridor, with funding aid from the city.

Fittingly, it was through the Beacon of Light that the soft-spoken Dorsey emerged from the shadows of virtual anonymity and found himself in the loving embrace of two families. The first was Beacon staff and Emory church leaders, who have befriended and looked after him for the past year, as he has tried to remain sober, employed and accountable in his recovery from addiction.

Belonging to the Beacon Clean Team also afforded Dorsey valuable learning opportunities, including
basic computer training at the Beacon offices. A computer specialist comes in weekly to teach team members how to use software programs and research jobs and other interests on the Internet. He also helped them set up e-mail accounts and join the social media universe by starting their own Facebook pages.

It was that introduction to Facebook that led Dorsey back to his original family.

“I lost touch with them — all of them — for 11 years after I left the Marines,” he said, even though most of his family still lived in his hometown, Birmingham, Ala. “The only phone number I had was my grandmother’s, but she had moved or changed numbers.”

That’s Dorsey’s version, but his friends at Emory knew better. They told him he was hiding from his family because of his shame about his predicament and that he needed to find and reestablish ties with them. “Miss Bonnie (Bonnie Lee Nicholas, who oversees the Sunday dinner ministry) was always on me about that,” he recalls.

During one mid-August week Dorsey kept seeing and hearing references to family everywhere he turned — during Sunday worship and at the midweek prayer service, in conversations with staff, even in his Bible reading. Then after work one evening he checked his e-mail account and saw an astonishing message.

“I had been looking all over for him for years,” Dorsey’s sister, Montina, said in a later interview. “I had checked hospitals, prisons, information Web sites, everywhere. My girlfriend had been pressuring me to try Facebook because she had found so many people there that she once knew. But I wasn’t into all that social media stuff; I figured it was just for young people.”

But the friend was persistent. “She kept nagging me to try it. So finally, with her help, I set up my Facebook page while at my job and then searched for Roderick. When I saw his page and his picture there after all these years, I was shocked and so happy, I ran through the office screaming.”

Following Facebook protocol, Montina Dorsey asked her brother to admit her as his friend. When he accepted, she e-mailed him phone numbers for her, their mother and two brothers, uncles and aunts. Roderick called his sister and thus took the next step on his journey home.

“We were so excited to be talking to each other after so many years,” he recalled. “And when I called my mom, we were both crying. She said she had been waiting for that call for 11 years.”

Dorsey was heartbroken to learn his father had died in 2007, and no one knew how to inform him. But his emotions rebounded when his mother gave him the phone number of his ex-wife and two daughters who live near New Bern, N.C. After their initial shock, tears and laughter flowed on both ends of the phone, as a father reconnected with a 15 year-old who was 4 when he last spoke to her and a 20 year-old who was then 9.

“My ex-wife bawled me out for not calling,” he admitted, “but I had it coming.”

Nightly conversations with family members across four states ensued, but Dorsey had another surprise in store. He learned that the family would be celebrating his grandmother’s 92nd birthday on Saturday, Aug. 29, at a Golden Corral restaurant in Birmingham. When he shared that news with his friends at Emory they all urged him to make a surprise visit home for the occasion.

Dorsey bought a one-way ticket and traveled by train for 22 hours, nervous but excited, wondering what would happen, how it would all feel. “I had lots of thoughts and feelings, but I knew that making this trip was important. It was time to go home.”

When he entered the restaurant and shocked family members saw him approaching, they too erupted in screams and tears, he recalled, and the restaurant’s other, bewildered diners watched in stunned silence.

“We were hoping he would come home. We even had prayer vigils every night that week,” Montina Dorsey said. “When he showed up, my mom started screaming all over the restaurant. My grandmother was in tears, everybody was crying. The waitress came over to see what had happened, and then she started crying, too.”

The next day, he attended his grandmother’s Baptist church with his family, worshipping with them for the first time in more than a decade. His plan was to return to Washington in time for work on the following Tuesday, but they prevailed upon him to extend his stay.

“My mom was afraid he might not come back,” said Montina. “We want to hold onto him and love him here at home for as long as we can.”

So this prodigal son is still in Birmingham, a city he left as a teenager in the 1970s. He is living with his mom as he considers relocating there, finding a new job and starting a new life.

“All the memories from my childhood — people and places I knew, things I did — have been coming back to me down here, but a lot has changed,” Dorsey said.

He wants to see his daughters as soon as he can get to North Carolina. He feels hurt, and probably some guilt, about not knowing his own father had passed and not attending the funeral. “I can’t look at the obituary yet or visit his grave site,” he said. “I’m just not ready.”

But he says the life he’s lived and lessons he’s learned so far, “including from some of Pastor Daniels’ preaching,” and the eager support of his family at the Emory Fellowship will help him get ready for the next stage of his journey.

“We’re very happy for him,” said John Davis, Dorsey’s supervisor on Emory’s Beacon Clean Team. “Once you’ve been homeless, reconnecting with family and mending broken ties is so important. We teach that to the guys here all the time.”