Once he was lost, but now Montie is found!

EDITOR'S NOTE -- When AP National Writer Martha Irvine learned that her family had been reunited with a long-lost cousin, she set out to tell his story -- and that of the big-hearted kin who embraced him.

Read Montie's heartwarming story below...

WOODHAVEN, Michigan -- His hair had grayed and he'd lost several teeth.

But there was something about the small, wiry man who walked into the shelter at the Woodhaven Bible Church in suburban Detroit in search of a bed for the night. With boyish enthusiasm, he told church volunteer Pat Fite about his "good day," how pleased he was to have found some discarded returnable cans and a grungy baseball. Pat helped him clean up the ball. She continued to study his face.

It was a good day for Monte, indeed -- and it was about to get a whole lot better.

"You look so familiar," Pat said to him as she poured him a cup of coffee that cold evening last December. He thought the same of her, but wasn't sure why, until she directed him to a nearby table to get a name tag. He scrawled "MONTE" on it, and immediately, Pat knew this was no stranger.

"You're family to me!" she exclaimed, as she darted from behind a kitchen counter in the church basement to hug Monte Handley, who she'd somehow realized was her husband Howard's younger cousin.

The last time they had seen him, Pat and Howard were in their 20s and Monte was a towheaded, freckled boy at a Handley family reunion -- summertime picnics that had become increasingly infrequent over the years as the older generation died.

Now, at age 47, here was Monte, waiting for a free meal in a church basement, with no job, scant reading skills and a home he'd fled to escape his druggie friends. Other than the baseball and the cans, the few possessions he carried with him were in a canvas duffel bag: a bit of clothing, cartoons he'd drawn, and a dilapidated book of photos of storefront artwork and signs he'd once painted to earn money. That was it.

With everything going on in her own life, Pat didn't have to take this on.

She and Howard have their own financial struggles and live in an urban area that has seen more than its share of economic heartache, with foreclosure notices, boarded-up banks and gas stations, crumbling roads and peeling paint around every corner. It is a sobering scene.

And yet they knew they had to help. Here, in the midst of hardship, a family was stepping up to take care of one of their own, banding together as their elders would have done in the days before government took on so much of the responsibility.

Whether divine intervention or just an incredible stroke of luck, Monte was back in the family fold -- and Pat and Howard were not about to lose him again.

Montie's Story Continues...Click Here for Page 2