A Calling to Fulfill: Reflections of a Missionary

By Marion Lamar Simpson

Marion Lamar Simpson has been called a trailblazer and pioneer among individuals and leaders of his community. The late Atlanta City councilman Archie Byron once stated that Marion was born to help improve the conditions, nurturing, and growth of disadvantaged children and young adults.Marion's life story is told and gives the reader detailed family issues that molded him into being who he became. Much information is revealed from his childhood about incidents in his past while growing up in a world that affected him, his friends, his family, and his community.The book details his achievements, challenges, downfalls, and triumphs of life, and the world's state of turmoil and change during his development. Simpson discusses his battle with using drugs and almost giving up on his dream to be a humanitarian. Mr. Simpson experiences an act of recompense with God himself and recognizes that he is able to accomplish an array of goals by the testing of his faith. If Mr. Simpson had not risen above his life adversities, what would have happened to the over seventeen thousand homeless young people he was eventually responsible for overseeing and providing a haven at the Young Adult Guidance Center Inc.?Marion's story will also be of particular interest to those readers who are studying in the areas of social science, social work, and social services, who may have a desire to develop their own support service agency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662403132

Book preview

Chapter 1

Assessing the Need

On the evening of May 6, 2010, I was suddenly escorted into a surprise party celebrating my sixtieth birthday. It was planned by the Young Adult Guidance Center staff. I really had no idea that the staff remembered when my birthday was. Here I was, me, being honored that day. I never imagined so many folks would gather to celebrate me on this day. My loving family, board members, residents, and staff were all present.

As we all settled in the dining room, someone asked me to say something to the group. So I did, and I first thanked everyone for coming out to wish me a happy birthday. I told them that my birthday was also significant because it marked forty years that I had been working with young people, and I thanked God Almighty for the opportunity to serve all those years and hoped I would have another forty years to be of service.

Then one of the seventeen-year-old consumers who resided at the facility in our Independent Living Program (ILP) asked me, Why did you work so long in helping young people?

I told him that I knew that the young people were the future. I personally wanted to make a difference in the future lives of young people, especially young people who knew they needed help and even those who didn’t know they needed help. I believed in my heart that my desire to help young people had been with me since my childhood. I felt that it was a calling from God because God made my dream clearer to me and allowed the dream to become reality.

After the young man heard my remarks, he said to me, Mr. Simpson, you ought to write a book about your forty-plus years of experience in helping young people.

I answered, One day, I really think I will!

The same night, while driving home, and even a week later, I intensely thought about the young man’s comment concerning me writing a book and the challenges involved in doing it. I thought if I did write a book, I would need to tell the truth and not leave anything out. Keeping it real, as the young people would say. I also thought about the question he posed concerning my longevity working with young people. Why did I remain in the field so long? I then questioned myself: What if I did write a book? What would I write about specifically? I would write a book that included the struggles I had in life and how they influenced my desire to provide social services for young people and especially the difficulties and victories in my effort to establish a program to provide services needed by young people. The world needed to know why we all should be concerned about the adversities that homeless young people were faced with.

Deep down in my soul, I knew why I worked so long. I knew what the unmet needs were in the metropolitan Atlanta community in the early 1970s. When I started my career, it was then that I had a front row seat. I was face-to-face, looking at the problems each day and watching and hearing about young people faced with adversities. There were single-parent mothers who were heads of households that had sons with behavior problems that were out of control in their homes. Those kids exhibiting unruly behavior ended up locked up, detained, placed in the juvenile justice systems, placed in prison, or dead. The youth were caught up in illegal or deadly issues before those parents, usually a single-parent mother, could get help with their child’s issues. These were kids that needed structure, counseling, and mentoring.

We saw more gang violence than ever before because of the absence of fathers or strong role models in the household. From 1970 to the present day, Atlanta has had an increase in battered women enrolling in shelters, which were usually overcrowded. Due to facility regulations and requirements, most of those shelters would not admit women who were mothers with older teenage sons who needed to stay with them. In many situations, the young men who were thirteen and older were separated from the family. They had to be referred to the County Department of Family and Children Services or placed in male adult shelters.

When we took a close look at the overall foster care systems in the United States, it showed that black male children were adopted the least. And in most cases, they were forced to grow up in institutional living that continued into adulthood. About 30 percent of this population became runaways and joined gangs in order to survive. Another 35 percent of our young men would most likely enter prisons or die at an early age.

I became so concerned and passionate about wanting to develop some kind of support system to help the dying male youth population. My past job experiences in the social service field and my work in resolving some of the problems in shelters and group homes gave me clear insight into the need. Some of the success stories I witnessed in working directly with those youth gave me the inspiration to focus more on their immediate needs. The system actually failed them, and they really needed a continuum of care plan. The need for this population to be in a structured environment as a child was very important. At an early age, they needed to receive responsible adult guidance, and I believe it still is the solution to this very day. Our young men needed structure and consistent caring supervision. Young people needed the kind of guidance that would teach them how to care for themselves and develop healthy relationships with others. This would be a major priority in the approach to development for young men in the Atlanta area. I then thought about it even further, realizing that if I wrote a book that encouraged other people to be concerned and become more active in advocating for the disadvantaged male youth population, then I would be achieving a great accomplishment for humanity.

It was a fact that the males provided the seed of the world’s human race. They should be the providers of strength for the family. If we were our brother’s keepers, then a real human being should be concerned about his fellow man. Not just concerned for himself but concerned for each person’s well-being.

If our society, with so many social ills, stifled the growth and development of the young male, then there goes the value and structure of the family and even humanity. I must say the family institution is the root of development for each person in the family to become a real human being.

