Meet Rev. Beulah H. "Bubba" Dailey, Episcopal priest and executive director of Austin Street Centre. Answering God's call to service, Bubba began her own outreach program in the early 1970s. Alone but undaunted, she slipped into the dark nooks and crannies of Dallas’s largely ignored underbelly. Her goal: to dispense food, blankets and clothing to the destitute and dispossessed.

Friends familiar with the North Carolina native's one-woman crusade began referring to her nocturnal adventures as "Bubba's ministry."

She was not amused. "It's not my ministry," Bubba insisted. "It's God's."

God's ministry would ultimately move Bubba in 1983 to establish, with Rev. Jerry Hill, the Austin Street Shelter. Bubba juggled her duties at the shelter with a full course load at the Anglican School of Theology. There, she began preparing for the priesthood taking her vows in 1987.

Now meet Father Harry E. Dailey, Episcopal priest, licensed alcohol and drug counselor and co-executive director of Austin Street Centre. Like Bubba, Harry had his own first-hand experiences with life on the streets.

Chronic drinking cost Harry several jobs and a marriage back in his native Ohio. By the early 1980s, he was homeless and adrift in Dallas. His frequent binges triggered the unholy trinity of alcohol abuse — pain, sorrow and heartache.

Bubba and Harry met in passing in 1982 at The Stewpot, a downtown food bank funded and operated by the First Presbyterian Church. The diminutive Bubba was serving soup to, and talked sports with, the raggedy, scruffy men who showed up each day.

One day, she swabbed an infected knife wound the hulking Harry had suffered in a street altercation. He politely said, "Thank you, ma'am," and promptly went back to the street — and the bottle.

God would bring them together again two years later. Harry, recovering from a serious alcohol-induced illness, showed up at Austin Street Shelter a repentant person. A near-death experience transformed him while he was in intensive care.

"I realized God had touched me and that my life would have purpose and meaning from then on," he says. "I knew I would be able to do good things. I was being given an opportunity to love and serve the Lord. That's the mandate for all of his children, really."

During a lengthy rehabilitation process at the shelter, Harry worked his way from floor worker to night manager and later to the executive staff. He also participated in Bible study and shared his awakened faith with the shelter's recently widowed co-founder.

He came to see in Bubba the embodiment of Jesus's instruction for his followers to love one another. "I had never met anyone, and still haven't, who radiates God's love more than she does," Harry explains.

In 1987, the Daileys exchanged wedding vows at the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Cedar Hill. Theirs was — and is — a union based on caring, compassion and a mutual desire to assist the needy and forlorn.

In the intervening decade and a half, the Daileys have devoted their lives to fulfilling Austin Street Centre's mission of providing shelter and care in a safe, compassionate Christian community.

Yoked by a call to serve the poor, they have touched thousands of people by providing help, hope and healing.

The Austin Street Centre's programs affirm the role of Christian discipleship. So, it’s tempting to refer to the Centre as "Bubba and Harry's ministry."

But the Daileys, plural, will be the first to say it's not their ministry at all. It belongs to God,