Same Kind of Different as Me

This is the best book I’ve read in quite a while. I finished reading Same Kind of Different as Me during our trip to Mount Hermon, in fact I stayed up late on Friday night to get to the end.

It touches on so many issues that it’s hard to list them all. At its heart the book is about three people–a rich white couple who befriend a homeless black man who grew up sharecropping in Louisiana. It would be hard to imagine a great relational divide in American life. Normally they would never meet. 

But God touched Deborah Hall and called her to reach out to the homeless in Fort Worth. Her husband reluctantly follows. When they meet Denver Moore, he wants nothing to do with them. Over time love wins out and they become friends. 

Even at that level, the book carries an important message. But there is much more. Life changes when Deborah is diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. Suddenly the book has much to say about living and loving and facing a terminal illness. The last few chapters are almost unbearably sad, and yet they shine with hope that death cannot destroy.

It’s all interwoven, the sharecropping, growing up in Texas, becoming rich, working for “the Man,” riding the rails, living on the streets of Fort Worth, making millions selling art, answers to prayer, years in Angola Prison, infidelity, sadness, victory, chemotherapy, the true face of the homeless in America, learning to trust across the racial divide, the power of love, dreams and visions, a trip to Beverly Hills, final forgiveness, saying goodbye, and the wisdom of a man who can’t read but knows how to preach. 

It’s all there, mixed up the way life is, in chapters narrated in turn by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. 

As I said, it’s the best book I’ve read in a while because it puts a human face on issues we don’t know how to talk about. Marlene and I were both deeply moved, for different reasons and in different ways. It’s the sort of book you want to talk about after you’ve finished it.