I believed that the family was the key to the door of successful living or the door of destructive living. We knew that if a child were raised in a safe and stable family environment, then that child would have a greater chance in becoming a successful citizen. It was not just the positive interpersonal relationship development of the family that made each individual member successful, but the entire community and environment played a part in the full development. I believed that each individual in the family needed a support system through their growing pains and development.

I couldn’t forget my Bible studies, and I must reference my Lord and Savior Jesus who said that the last commandment from God was to love one another as we should love ourselves. Most of us who had read and studied the Bible had been taught that faith, hope, and charity practices were ways of life, and it kept us successful throughout our lives. It had been proven that the longer one practiced these charitable ways, the more spiritually successful they could become.

It was said in the King James Bible, book of Proverbs 22:6, Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. A child needed to be trained by responsible adults in the household or the community. It was recommended that a child be raised by a responsible mother or father figure in the household. It would be good if this could come about all over the world, and this would help to solve many of the problems. But let’s be realistic. All families had not been guided by responsible adults. This was the major reason why we had so many dysfunctional families.

In order to really tell my story and why I had worked so hard supporting and advocating for our youth, I must introduce myself. You needed to know what made me who I was. I did think it really was my upbringing and family environment. Now I was not saying that I came from a well-rounded, structured, and upstanding family with perfect parents. This would be far from the truth. I felt that regardless of the downfalls my family experienced, one thing I did know when I looked back was that there was the essence of love shared among my family experience. For this fact, I was reassured to know that I had help from God on this pilgrim journey. It was my family story that encouraged me to develop the Young Adult Guidance Center Inc. So this was why I told my story about A Calling to Fulfill: Reflections of a Missionary.

Chapter 2

Born in a World of Changing Times

You could say I had lived through the worst of times and even the best of times. But in all my life, of years sixty plus nine, I had seen the true glory of God through the bad times and the good times.

Being a key person in the development of the Young Adult Guidance Center Inc., the experience had strengthened my belief that there was a God who made the earth and heavens. At the time of my beginning, the world news traveled by newspaper, radio, television, and most of all, word of mouth. But now, we had it in the speed of light with our internet resource for communication. I hoped that when people read this book, they would be inspired to help those youth who could not help themselves.

I was born in the baby boom era of the 1950s. We, who were baby boomers, were born worldwide between 1946 and 1964, the time frame most commonly used to define the present senior population. During my first decade being alive on the planet, world news exploded; as it did five years earlier with the atomic bomb explosion. The Korean War began, with North Korea invading South Korea; and the United States became involved, asserting a post-Second World War role as world police. I Love Lucy became a hit TV show on one of the only three television networks at that time: ABC, CBS, and NBC. History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, which was the first artificial satellite. Albert Einstein had declared that a nuclear war would bring the world to destruction. Elizabeth II became the Queen of England. The United States Supreme Court declared that racial segregation was unconstitutional. Joseph Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev took over as leader of the now defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or the Soviet Union. Emmett Till was the victim of an anti-black, racially motivated murder in Mississippi. Rosa Parks, in defiance of segregated seating requirements on public buses in Alabama, was arrested. These were the signs of the time that stood out in my memory when growing up as a child before I reached the age of ten.

Yes, my childhood saw the world spinning around fast with bad and good news, and if it were not for a praying family, I didn’t think I would have made it to this day. Yes, I was born in America, the land of e pluribus unum, which is the United States of America’s motto in the Latin language, interpreted as Out of many, one.

As a baby born on Larkin Street off Northside Drive in Atlanta, Georgia, my mother, Clara Irby Simpson, didn’t make it to Grady Memorial Hospital. I came into this world on May 6, 1950, with the help of a neighbor who was there to help my mother through the delivery. I wouldn’t remember anything about my entry back then, other than what my eldest sister, Doris, said.

We Are a Living Soul

We are living souls, we come into a world with little knowledge about where we are, who we are, but we know we exist as a living soul.

We feel and sense that someone else is with us, touching us, although they remain with little sound.

Those sounds we hear, we cannot understand, but we hear loud and sometimes calming sounds that we like, so we know we exist as a living soul.

We move around in little space and, for some consistent reason, seek to test the limits of space perimeters, we feel the company and comfort of someone else; Yes, we know we exist as a living soul.

We hunger for some kind of substance we know not what and regularly experience several exciting, tasty meals during the course of a period of consistency, and we feel nurtured, so we know to exist as a living soul.

We know that we are not alone because of the constant sounds, movement, and experience of a deep connection to a caring other, we feel loved and we know we exist as a living soul.

My sister Doris was just nine, about to turn ten years old, and she was with Mama during the time of my birth. Mama told her to run nearby in John Hope Homes to a neighbor, to get help with the delivery. At the time of my birth, my parents had five kids already in the small three-bedroom apartment in John Hope Homes. Doris was the oldest, then James Jr., Betty, Mable, Howard, and me. Here I was, the sixth child of James and Clara Simpson.

Months later, it was decided that because our family began to increase in numbers, we had to move to another set of government apartments in Carver Homes. It was said, during that time, as the baby of the family, I was a very curious little one and wanted to crawl and explore every corner of each room. It would appear that these acts led me to learn an early life lesson of obedience. One room my parents said that excited me most was the kitchen, where the food was. I suppose I had an insatiable appetite as a growing baby. I was fascinated by the many sweets, cookies, cakes, and pies Mama would prepare for dinner at times. My mother said I was always interested in what was being cooked. I was eager to see the items that came out of her oven. It was as if I was trying to learn how to cook. My mother was an outstanding cook, and I discovered that as a baby.

Mama said that one time before she got a baby playpen, she would place me on a blanket in the living room. That way, she had a clear view of me as she was cooking. Several times when cooking, she would always see me