Homeless couple find help — and marriage — in Rock Hill
By Andrew Dys, Columnist – adys@heraldonline.com
Andy Burriss
Ruben Hernandez and Terri Simmons Hernandez are all smiles on their wedding day at First Baptist Church in Rock Hill on Friday.The smiling couple, homeless, said “I do” Friday afternoon.
The witnesses at First Baptist Church, strangers days or hours before, who took rings off their own fingers and money out of their pockets and love out of their hearts for this rarest of all weddings, clapped and cried.
Ruben Hernandez and Terri Simmons “did” because Rock Hill, and the members of First Baptist Church, did.
Before July 4, they had slept two nights in a row under an Interstate 77 bridge along Cherry Road. Before that, the couple hitchhiked from Tennessee, through North Carolina, to what Terri said was “nothing but stares like we were animals.”
“The world looked right past us,” Simmons said. “Until we got here. Rock Hill. We never were here before. Never even heard of the place. But people saw us here.”
Rock Hill did not look away.
One lady wiping tears at the wedding was Celeste Rinehart, who never met the couple until Thursday. She touched her empty finger where her own engagement ring had been for decades. Yet her finger was now bare. Rinehart had taken that ring off and given it to Simmons.
“I have never seen people like this, it was love and it was a realness in their hearts that they just needed a helping hand,” Rinehart said. “I felt I had to give the ring. I can’t explain it. It just came to me that it would matter more to them.”
On July 4, Hernandez, 39, and Simmons, 38, walked the streets most of the day looking for work. Homeless, hopeless.
They met in a Texas grocery store a year ago, a concrete finisher and a waitress both down on their luck in a bad economy. Hernandez admits he was in a rough place in his life.
Still, they hit it off.
“I just plain fell in love with him,” Simmons said.
The couple found no hope or work in Tennessee, where Simmons has family, then tried other family in High Point, N.C., only to find nothing but despair. Then a shot at Statesville, N.C., until last week when Hernandez, born in California and bilingual in English and Spanish, was told by some Hispanic construction workers to try Rock Hill.
“Heard there was work here from those guys, so we hitchhiked down,” Hernandez said. “I don’t want charity. I want work.”
Hernandez and Simmons on July 4 walked up and down Anderson Road, U.S. 21 Bypass, looking for any work.
“I was about to give up hope,” Terri said.
“She was ready to leave me forever,” Hernandez said. “Really the end of the rope.”
Hernandez finally asked a used-car dealer, Darrell Burkett, if he could wash cars for a few bucks. Burkett said yes because Hernandez didn’t ask for a handout but asked to work for cash.
“He told me his story, and I knew this couple was different,” Burkett said.
Burkett, a member at First Baptist, told the couple to go to the church to see if there was any help for them. A friend of Burkett’s, church member Ray Register, gave them food and money and clothes to make it through a couple days. At the church, Beth McCormick, 30 years seeing both the truly needy and scammers walk through her doors as benevolence minister at the church, knew immediately this couple was legit.
“They wanted to work for whatever they could get,” McCormick said. “They told me they wanted to work to make money to get back to Texas, where they would at least not be homeless.”
McCormick gave the couple enough money for a motel room and two bags of food. She watched them walk away and cried.
Terri Hood, church administrator, set up a plan for the pair to work cleaning up Thursday and Friday around the church to make enough money for bus tickets to Texas. Pulling weeds, washing floors, anything.
“They never asked for a handout, insisted they be able to work for whatever they received,” Hood said. “That is the difference. Their desire to work, not to get a freebie. And what was clear was a devotion to each other.”
The couple struck up a conversation with Rinehart, a volunteer receptionist. It was mentioned that each wanted to get married, but Simmons said “it was the wrong time.” When you have only enough money for a motel room for one night and seemingly no future, marriage seems out of reach.
“I told them it is never the wrong time to do the right thing,” Rinehart said.
That’s when Rinehart pulled the ring off her finger and gave it to Simmons. Rinehart took it on faith to put the couple in her car, drive to the Probate Court office for them to apply for the license and pay the fee herself.
The word spread around the church that this homeless couple seen out in the heat pulling weeds was going to get hitched.
One lady volunteered to bake a wedding cake. Others bought gift cards and secretly threw in money. Somebody brought flowers.
Friday morning, the couple worked at the church. Then Rinehart took them to a salon for a donated style and wash for the bride and a fresh cut for the groom.
They arrived at the church a few minutes before 1 p.m. Friday to meet the Rev. Enrique Ramirez, the church’s newest assistant pastor who has started a Hispanic ministry. Ramirez volunteered to marry the couple and even called friends in Dallas so the couple would arrive to another church of open arms.
“We all have value on this earth, a place,” Ramirez said. “This wedding is about love and valuing each other in life. The couple, and the rest of us, too.”
So the wedding was set.
The words “I do” came out in the vestibule of the church, next to the big boulder inside the building signifying that Bible phrase: “The Lord is my rock.”
“This spot just seemed perfect, that the Lord had to be my rock to put all these people in our path just when it seemed that we had no hope left,” Simmons said.
The bride and groom wore donated jeans and flip-flops.
Nobody cared what they wore or that the wedding was unlike any ever held in this church. Many of those people who had helped over the past few days watched and tried not to cry.
Most failed.
“I will never forget you all,” said Terri Simmons, now Terri Hernandez. “You made me believe in people again.”
The couple cut the wedding cake and shared it with friends.
“Rock Hill will always be special to me, and before I got here, I never even heard of the place,” Hernandez said. “I am so happy. I got married. I got saved. I found out there is a place in this world that cares. I never had been here before last week.
“Rock Hill, South Carolina. What a place!”
Then another church member drove the newlyweds to Charlotte, where the bus rolled out for the long ride to Texas. A ride that has countless bridges that the bus will roll under.
Yet, because of the people of First Baptist Church in Rock Hill, a church and city neither had ever heard of until a week ago, Ruben Hernandez and his wife, Terri, will not have to sleep under a single bridge to get there.
Andrew Dys 803-329-4065
adys@heraldonline.com
