the community is gathering this day in grief and in celebration and on behalf of the family i simply wanted to say thank you for comment to pay your respects your love the consideration you had towards ed all  of us this whole city has been touched by a remarkable man a living proof of the old proverb that you can't judge a book by its cover this is a man who who did live out the saying right on what he said right on the front cover of the bulletin leaving no rock unturned a life fall rich overflowing made some mistakes corrected some mistakes and gave back and gave back and gave back and that's why we're here today and so on behalf of the family i want to thank you after the service today i want to invite you into the parlor it's a room right down that straight hallway the doors will be open there's a room just for a few refreshments a time of gathering and sharing stories and giving comfort to one another also wanted to let you know that today in the service there will be times where we will ask the family to share some remembrances and then we will ask the community to share some remembrance and i simply wanted to lift up that are remembering it's is simply a small little snapshot you don't have to tell ed's whole story just a story that touched your life  and that is your gift to the family who won't know those stories and so if you would would you gather with me in prayer we give thanks to you holy one the spirit of life itself the spirit that knows us when we ascend on top of the highest peaks when we are so victorious when everything is going our way down aren't there and when we stumble and we fall we lose our way when we can't find the door that leads out even there in that pit you are with us you are the strength and the compassion in the courage and the imagination that leads us out redeems our life gives a second third ten chances and you are the spirit of love that connects us together makes us to know ourselves for who we are created in your image and after your like ess and our whole story is just learning how to love one another so we invite you hold the spirit to be present with us as we share stories offer each other our grief and offer each other our gratitude for the remarkable life of this man who touched us deeply calmly and be with us men like to introduce  harris and thames going to start us off so i spent the last hour before i left the house and some time in the parking lot across the street this morning trying to get through this speech without trying and it's going to be a my challenge for this morning because if i do that then you're going to start crying and i'm going to see you and i don't cry and says going to be a bad dynamic so i'm going to do this all the spirit be with me so i decided that what i wanted to do to day as to tell the truth about it mclean truth is the hard thing and none of us i think have more or came into the office one day and i told him he had sold thirteen hundred papers that month and this is that can we were publishing every other week maybe fourteen fifteen thousand copies a month so that i was responsible for the ten percent of our circulation and he told me later he went back to his room at the seal motel that ni he got a custodial job at the school across the street from safeway and got up every morning at six and he'd work that  and then at noon he'd go across the street to the safeway and he'd stay there till like eight or nine at night and i go make a bank and the next day he did the same thing all over again and worked hard and created some comforts for himself that a lot of us take for granted he never stopped working those long hours and he told me once that free time was not good fred and that those hours at the safeway were what kept him on track and once he had found success he started giving back he'd come into real change buy six hundred papers for the week and then he'd buy another hundred for the vendors who weren't doing as well as he was and needed them every week and every holiday season and sometimes just because he would cook up these huge feasts in his lake city apartment and he would bring them into real change seafood gumbo baked chicken two or three kinds of kishen jew or three kinds pies oxtail soup southern greens glazed carrots ribs mashed potatoes and gravy cornbread he'd bring it in with a hand truck man who every time he would come in for papers he would shout over his shoulder on the way out the door no one in particular everybody have a great day and make a lot of money november told me that he had been given two months to live and terminal lung cancer nothing and then maybe seeing the four alarm look on my face he said wri and that's when i realized i really knew nothing about it i mean he told me a few stories these are just pieces so i spen time with them in his apartment and him telling me a story and i got to know ed and ed ed's telling was clearly a bad ass i came to know that ed story is the story of race in america he told me about his father edward was a sharecropper three or four generations removed from slavery from had his birth mississippi who went into the military in the late thirty's and found that for a black man there are some things worse than sharecropping tried sharecropping for a few years few more years and then he went north with the great migration was about six million other african americans he worked in factories the rest of his life and i got to know ed smart black kid from the south side of chicago deep in the south side who hated school but loved a good fight whose devout christian grandmother carried a big gun in her  purse even within the black community growing up in chicago's red light district was sometimes ready killed and shamed just because his skin was darker than those people he discovered from behind bars and he had a fine line and a thirst for knowledge who fought for an education and when he was released from prison in the late sixty's finished his beer and political science through one of the first young gifted and black scholarships the state of illinois ever made who learned in his late twenty's that a college degree for a black man with a federal prison record is no magic ticket and that for him so many of who became an international drug dealer known by his street name cheesus whose superfly inspired seventies fashion sense drove him to wear a black mane hat with a big gold chain who roamed europe speaking french eating in fine restaurants drinking remy martin under the assumed identity of a canadian named ronald co his way into classes at le cordon bleu the world's premier french cooking institute in paris france in the early seventy's learned the black man were not feared and despised throughout the world and for whom that was a revelation whose brother was