President's Blog

Happy New Year
 Another year begins.  How quickly they seem to pass.  2011 was a hard year for this old planet.  History will probably show that it wasn’t a whole lot worse than many years have been, but it’s the one we’re closest too, and it did have its challenges.  Now we look to the future, and despite the dire warnings that surround us I’m looking forward to a very good year.

This will be the year, the purveyors of gloom would have us believe, when the Euro collapses, gas and energy prices skyrocket, and our almost friends in the Mid

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A Season of Beginnings
 It’s the day after Christmas.  The gifts are all opened, the turkey’s going into reruns, and thousands are heading back to the mall to exchange the gifts they just got for something they apparently need more.  What a strange and wonderful holiday!  It’s rich with tradition and consumed with controversy—the Christians think it’s too secular, the secularists think it’s too Christian.  It’s fitting, though, that the day is full of irony.  It does, after all, celebrate the birth of the One whose life was, to many in His time,
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Dateline: Minden
 We’re back home after a great week at the Millard Fuller Legacy Build in Minden, Louisiana.  Minden is a country town some 30 miles east of Shreveport.  Charlie Park, who heads up the covenant partner there, came over to Shreveport to meet with Millard about the Fuller Center in 2006, and Webster Parish became one of our first partner organizations.  Since then they’ve been hard at work in Minden and Spring Hill, getting God’s people into decent homes. 

This year’s event was a big one, with work on eight new homes and seven rehabs.  We had an outstanding volunteer corps of some 250 hardy souls, some at their first build and many of the old faithful.  Sheilla and I got to build this year, and it was great fun.  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to crawl into bed on Monday night—we did a lot of lifting and toting that day.  Things improved as the week went on and we were downright chipper by Thursday, when we had to say our goodbyes and go into Fuller Center board meetings.

Our house leader was Orie Lehman, a good Amish man from Shipshewana, Indiana.  He and his son Michael took the train down to Longview, Texas and a bus from there to Shreveport—a long, hard trip.  Orie is a master craftsman with a seemingly endless reservoir of patience.  He taught us all a great deal, managed to be in several places at one time, and made the build productive and great fun.  I’ll be looking to Orie to lead my house from here on out.

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Dateline Madison
It’s been quite a whirlwind of travel over the past few weeks, and despite my best intentions I’ve had a hard time keeping up with the blog. I think it’s a discipline.   I was in Congo in mid August, Honduras at the end of the month, and in Indianapolis over the past few days. I need a new travel agent!
The trip to Congo was an adventure. It was my fourth or fifth trip there, and, like all the ones before it, full of surprises. People who operate on carefully organized iti
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A Tribute to a Friend
I started this blog to report on my travels, and despite my poor discipline in updating it I do feel the urge every time I hit the road.  I got back early this morning from a week in Congo, so my juices are flowing.  The trip got off to a sad start, though, and that’s what’s on my mind now.  When we arrived in Kinshasa on Monday evening I called home and got the news that our friend and partner Glen Barton had died.  I’ll share some of our Congo experiences over the next few days (one of our group, Craig Martindale, rightly noted that there was no way a script could have been written for what unfolded there!).  Today, though, my thoughts are on Glen.

I first met him in late 2005.  Mack McCarter of Community Renewal had met with Millard and me to see if we could get some houses built for the Katrina refugees who had flooded Shreveport after the storm.  We all agreed that it would be a good thing to do, but we didn’t have a covenant partner there and knew we’d have to take the lead in the work.

About this same time Millard and Glen had been in touch and Glen indicated a willingness to get involved.  Millard asked him to drive over to Shreveport to meet with me (a short 5 hour trip, he said—turns out its more like 14). 

We met at a little coffee house on the King’s Highway and got to know one another.  It turned out that we had a fair amount in common.  We had both worked for Habitat and both awoke one day to find that our positions had disappeared in a restructuring.  We were the same age—a pair of old guys not ready for retirement and looking for a new life assignment, and we were both committed to Millard Fuller’s vision of a world without poverty housing.

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