An alert reader spotted this in a Texas newspaper and thought it deserved a wider audience. I agree. It’s a powerful testimony to perseverance — and it shows how just one person can make a difference in the life of another. At this moment of new beginnings, it’s a wonderful pick-me-up, too.

Take a look:

Jo Ann Reyes was hesitant when the homeless man volunteered to teach a GED class at her church. His clothes were in terrible condition. He had long hair, his front teeth were rotted out, and he smelled of the streets.

But Reyes agreed to let Jeremy Burnett teach. He quickly got everyone to pass the math portion of the test. So Reyes, president of the Hope Center, a ministry for the poor at the Without Walls Church in Fort Worth, recommended him to a nearby electrical training company. He soon had those students up to speed on the math portion of their test, too.

It was clear that, despite his appearance, the 35-year-old was intellectually gifted. Encouraged by his successes, Burnett told Reyes he wanted to save money for college.

Reyes told him: “Don’t wait. Go now.”

Last month, Burnett finished his first semester at Texas Wesleyan University. He got an A in every class.

The achievement contrasts starkly with nearly every other part of Burnett’s life. He failed at military enlistment, marriage and three attempts at community college. He slept in parks and homeless shelters for years. He struggled with depression so severe that he was locked in a psychiatric ward three times.

“The hardest part about being homeless was getting food,” Burnett said. “There were several times when I had to eat out of garbage cans. Then there’s the loneliness because it’s hard to find people to talk to.”

Attending high school in Spokane, Wash., Burnett showed promise. His teachers enrolled him in advanced math classes, but he started using drugs and alcohol.

He stole from his parents and his brother and sister so often that his mother threw him out of the house in October 1990. Three months later, he stopped attending school.

Life as a homeless drug addict was so difficult, Burnett said, that he soon resolved to quit.

“I was sitting in the snow, crying, and I can remember the tears freezing on my face. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t live like this forever,’?” he said.

He quit drugs and alcohol for good, but years of homelessness and depression lay ahead.

He tried to turn his life around by joining the Army. Five weeks or so into basic training, he said, the Army decided he wasn’t soldier material and sent him home.

Always a lover of books, Burnett decided to see the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

“I just had this idea of all these books and wanted to see them all,” he said.

He resolved to get there by hitchhiking. He slept in parks and got by on scraps.

“People would give me money or food on occasion. Mostly, I ate out of trash cans,” he said.

Burnett caught a ride out of Denver that brought him to Fort Worth. He arrived around July 1992.

“It’s not exactly that I decided to stay. I just ended up staying,” he said.

On several occasions, people would take a liking to the soft-spoken young man and offer him a place to stay. But in what would become a pattern, people soon realized his bouts with depression were more than they could handle, and they had to force him out.

“They really couldn’t take care of me, especially someone with the psychological problems I had at the time, complicated by the problem I had with withdrawal from drugs,” Burnett said. “I don’t blame them at all.”

Burnett was in and out of homeless shelters for years. He slept in parks. Sometimes he enrolled in 12-step recovery programs to deal with withdrawal.

Depression would burn the biggest holes in his life. He would not care about anything and would not take care of himself. His front teeth rotted and fell out.

In some intervening brighter times, Burnett would visit libraries to read fiction and sift through books about math.

Around 1993, he said, he worked in a fast-food restaurant and followed a co-worker to a GED class. On his third visit to the class, he passed the test, getting the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Burnett took the GED to enroll at Tarrant County College three times. But depression returned each time, robbing him of all interest in studying and eventually leading him to drop out.

Eventually, a public-health counselor referred him to the county’s mental-health facility. Burnett said he was locked in the psychiatric ward for three months in 1997, a month and a half in 1998, and another month and a half in 2000.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, Burnett befriended a woman who worked at a laundromat he frequented. He was struck by the warmth she showed him.

“One day I decided, ‘You know, I want to love the way she does.’ That was the moment I got saved. A week after that, I went to church and was baptized within a month,” Burnett said.

Read the rest at the link.

Photo: by M.L. Gray/Fort Worth Star-Telegram