murdered by chicago  who finally got nailed for international drug trafficking went back inside for another ten years i got freed from prison that i didn't get freed from his past and he was dogged by trouble and addiction for most of his life and then finally ed found himself again through work and community and caring about people and then just as i thought i discovered the true ed ed does and as ed community responded to his passing i learned about this whole other side of ed that he didn't want to tell me about the man who cared about street kids and the crack heads in the prostitutes and sometimes even the panhandlers and tried to lead them toward the light who was always generous with his success and held court every day from his folding chair dispensing hard earned street was done and sometimes cash to those who needed it more than he did firmly believed in everybody's ability to change and transcend who believed in people and wanted to help them to be better and many others here you can share those stories including his wonderful family the privilege of spending some time with yesterday so i'm not going to go on for much longer but in a better world could have been anything he wanted to be and in the final chapter of his life ed found a way had lit up that corner of the of which his gorgeous and true soul and all of us real change are honored to have known him honored to be here with you today so i would like to welcome sister ed was the only person in the world who got to call around a banana bun seal mclean gains illness progressed the conversation the conversation became a little less because i realized he was in pain but i'm here today to share some thoughts my own personal thoughts with you as tim said my name is sue mclean gaines and i'd like to share a word with you today that's very important to me that word is storm lists odorless lists and on it's own it's power list that excuse me that word is a love brought me across the country to stand before you today because after all i've got a birthday coming up tuesday and i hate playing to have a hootenanny i hate playing to party like it was in ninet be here because of some things that he made it clear to me that he wanted me to do from the from the from the man that really didn't give a damn to the real change guy who cared and acted and reacted responsibly love brought out his passion and that passion was selling real change i remember a conversation that we had and he was he was working for the community center and he said to me he said i am a banana i'm going to give this job of the community center and i'm just going to say all newspapers in the name of the newspaper it's real change and i say well what can an a is real change for a newspaper and he said to me he said oh you stay you say it's going to be all right and no matter how old he got whenever i talk to him i would always say boy listen to me here when i'm about to say the year this is how we responded and reacted it was just passion and that passion was selling real change real change awakened in him a genuine concern for people his grandson love took form and love reached a point where it was not powerless it took power you have to you have to bear with me  and it took shape as he extended and expressed it to others i'm so proud of my brother he did a three hundred sixty degree turnaround  in his life and although i am older than he is it was wonderful to be here to witness that turnaround the thing i am most pleased about where he and i was concerned is that it never mattered where we win or what we did we never lost for one another and that i think that's remarkable i think that's that's something to celebrate and something to say so it is with love that i release my brother to god's unconditional love and i know that  so that you will act and react lovingly always towards one another and i say thank you one of the things that happens at real change his spot at the safeway talked to him a lot got to be friends and she knew or had come out and afterwards she took it upon herself to sort of canvassed the neighborhood and she's got a story to tell and she's going to come up and tell that story and that will open a passing the mike piece where mean rich gave the guidelines remember there's a lot of people who want to speak and sometimes a short set on the end is better than a long speech and while mike is being passed there will be a plate that gets passed and what you put into that beyond the expenses of putting up so anyway donations in excess of the memorial will be put into a fund to buy papers for vendors because we think that's what it would have wanted and it will also be index cards in there and one of the things that's been very meaningful to the family is seeing all of your incredible comments on the facebook page on the real change face page blew up and away that i've never seen when we posted the notice of age saying overnight literally within twenty four hours there were more than  hundred thousand views of that notice and more than five hundred shares it's unlike anything we've ever seen we saw a five thousand percent jump in our stats so there's been a lot of comments on that in there from gorgeous and what we would like you to do is if you have a member and you would like to take one of those index cards take one of the town souls write it down pass it on to the next person and write down your thoughts so i would like to bring up a little i first want to say thank you so much to the family for this is huge for you to be willing to share this moment with i feel honored to be here and that you would come all the way out here from six and i need to say that are you the grandson he loves you so it's he had about a million pictures of you that he showed and i talked a lot about i think he was talking to you a couple times when i stood out there on the phone so thank you so much i'm from minneapolis so that's something that we had in common i'm new to seattle and to washington and i came out here on a job so then i was in the northern part of washington and i have really had a hard time since i have been here in in washington i don't know what it was i was just having the i don't know if it was the midwest or and wes clashing or something but i just found myself having a difficult time meeting people and and i'm in seminary so i was having a hard time finding a church and everything seemed to be so hard and so then i moved to the university district and i went to the store one day and here's this big black guy on a chair talking about real change real change and i looked at him and i thought you know i'm not saying anything to him and i did that for about a year i think maybe about two years because by that time i had so many negative experiences i'm sorry you guys