By Rita McInerney

John Bray is attuned to the outdoors. He loves the air, woods, the horse trailer near the comfortable home he built among the tall hardwood trees. He would like, he admits, to light the fire in the big stone fireplace in his living room, take the telephone off the hook and enjoy the peace of home for a few days.

But this season, with the cold nights coming on, he’s back at his special ministry to the street people at Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Atlanta and at the shelter in Jonesboro. Instead of the piney air that refreshes him, he’ll be at the night shelters where anger and depression are nightly guests and the air is fetid with the sour stench from the breaths and bodies of defeated and sick men and women.

John Bray’s connection with the people adrift through misfortune or folly began six years ago with a call from Betti Knott, volunteer coordinator for the Central Presbyterian shelter. She told him she needed someone to stay overnight. Could he volunteer?

“I went down. I don’t know why--just because a friend of mine had given her my name. I got down there and met some folks and realized I could do some good.”

That was before the shelter had cots for its overnight guests. They would come in wearing their newspaper and cardboard lined rags and flop down in any corner or space they could find. It was, John Bray recalled, “a stinking, smelly, dirty, loud, nerve-wracking crowd. But I felt like I needed to be there.” Gradually, that first year, “it clicked that I could do something. I was gullible. I listened to their hardship stories.” He befriended some of the men, tried to help them get back on their feet.

He still feels close to one of the first men he helped, hears from him occasionally and knows their friendship remains. “Phil” had lost wife, children, job, home. He turned to alcohol as many do. John Bray encouraged him to find a job through his labor pool, staked him his first week’s rent, $35, at a rooming house. “He used to come home with me.” His children, Tony, 13, and Annette, 17, welcomed the stranger who sometimes played with them.

If John Bray’s red and white polka dot cap, red T-shirt and dungarees are his “uniform” for most every occasion, his faith is always his armor.

“I’ve got a lot of trust in the Lord and I feel like I’m a fairly good judge of people I meet (at the shelter). Phil was the first one I saw that some of these folks could get out with a little help.”

It took him several years but now, he said, he “tries to discern which ones the Lord wants me to help. I haven’t been good in some of my judgements. Some of them fell down, but with lots of support from my community, I’ve finally come to realize that I can’t help all of them.”

When he first started at the shelter he used to stay overnight. “Now I guess I’ve come up the chain of command, I don’t stay over. I’m the street person. I keep it orderly on the outside and let them in. I’m also a trainer for the (new) overnight volunteers. After everyone is in and if everything is quiet, I can leave.”

“When his truck pulls up in front they are so glad to see him,” Ms. Knott said. “The street people love him, respect him. He has a marvelous rapport with them.” She recalled the night, the first year he worked, when the volunteers he was there to train, wouldn’t let him in. “They thought he was a street person.”

“He is so pained by the suffering of these people. He’s helped a lot of them get back on their feet. It’s hard to accept that you can’t help everyone,” she said.

He took a major role in getting the Jonesboro shelter started. About five years ago, he and Mary Iezzi and Judi Carroll, fellow parishioners at St. Philip Benizi and shelter volunteers, heard Ed Loring from the Open Door Community speak of the need for the shelter all over the metropolitan area and neighboring counties. This prompted them to try and get a shelter in Clayton County. Two years later, after much apathy and discouragement, the Jonesboro Presbyterian Church congregation agreed to let the Task Force on the Homeless, a coalition church, Saint Vincent de Paul, social service, mental health and hospital people, use the second floor of the Sunday school building as a night shelter.

Now the Jonesboro shelter can accommodate 50 people. “Our shelter is not so much street people but people who get evicted and some transients. We have enough rooms so we can put up families.

“My job this year is trainer coordinator. I have to train the volunteers the first two weeks (the Jonesboro shelter opened Nov. 1). It’s like the Lord lets the work slow down in winter so I can do the shelter work. As long as he doesn’t let it slow down too much. He hasn’t let me down.”

John Bray might have thought the Lord let him down when he was laid off from his night shift job at the Ford plant in Hapeville during the recession. Now he views this as a gain, the Lord’s way of leading him and making him open to the shelter ministry. He started out on his own as a contractor and, offered the chance in 1983 to return to the night shift, he decided to stick with his own business and the night shelter.

Earlier, during the night shift years, another event deeply affected his life. His wife Judy, born and raised in the Baptist faith, accepted a neighbor’s invitation to go to the Catholic church with her. Later, she took instructions but didn’t tell John who hadn’t gone regularly since he left home to go to college.

The Friday night before the Easter Vigil Mass in 1974, she recalled, she told him he had to go to church with her Saturday night. Then she told him why. She was being received into the Church and she had persuaded the priest to let him be her sponsor. “I told him it would work out.”

Another big change for both of them came in 1978 when they made Cursillos (weekend short course in Christianity). By that time John Bray was back in the Church, “more in tune, trying to discern what He wanted me to do. When someone needed me, I tried to be there.”

“I just see him as having a gift,” his wife said. “He gives 100 percent of himself to everybody.”

John Bray is going to ease off this winter. Instead of going to the shelters four or five nights a week, he said he will only be going two nights. First, though, he is going to the Jonesboro shelter every night these first two weeks it is open to train new volunteers.

He gets depressed, tired, emotionally drained. And there is constant need for people to help. “I’m always looking for more people interested in helping.”

He doesn’t hesitate to say how volunteering at the shelters has changed him.

“It made me aware of the needs of people I didn’t realize were there. Not only their physical needs but their emotional needs. It made me appreciate the life I have, both spiritually and materially. We’re suppose to look for the good in people. I think the Lord has shown me the good in these people.”

“But there’s no way you can do it on your own, there’s no way. Betti (Knott), Joanna (the Rev. Joanna Adams, staff person for Central Presbyterian) and all the super people involved, there’s no way we could do it without the peace and grace of the good Lord...You’re going through the valley and see so much you can’t do, except to give them a place to sleep and something to eat.”

“Where I am right now in my spiritual life is doing what I can and praying. It took me awhile to get to that peace. I put myself on a lot of guilt trips. Now I use whatever I have for His glory.”