Then what?

A little something extra on this Friday before Thanksgiving...

About 15 years ago, Kansas City Police dropped a freezing homeless man off at the Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Shelter. There, a volunteer rubbed his frostbitten feet. "Are you a minister?" the homeless man asked. "No," replied the volunteer. "I'm an engineer."

Teresa Williams recently told Charles McField's story in the Kansas City Star Magazine. The content has expired on the Star's website, but we'll give you some of the details...McField worked as an engineer with Allied Signal, now Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technologies, for 13 years after earning his master's degree at UMR. Sure, he did some volunteer work. But it wasn't enough for McField. In 1996, he decided to go to the Harding Graduate School of Religion in Memphis.

"I spent much of my life pursuing goals set by society -- striving to achieve marketable accomplishments or American dream concepts," McField says in the magazine article. "I realized that after acquiring all my dreams, goals, plans, desires, then what?"

McField is no longer an engineer or even a volunteer. Now he really is a minister. To be more accurate, he's a full-time chaplain at City Union Mission Men's Center, 10th and Troost, back in Kansas City. One of his main jobs there is to help people feel better any way he can. In her article, Williams describes a poignant encounter McField had while on the job:

"A few months ago a young client grabbed McField's glasses in a burst of anger, snapped them in two and threw them to the ground. As McField reached down to pick up the pieces, the man punched him in the jaw. A client who saw the event says he actually saw the chaplain offer his other cheek to the aggressor and ask, 'Do you feel better now?"'