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You did it, Greensboro.

It was 10 degrees Friday night, and everyone who wanted in, came in.

That included Willie Chandler Muhammad, 38. And though he may be a former welterweight boxer from Chicago, the cold is too much for him, as is the stress and noise of the overflowing Weaver House shelter.

So here he was in a converted Boy Scout hall at First Presbyterian Church, where Jill Tourtellot's volunteers were serving pizza to Muhammad and 20 other men as "Wheel of Fortune" played on the TV.

It's one of six satellite shelters that sprang up in the past 30 days around town, and this weekend hosted 100 guests. Through March, the shelters will reserve a place for men like Muhammad, who is more used to being served day-old bread in a garbage bag and being turned out at 7 a.m.

No more.

"You really should try the salad," he suggests. "It's very good."

To whom do we owe this fortunate turn of the wheel, just in time for last week's bitter cold?

Not the City of Greensboro, with a capital "C." Not Urban Ministry, per se, or the Salvation Army, or the people we always wrote checks to all these years, thinking that was enough to solve our homeless "problem."

This year, it wasn't enough. And when winter came, the entire city of Greensboro, with a lowercase "c" decided to do something. Granted, it was the 11th hour - Dec. 15, 2008 - but it wasn't too late.

Two churches opened their doors, then two more. Then a community center in Glenwood. Two more churches this week, including a rural church in Pleasant Garden, which surprised people. Or let's just say, people who didn't know that church.

And there you have it. After all the rhetoric and the sob stories, the candlelight vigils, and enough canned food to stretch from here to Timbuktu, we opened the doors and let people in, with the help of $100,000 raised by Operation Greensboro Cares.

For Servant Center founder Gail Haworth, who has worked with homeless veterans for 22 years, this coming together is an epiphany.

"It's amazing," Haworth said Saturday morning as she restocked blankets for the police department and prepared to deliver a pot of chili to volunteers at the overflow shelter at The HIVE. "This is what should have been going on all the time."

There is something counterintuitive here. When so many households have been hit by layoffs and are limping along on one income, shouldn't we attend to our own problems?

Or is it possible that looking down from that ledge for a moment, entertaining the idea that we too could lose it all puts a new light on the guy trudging along with his backpack?

Maybe he had a reason or three.

"People begin to see that we're all the same," said Sheron Sumner, director of the WE! Shelters, "and we begin to recognize our responsibility to each other. It's easy to write a check to look after somebody. But giving of yourself brings about a change within oneself."

That's a lot of change - 500 volunteers. High school students. Men's clubs. Homeless volunteers who painted the $300,000 day center the city opened on East Bessemer. The kids from St. Stephen's on Gorrell who came to the First Presbyterian shelter Dec. 23. They wore Santa caps and brought socks and gloves.

How do you thank 500 people? It's an individual thing, at the right place and time. Some comments overheard at pizza night at First Pres:

"This is some awesome pizza."

"Why are you so good to us?"

And from a man who introduced himself only as Ray: "Thanks."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com