Selling your soul... worth it? Homeless Man Challenges Award-Winning Salesman Bill Moyer to go home and change the world

Catholic Men’s Leadership Alliance president ties “new year, new you” to small daily vows, a late-night encounter in Austin, and a long road back to the Church

Bill Moyer, the Catholic Men’s Leadership Alliance president, calls heroism “simple”: put God first, love your wife the way Jesus loves you, and walk your family toward heaven one day at a time.

His life changed after winning an international sales award, but not how you think. It left him feeling so empty that he wandered the nighttime streets of Austin, looking for meaning again. A homeless man told him he’d never be satisfied until he “went home again.” That night led him back to the Church — and later, to face up to a deep bitterness against his own dad.

Moyer rejects big resolutions to focus on small, finished, commitments. Ministry to men grows the same way: one coffee, one brother, one step closer to home.

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Moyer defines heroism as something ordinary and demanding at the same time.

“Heroic men don’t have to save people from burning buildings and do all kinds of things,” Moyer says. “A heroic man is a man who gets up every day and understands a couple of things.”

He turns to his marriage.

“I love my wife more than I ever thought I could love anyone,” he says, “47 years later. I still look at her like the very first time our eyes met.”

“But today, I don’t look at her and see the most beautiful face, the most beautiful person,” he says. “I see the most beautiful soul, because I don’t look at her, I look into her — into her soul and that connection.”

He says the relationship works because of clear priorities.

“My wife understands that she’s the second love of my life,” he says. “Because I love God with all my heart, all my mind, all my soul.”

“And then Jesus’ command was love as I have loved you,” he says.

‘The price you pay is your soul’

Moyer describes a version of leadership teaching he absorbed early and later rejected.

“They told you, you can have anything you want, do anything you want, be anything you want, if you’re just willing to pay the price,” he says. “And I bought that lie.”

“What they don’t tell you is that the price you pay is your soul,” he says.

He pins the moment to a date.

“I woke up one day as part of my story at the height of my career — 1987,” he says. He describes winning “a world award,” flying from Pennsylvania to Austin, and leaving “my three kids and my pregnant wife at home.”

“When I received that award,” he says, “it was the emptiest feeling I’ve ever had in my life.”

He calls himself “uncle dad.”

“Uncle dad to me is that good guy that comes home, enjoys their kids, comes to visit, brings gifts from all the places he’s traveled because he’s never home,” he says. “That’s what an uncle does. That’s not what a dad does.”

He says the emptiness turned into a question that wouldn’t stop.

“I went out and took a walk that night,” he says. “Challenging in my mind: why whenever I get what I want, why is it never enough?”

A homeless man on the streets of Austin

The walk ends in a conversation he still treats as decisive.

“I was confronted by a homeless man on the streets of Austin,” Moyer says. “Just taking a walk middle of the night.”

He says the man asked why he looked lost.

“I told him about winning this award,” he says. “I told him about my alcoholic father.”

He describes shame, distance, and an early break with faith.

“I walked away from the church, walked away from faith,” he says, “because I had a confirmation teacher who kind of lit up my life — the best teacher ever even to this day that I’ve ever had in my life.”

Then, he says, the teacher left his family.

“In the middle of that year,” Moyer says, “this guy left his wife and his kids because he was having an affair and he later married his 23-year-old assistant and he was 45 years old.”

“At that point,” he says, “I walked away from the church and I said, if this is what being a man of God is … I was 13 years old … I don’t need any of that.”

He says he decided to build a life on his own.

“I made a decision that day,” he says, “that if I was going to make anything good in my life, it had to be up to me.”

The homeless man shares his own collapse — job loss, drinking, separation, three years on the streets — and then turns the question back on Moyer.

“He looked at me that night,” Moyer says, “and he said, you know, you’re never going to be happy. You’re never going to be satisfied until you go home again.”

Moyer says he answered with disbelief.

“I said, so let me see if I understand what you’re saying,” he says. “You’re a homeless guy and you’re telling me to go home.”

The man presses harder. “You know where home is,” Moyer remembers him saying, “back to the time in your life before that teacher disappointed you, when you knew real peace.”

‘Can I call her?’

Moyer offers what he calls a deal.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he says. “When I go home, back home to Pennsylvania, I’ll go back to the church if you’ll go home to your family.”