but i did i just kind of watched people before really you know connected and tim was right i did i want to go look for it for  but now that he's gone i ask myself and this is kind of i'm going to talk about him through the perspective of who i am because i i'm i'm not only in seminary but i am  have in me and live by my faith in jesus christ so my re my interaction with everybody and everything and everything that i choose to do including it is through that perspective so now that is gone i ask myself who was he really we got a piece from his sister and we got a piece from from tim tim because i have embrace the gospel and because we gather here  and this is a church of jesus christ and because the entire notion of eternity is before each and every one of us and i have to say that when i went out to look for it it was kind of like two times when i was just going on all throughout the neighborhood the first time i heard you know how you hear things and you don't you know when you get sixty you don't believe too much of what you hear so i heard things but i kept looking because i didn't believe it and then finally he talked so highly of him i remembered his name he really respected him so i called real change but as i began to speak to people as a first time part number one i was looking for part number two i had been told that he was no longer you know here and when i then had a different mission and began to get out and to to to try to let people know what i thought maybe people were shocked as i was and one of the things that i got repeatedly from my community because this is now become my community is that people were voicing the whole question of eternity because and was such a fixture here he was he was when everything would go wrong when everything was messed up one when when nothing seemed to work out you could always go to ed and al ed was just him selling real change was really appropriate and it was almost like a metaphor because he actually did create real change within people million times a day and as i walk through the neighborhood all those times i'm looking for it and then found out that he he had passed on i found many similarities between and jesus christ this really interesting  tim had to say because that's just my because i was not understanding what i was feeling about him no longer being here and without the mantle of being the son of god  who was jesus really and i think that's still a question so from that perspective people really didn't know within the community who was but they know that there was something so special about him and the same was also true of jesus christ he came as a man jesus did and he was stripped from his identity of being the son of god in the only way to the father and jesus too had a proclivity to run with the people that most people didn't even talk to let prostitutes and and swearing swearing fishermen i mean peter was one of his disciples and i am just going to keep it real you know and sometimes to go there with his language but in that sense he was like peter because peter cursed too and even cut off somebody is easier you know so from that perspective any any went on to be one of the greatest apostle so there is a similarity there because amaze because i mean i was fail real annoying to learn i realize i was called and i felt really i felt very annoying to just so special that god called me and i was in seminary and then i met ed you know it and it was almost like i realized after a time when we were friends for about maybe three years i realized that i didn't have what he had and that began to bother me i saw him giving money to people on crack and he he complained well i know where it's going you know and in that sense he was very much like jesus when the thing that made him so special is and got it but unfortunately the church unfortunately does not seem to get that and they didn't get it back in jesus day either and that's why jesus died he was killed by people that didn't understand will you know back in those days people either clean or own clean and so when you talk to prostitutes and the woman at the well and feeds and those kind of people that was just unheard of he was a rabbi but all of those people's lives work were changed but the ultimate thing that and the last thing that jesus said and i'm just going to quote this john fifteen fifteen he said i no longer call you servants because the servant does not know his master's business instead i have called you friend everything that i learned from my father the disciples didn't get it because friend was like beyond their ability what do you put friend i mean i mean a lot of us do we have that today where we say friend in fact we get on facebook and you can have five thousand friends but nobody knows how to be a friend i'm putting this down because i'm done i'm way over my five minutes but that's the sum asian of my message is that like jesus knew how to die jesus tried to keep telling his disciples i'm a die i'm a they didn't get it and they slipped they weren't there for him when he needed them i i i i am and all of the way that he chose to die and i am convinced at this moment that he saw something or had something that i do not have and that most people don't have because to be quite frank with you i know that in jesus christ there is no death but i have to tell you that if i had a report like that i mean i'm still a work in progress and i probably go kicking and screaming and i definitely wouldn't keep keep keep it to myself i mean i don't know you never know but with such honor and honorable like jesus and in that sense i am for every change knowing him i've been really blessed in my life i don't know why i've had the blessing to really sit with people that are known all around the world preachers that are known all around the world politicians all the rest but i have to tell you is that where they miss the church preachers politicians all of them what they miss is that the ability to love the ability to be a friend to be ability to try to teach to relate to people where they are a lawyer a prostitute a fisherman a drug addict anxious to hear your stories because i know that they're much richer that even than mine and i thank you very much my name is portia mcclain i am also it from minnesota i live in minneapolis i'm a professor of english linguistics and i want to share a story that when a and i were six and eight i was six got our first bike bikes alike we got a monarch and we couldn't wait to get outside to ride those bags and we must the road at christmas time up and down in the cold and we were freezing and my grandmother came out and said you can we had a fit but a little bit more about edward is that he was always a romer he and my brother that was killed were very close to