Man of God
His retail ministry, song for your troubles, this way to lumber
He’s there as you enter the Home Depot at The Forum off Colonial Boulevard. A big man, Ken Williams is kneeling on the floor in front of two astonished young children, Parker and Kallyn, their mother, Ashley Lemieux, standing nearby. Williams is serenading the family with a beautiful tenor voice.
It is not any song I had e ver heard, but lyrics that come from his heart at this very moment.
It is also a powerful voice that comes from deep within him. “I am a minister,” he would tell me. “And this is my ministry,” waving his hand about the store he began working at in 2006, as Moses might have waved his staff and parted the Red Sea.
But Williams is far more than a greeter. He is a man of God, his job connecting him with others on a very real and spiritual level. “People,” he says, “come in here and they are struggling with something. Maybe they aren’t getting along with their husband or their wife. Maybe they are having trouble paying their bills. It is important that we give everybody love, because all people need it.”
I watch Williams work for a while, first with the young mother and her two children, completely captivating them. Then with a man in a hurry to find something, a burst of singing directed at no one but the air in front of him. There’s another man in a rush to get a propane tank, asking Ken to help him get it out of the
rack outside the huge store.
Williams is more than happy to oblige. “I have told you before, brother,” he says to the man. “You having any trouble, you come to me.”
I notice by now that Williams, who is just 57, walks a bit bent over, as if carrying a heavy weight on his shoulders and that he could never quite straighten up under such a load. As he talks with me while performing his greeter duties, I sense he’s more testifying about his religious convictions than interviewing. “I used to be a battler,” he tells me. “Everything was a fight for me.”
There’s more truth than metaphor here, as Williams is a former professional boxer. “It was a release for me at first but became a way of life,” he says of fighting, “and, unfortunately, it took me a while to outgrow it. Sometimes it takes time to become a man, and I am not just talking about getting older. I am talking about becoming a true man of God.”
Outside now, a car stops at the curb. Glenda Mendoza calls out to Williams,
“Sometimes it takes time to become a man, and I am not just talking about getting older.” —Ken Williams
“It is my mission to try to uplift them [customers] and send them on their way with joy in their hearts.” —Ken Williams
who goes to the car and begins singing to a child in the back seat. “I sing to be at peace,” he says, “and because God said in the Bible we should make a joyful noise.”
When I ask Glenda Mendoza about Williams, she smiles broadly. “He is always happy and he is great with kids. We call him Papa.”
As Williams resumes his story, he wonders whether I’m getting the message. “Yes, sir, I am listening,” I respond. “People wonder why they get into trouble or bad things happen to them,” he says, “but I will tell you when you do evil, God takes his protection away from you.”
At which point my mind starts whirling as I think about all the evil I might have done and the personal problems I’m enduring. “Everybody has problems,” he says, as if reading my mind. “It is my mission to try to uplift them [customers] and send them on their way with joy in their hearts.”
As we’re finishing our talk and I’m walking off, Ken Williams calls out to me as he had so often to others that day. “Have a blessed day,” he yells, and while I have heard that phrase many times, in the case of Ken Williams, I think he really means it. It feels nice.
Williams also sings in the group Spiritual Voices and is a parishioner at the Church of the Living God on Cuba Street in Fort Myers.
But the Home Depot at The Forum is his ministry.