The man says his wife won’t take him back.

“There’s no way my wife would take me back,” Moyer recalls. “The way I treated her and all that I did, that’s unforgivable.”

Then Moyer uses the one thing he had that night — confidence.

“I said to him, I just won an award for being the best salesman in the world,” he says. “Can I call her?”

He says he called the man’s wife, and “30 minutes later she came and picked him up and took him home.”

Holy Saturday, 1988

Moyer says he returned home, joined RCIA, and entered the Catholic Church the following year.

“Holy Saturday, 1988,” he says. “Came into the church and changed my life.”

He describes receiving the Eucharist for the first time.

“That day, that moment when I received Jesus in the Eucharist for the very first time,” he says, “was the first time in my life that I ever experienced true intimacy — one with God and one with my wife.”

He places heroism inside vows.

“July 8th, 1978, when I said I do,” he says. “What my vows meant is from that day forward, I was responsible to get my wife to heaven.”

“When each of our children were born,” he says, “from the day they were born, I was responsible to get them to heaven — not to point to heaven, but to walk them to heaven every day and to be that model.”

‘I thought you were talking about richness’

A friend once asked why he wasn’t a millionaire.

“He said, you’re one of the sharpest business people that I’ve ever met,” Moyer recalls. “I don’t understand why you’re not a millionaire.”

“I said, I am,” Moyer says.

When the friend clarified he meant money, Moyer says he corrected him.

“Oh, you’re talking about money,” he says. “I thought you were talking about richness.”

He lists what he calls his real wealth: “I’m married to the love of my life. I have a personal, intimate relationship with God. I got the best kids — not the most perfect kids — but I got kids that God has entrusted me to raise.”

“The rest is just stuff of the world,” he says, “and none of that matters.”

The deacon’s challenge

Moyer says another turning point came just before entering the Church, at an RCIA retreat led by a deacon.

“He said, you know, I want you to pray about something because I don’t think you’re ready to come into the church yet,” Moyer recalls.

Moyer argues back in the story, listing the work he’d done.

“I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do,” he says. “For the last nine months, I’ve come every week … I did all the homework, read all the books.”

The deacon says the problem wasn’t effort.

“How can you stand before God,” Moyer remembers him asking, “and say yes … with bitterness in your heart for your father?”

“You’re forgiven as you forgive,” the deacon tells him.

Moyer calls the confrontation heroic.

“That’s a man,” he says. “That was heroism from that deacon to challenge me like that.”

‘You’re not going to kill him, are you?’

Moyer says he did “the hardest thing” he’d done up to that point: he told his wife and kids why he didn’t speak to his dad, then asked to see him.

He calls his mother with a familiar question.

“I called her and said, is he home?” he says.

“She said, yes, but I’ll ask him to leave,” he recalls.

Moyer refuses.

“I said, no, I don’t want him to leave. When I get there, I’d like you to leave for a little while. I just want to see him,” he says.

He says his mother whispered back. “‘You’re not going to kill him, are you?’”

He arrives with notes he’d written, sits down facing his dad, and then realizes he grabbed the wrong card.

“Somehow there was a card in my pocket, but it was blank,” he says. “I’d picked up the wrong one.”

So he speaks without a script.

“I just looked at him, looked him straight in the eye,” Moyer says. “And I said, I can’t imagine what your life must’ve been like to have hurt people like you have.”

“But I just want to say something to you,” he says. “I want you to know, no matter what, that I love you. And I forgive you. And I want us to start over.”

His father breaks.

“My dad … cried like a baby,” Moyer says.

He says the change lasted too.

“From that day on for the rest of his life,” he says, “a lifetime, at least third-generation alcoholic — never drank again.”

Moyer says his children met a different man.

“My kids then got to know the grandfather that was like the father that I wished I had,” he says.

He describes what came next: a cancer diagnosis, five years of fighting, and reconciliation.

“God blessed me in a really powerful way,” he says, “because my dad lived five years after a diagnosis of six months.”

He says he was there at the end.

“I got to sit alone with him holding his hand when he took his last breath,” Moyer says. “I got to walk him out.”

He circles back to the homeless man’s line.

“When that homeless man said, you won’t be happy until you go home again,” he says, “part of us going home again … Jesus didn’t say, come home. He also said, walk others along home with you.”