three of us were very close and my grandmother drug us to jail to see him every time he was locked up we are had to go but then when c died and he was in jail in it we continued to add ritual to go see him every time your brother and i said my brother a i'm like he's in minneapolis they said yeah so about a week later i bumped into him then he came to live with me and he lived with me in minneapolis until he moved here to seattle in one thousand nine hundred four and he moved here because he caught a case and was in trouble again a medium want to go back to jail but then he moved here because of his son and his son to mother because he always managed to go where there was a relative he managed to be wherever there was a relative i have that see i had seen him in a tough father died at our father's funeral but we were very close as youngsters and down through the years and i i'm so glad they finally found himself here to have so many people care so much about him that is just amazing to me and that's why i flew here from minneapolis to be here today because i  to really be a part of what he found i read the real change on the internet and the story that was written about him and it made me feel so very good because he'd been a lost soul for so long and he finally found that peace here among you all and i thank you for  that my name is sin and i knew for gosh seventeen eighteen years i think most people here know that there is a meal here on friday nights that's open to everyone in the community called friday feast and it's been here for about thirteen years and before that for four years it was a university baptist church just a couple blocks from the safeway and ed used to come to that meal on and off more in the beginning when we were at the old  location but later i would still make a point of going and seeing if you know i had my niece and nephew or another young person who was new to volunteering and they felt nervous about it i'd make a point of walking them by the safeway with me and talking to  you know seeing what a true gentleman was and ed and i had a ritual that i understand better now that i know his background in cooking i would pass him by the safeway and he would always the first thing he'd say to me is what's for dinner this week and you know he knew the most gratifying thing to us is when real change called our meal the best of all soup kitchens because there was something different and add new to and he said what's for dinner this week and i'd say  well it's only wednesday i don't know yet i haven't scrounged you know if i'd see him on a friday and i'd say well you know i found this this and this and i don't know what i'm going to do with it and at always have a lot of opinions about what i should do with it  i understand that better now that he you know he had a love for many many things in the community i could feel that he had a love for food and a love for what we were doing with our meal and it was a blessing to us that you know he he blessed us with his presence there hi my name is stephen i'm a neighbor and i guess i've known ed for probably those same eighteen years or so and and in some ways ed helped raise my children i just realized because we would often walk past the store and by the door we'd be buying the issue or we wouldn't and it was always have a good day and you too little man to my son or you two little cutie pie to my daughter and they're now in high school and college and they miss him and they remember him and he helped us be a better family in this neighborhood where he showed us how to be gracious how to be available how to be kind and otherwise where we live we wouldn't have that kind of interaction and that's a great gift that will keep on giving i'm sure through their lives so this is and thanks for him helping to raise two great people hi my name is done a new eighteen years i believe when i so i'm just going to say something sure i moved here last year from new york and i didn't know anyone and i felt really lonely and first moving here and seeing and at the safeway when i first came there and then subsequently take the news because we knew we didn't read it so we just for year or two we didn't exactly what he was saying and he actually found out about real change and came home one day and told me old newspaper actually it's called real change so then the debate was then over but i've never talked to him out of this has given money for the newspaper and i just walked away and when i heard he passed away i read about him i just do with a great person and i regret not even saying good morning he always said you have a good day and i said thank you  known for many many years he's greatly kushal life my entire family my mother always talked with him she held him in great high and sting my sister and always talked with him and held him in the same high esteem and it was he's turned into a very good young man with a young family of his own now my babysitter who spoke how he feels he knew it all his o showing his love for our son my son which he said to him is like him having a son himself and we always talked about his little grandson and how important it was and his slow princeton's why and the last time i saw this is a few weeks ago and the other day when i went to  i'm no air wait for eighteen years and one thing that we have in common is our grandchildren he always talks about your grandson i stepped in this church today and i knew exactly who he was that they were to my hip they were to compare it to me that he was diabetic i've been one for thirty five years edward asked me about everything and i to edward every diabetic is different but i would let you know what you should eat or which you should eat the day my daughter called me and she told me that a word has passed and i told my parents say i said i hear  mind change change change changed and i have a gift from god that i see planes and hear things i told them they were to with me in he told me many but in the current step i hear his voice change change change change in him when i go to store tear plan a good man and i have found a good man and i think edward for thank you i've also known ed for about eighteen years i knew him before i knew that he was one of my best friends the father of one of my best friends sons and i wanted to say i think his real legacy has to do with the word it was words of kindness words of respect words of  that uplifted people that he really left as a legacy and what he gave us in exchange for our dollars were written words and it is through words that we do accomplish real change in a community and in each other's hearts so we need to remember his legacy of speaking respectfully and lovingly to each person those words have real power the power of real change thank you