When you restock our food pantry, you offer people like Dustin a second chance
It’s easy to take meals for granted. But when you’re homeless, a meal means everything! Just ask Dustin.
Chronically homeless, his choices had driven friends and family away. Meals were hard to come by. When he did get food—
“I would eat until I couldn’t eat anymore,” he remembers. “Then I would get sick and go for many more days without meals. I felt alone. I didn’t know what to do.”
Just 18 years old, he found himself at another homeless shelter for the first time. An unsafe place where there was fighting all the time. Then he was told about the Mission, and everything changed, beginning with that first meal.
And it means so much.
“Everything about the future excites me.”
“I can lean on the meals here,” he says. “Every day, as soon as it hits 12 noon, I know there’s going to be a meal. As soon as it’s 5:30, there’s dinner. It’s always there. It’s constant. That stability helps me heal.”
The regular meals have helped Dustin’s stabilize physically from a chronic medical condition. In fact—
“I was in a coma for two and a half weeks right before coming here,” he recalls. “The doctors asked my mom if I would want to wake up. If I’d been awake, I would have told her I didn’t want to live.”
Now that he has regular meals, his body has healed and he’s been able to work on the issues that brought him here. He even got his GED, which opened the door to a new job and the ability to go back to school. Dustin couldn’t be more excited!
“I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that without the Mission. Everything I have comes from here,” he says. “Before I didn’t want to live. Now, everything about the future excites me.”
And it all started with that first meal.
Meet Dustin
Dustin wants to meet you! Come for a light breakfast. He’ll share more of his testimony, you’ll have the chance to take a tour, and you’ll see first-hand how you’re giving Dustin–and so many others–a fresh start.
Saturday, September 29 | 9-10:30 a.m.
Men’s Campus, Union Gospel Mission Twin Cities, 435 University Ave. E., St. Paul
RSVP here, or call 651.789.7564.