Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

This is my cousin Troy. I just met him a few years ago when I discovered my mother’s birth family. (My mother was taken out of her home at 21 months of age, declared a “neglected child” and separated from her many siblings—though adopted by a  loving couple).

This newfound relative James Troy Turner is a disabled Vietnam veteran. As a young man he was a hippy, a sometime cowboy, served in the Navy, and worked as a mechanic. He has a devoted little trained service dog named Pedro. He’s had a hard life but he’s a believer in Jesus. And Troy is a poet, so we have that in common. I helped him gather his poems (penciled through the years in notebooks, on scraps of paper, anything at hand) into a book. He’s been selling the books to his friends and neighbors in Northeastern Colorado, and it’s for sale on Amazon. He writes gritty poems about challenges of life and death.

I share this, in part, because I desire to work for well being in our world by helping give voice to people who feel forgotten, overlooked, neglected, unseen, and unheard.