Across the street from my new neighborhood’s Starbucks at Bryn Mawr and Winthrop is a state-subsidized home for patients under psychiatric care. I learned this from 17-year resident Bill, who came in for coffee last night and sat across from me in a matching dark-leather cushion chair.

My conversation with Bill, who looked to be around 50 years old, began shortly after he arrived and inadvertently spilled drops of his open Pepsi bottle on my bare toes as he walked past. He was eating from a big-sized bag of Doritos and let out a loud burp, for which he apologized, before offering me some chips.

The next thing I know he’s yelling across the café to another man and then says to me—

with all kinds of orange bits of Doritos coming out of his mouth—“Freddy lives in the nursing home. I’m the smartest one in the nursing home. Even the administrator knows I’m smarter than him.”

After I formally introduced myself, Bill started filling me on his life. He lived 20 years in the neighborhood with his mother before being placed in the psychiatric care facility, where he says he must share a room with three other patients who are much more severely “ill” than him.

“There’s NO privacy,” he complained. “I got a curtain but it’s still not enough, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I get so down. I’ll be in the grocery store or the deli and hear a Carpenters song or something and I just start to cry. Seventeen years at that place—that’s way too much. Three years ago, I finally got on my own but it was only ight months before I was back. It was at the Laura lei (a converted hotel in the neighborhood for people with Social Security permanent disability) and the place was totally roach-infested. I couldn’t take it. I had a nervous breakdown.”

Unbeknownst to me, Bill had come into the Starbucks with a Gideon King James Bible he planned to read. When I asked him if he believed in Jesus Christ as his personal Savior, and then gave him my self-written Bible tract, he promptly scooped up the Bible from off the floor and showed me which page of Genesis he was on. I told him about Paul being our apostle for today and directed him to Romans 8 (Brother Jordan always says, “When in trouble, remember your 8s—Romans 8:18, 28 and 38.”)

Bill, who heavily smudged my tract with his Doritos-stained fingers, told me, “When I had the nervous breakdown three years ago, I thought, ‘Who can I turn to—I’ll turn to God.’ I’m reading my Bible today and God’s good taking care of me.”

Bill said he had a job once many years ago at O’Hare airport where he helped wheelchair-bound people get on and off airplanes. “I loved my job; I had a good time,” he assured. “I would have loved to become a sportscaster. Listen to how good I am.” He then picked up my tract and began to read from it as if he were giving play-by-play action from a live game.

In his best sportscaster tone and cadence, emphasizing certain words, he read so loudly everyone in our section of the Starbucks couldn’t help but overhear, “ ‘You don’t have to go anywhere, do anything, walk an aisle, keep a sacrament . . .,’ assures Jordan. “You don’t have to move a muscle. You don’t even have to pray. God looks at your heart and wants to see your faith resting in His Son. When you trust in Him, that moment God the Holy Spirit takes you and identifies you in the person of His Son. He baptizes you into Jesus Christ and makes you one with Him.”

I swear, I never enjoyed hearing Jordan’s words repeated back to me more! Bill and I couldn’t help but have a long laugh once he was finally done yelling. It was the best laugh I’d had in a week! We assured each other we’d be meeting up again inside our neighborhood Starbucks.

(Editor’s Note: Sorry for being so sporadic in my writings lately. I have a long article I’m finishing on the complicated, sullied life of the world’s wisest man, Solomon. Writing this will hold me accountable to getting it done!)