Rodricks: Baltimore’s Second Chance salvages lives and just about everything else. It also induces longing.

When it comes to describing Second Chance and its vast operation in South Baltimore, I hardly know where to begin. So I’ll begin at the entrance: The statue of the angel visiting Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and the marble angels to either side — all of that came from the Michigan church where the late Robert Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, worshipped as a boy during the Great Depression. It’s a long story — just about everything at Second Chance is — so here’s the short version: Throughout his life Kearns believed he was guided by a divine presence.