“So I got to walk my father home into the arms of Jesus,” he says.

Resolutions: One day at a time

“New Year’s resolutions by about the 17th or 18th of January,” he says, “they’re long forgotten.”

He jokes about the best business model.

“There’s one particular business where you only need a big space for a couple of weeks and you make all your money in January,” he says. “And that’s a health club.”

He says the issue is scale and speed.

“We live in that microwave instant-gratification world where we want everything now,” he says.

His answer is drawn from recovery culture.

“Alcoholics Anonymous, any of those 12-step programs all have the answer to that,” Moyer says. “One day at a time.”

Then he corrects the language.

“It’s not really a resolution if there’s no resolve,” he says. “The real key … is a series of small commitments.”

He uses prayer as the example.

“Somebody says, I’m going to improve my prayer life. I’m going to pray one hour every day,” he says. “You probably have prayed … one hour last year total. So that’s too much.”

Instead: “For five minutes every day, I’m just going to sit in a chair and just pray,” he says. “Not pray and ask. I’m just going to sit and just listen.”

He argues that commitment is proven only by completion.

“Jesus gave us the definition of commitment,” Moyer says. “In his last words: it is finished.”

“So what you say you’re going to do is only a commitment if you do it,” he says.

Heroic Men: A new year, a million men, and ‘storm the gates of heaven’

De Souza asks what the Catholic Men’s Leadership Alliance is trying to accomplish.

“It’s very simple,” Moyer says. “Harnessing what exists around the world. Back to our roots of being that Catholic men’s leadership alliance, using the power of Heroic Men.”

He reframes leadership as disciple-making.

“You know what we call it in the faith?” he asks. “Disciple making.”

He sets an ambition.

“To reach what eventually will be one million men and more,” Moyer says — “not necessarily next year” — by asking men already showing up in existing groups to take “one step farther” into an explicit commitment.

He lists the kinds of partners he has in mind: “the Knights of Columbus” and “That Man Is You,” among others, and says the aim is to strengthen families, the Church, and “transform the culture.”

What prayers work best

De Souza asks for Moyer’s “go-tos” in the spiritual life.

Moyer starts with time.

“I focus on God first,” he says. “So I give him first fruits of my time.”

“I don’t do anything else in the day before I give at least five, 10, 15 minutes of quiet just in his presence,” he says.

He says he stays in Scripture — “taking something every day” — and adds a shared practice with his wife.

“I pray Liturgy of the Hours with my wife,” Moyer says. “That’s been a game changer for us.”

He says they pray “three times a day, morning, evening, and night prayer,” and jokes that the ribbons used to “make my brain just explode.”

Another nightly practice ends with a repeated line.

“When we go to bed at night, we pray chaplet of Divine Mercy,” he says. “The last words on our lips … Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, I trust in you.”

He also describes a monthly review of a written rule.

“Many years ago, I wrote a rule of life,” Moyer says, describing it as a “life statement of who I am, who I’m working to become,” and says he asks his wife for feedback on how he’s doing.

He returns to the same theme: start where you are.

“If you can’t do something for an hour, you can’t do it for five minutes,” he says. “Try to do … the greatest holy five minutes you’ve ever seen.”

“Jesus meets you wherever you are,” Moyer says. “You don’t have to go to him, he’s right there.”

‘Be like Mike’

For a closing story, De Souza asks for Moyer’s favorite moment from recent years connected to the alliance’s work.

Moyer names a friend: Mike Kelly.

“I’m really kind of proud of this guy,” he says. He describes watching Kelly move from “searching for something” into weekly small-group faithfulness, then into leadership — “diocese-wide,” “Region 10,” and “now … on a national basis.”

The origin, he says, was ordinary.

“One man walking with another man … started with a cup of coffee,” Moyer says.

Then comes the detail that makes him laugh.

“He took me to Whataburger,” Moyer says, “because coffee is free if you’re a senior citizen. So he bought the coffee.”

“So we both had our free coffee. And he got free advice,” he says.

Moyer describes the end of that first conversation and the point of repeating it.

“We went from just being two guys searching for what God was calling us to,” he says, “to … now we’re brothers.”

“I kind of like to challenge men to be like Mike,” he says. “Go invite somebody to coffee, find out what their story is, share your story, and make a commitment that two brothers are going to walk together for a little while — and then go out and change the world.”