Anthony Delgado got dropped off at a train station in Doraville, Georgia, after an argument with his cousin. That’s when he began his journey as a drug-addicted homeless person.
“I did a lot of bad things,” Delgado said.
Crack was his drug of choice and he panhandled on the streets of Atlanta to feed the habit.
What he didn’t know at the time was that years later he would have his own charity across the street from the very train station where it all started.
Delgado says he looks at the station today and thinks, “God has a sense of humor.”
The turning point came when he was sitting at a Greyhound bus station in winter and had just smoked some crack. He wasn’t feeling well. That’s when he says a man and woman came up to him and told him he should go to the VA hospital. He followed them, flinging the bus station door open roughly and drawing the attention of some police officers standing outside. The police told him to calm down and he said, “I’m sorry officer, I was just trying to catch that couple going out the door.” But the police said they didn’t see anyone. Others nearby hadn’t seen the couple either, according to Delgado.
He walked down to the local park and started panhandling. His chest was bothering him. A man stopped and he asked him for help getting to the VA hospital. The man walked him to the train station and gave him a token. “I stepped on the train, turned around, and I was gonna say thank you,” but the man was gone.
Delgado made it to the hospital. He joined a rehab program and got help from a pastor. When Delgado told him the story of the vanishing couple and the man who gave him the train token, the pastor said, “Believe it or not, there are angels.”
He got a job and began to get back on his feet. After a church service about obedience, Delgado took bags of bread to the spot where he used to sleep on the streets. “It was very emotional. I saw the same people after a year, the same people I slept next to.” Within 45 minutes all the bread and pastries were gone. “As I was driving back, I started crying. Thank you, Father God, I found my purpose in life.”
Now Delgado has seven employees, two buildings, 17 freezers and two trucks in the organization he founded. I Care Atlanta, Inc. is a nonprofit devoted to ending homelessness by reaching out to the working poor and homeless men, women, and children in metro Atlanta and surrounding communities, its website states.
Click here to read more.
SOURCE: CNN, Jennifer Hauser
