Stan G. Duncan
Some years ago, when I lived in Oklahoma, I helped found a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. There were just three of us in the beginning: A friend of mine did the organizing, I did media, and this nice woman named Marge something-or-other was the treasurer. One day, soon after we got it started, we had a big gathering that was part fundraiser and part get-acquainted meeting. My church hosted it and put on the refreshments. They had me staff the punch bowl to greet and smile pleasantly at the newcomers because I couldn’t do much else. While I was standing there doing my job, I met a pleasant-looking gentleman who introduced himself as “George,” and seemed right at home, though I hadn’t yet met him. I noticed he was missing his right hand, though he didn’t seem to have any trouble filling his cup at the bowl.
He told me that he had been a carpenter all his life. Lived outside the city in a small town whose name I’ve now forgotten. He said he used to drink something terrible, and that one day he’d gotten drunk and crashed his truck into the storefront window of a bank and was in the hospital for over a week. Among other things, he had rammed his hand through the windshield of the truck and cut it off. They rushed him to the emergency room, but it was too damaged, and they couldn’t save it. On top of that, he didn’t have very good insurance, the hospital billed him, and the bank sued him. He was ruined.
After that, he pretty much shut down. He and his wife managed to save their little home, and he had social security, and she had some pension, but his life, so far as he was concerned was over. He said he got started sitting in a lounge chair watching TV with a “Clicker” for hours and hours every day. He fell into what we would think of as a deep depression, though he never called it that. He just felt dead and was waiting around for the end of life to catch up with how his heart already felt.
Periodically his wife would come in and plead with him to get up and do something to get his life going
again. He wouldn’t move. He could no longer work, so for him, he lost not only his job but also his manhood. He was no longer a good provider, so what good was he? Nothing, he thought, so he just drank beer, clicked channels, and avoided letting his mind function.
He said that now and then he’d say a few words to his wife during dinner, or at night, but more or less he let his life slide into a deep pit that he couldn’t get out of. One day, some years after the accident happened, he remembered vaguely that his wife packed up some things and said goodbye. He absently wondered what she was up to but didn’t think about it. Then that evening he listened and looked around and realized that she was gone. She was really gone. Her things were gone. A note was left. She wouldn’t be back. She wrote she had tried to help him, to talk to him, to love him, but he wouldn’t let her. She had failed. She mourned, she cried, she prayed, but she couldn’t stay.
For a while, he responded simply by falling deeper into his despair. Aside from eating and sleeping, which he did poorly and sporadically, he barely moved. Just sat in his chair drinking and clicking. Then one day he saw Jimmy Carter on TV. It’s been some time now, but he recalled that Jimmy was in Philadelphia rehabbing old houses. It was a special day, a “disabled-working-on-the-houses” day. All the people in the work crew had lost hands or feet or were otherwise crippled up bent over, or in wheelchairs. He saw this crowd and distantly saw himself. Here were people worse off than he was and they were building houses for Jesus.
He pulled himself up from his chair, took a shower, packed some food, crawled into his old camper, and took off for Plains Georgia, to Jimmy Carter’s house. Not a thought as to whether he could actually walk into the home of a former president, he just drove.
Two days later he drove up to the Carter house, and sure enough, there were official-looking people in front, but far from keeping him out, they invited him in. He just walked up to the door, knocked, and a moment later Rosalyn Carter came to the door. He stumbled and stammered and told her his story and she said just a minute. And then President Carter appeared. In a bathrobe, holding a cup of coffee. He invited George in. The three of them sat at the Carter breakfast table and talked for over an hour. George told his story, and they listened. They prayed together, shared scripture together, and then in the end Jimmy got on the phone and called some people he knew who planned projects for Habitat to see what they could do to set George up with a work project sometime soon.
George did it. In fact, he spent all that summer, and the better part of the rest of his life traveling around from house to house, helping work parties on Habitat houses.
And there he was across from me by the punch bowl telling me his story. I was moved, I was humbled. It was a great story. “It was the work what saved me,” I remember him saying. “When I was rebuilding them houses, I was actually rebuilding my life. If I hadn’t started working for Jesus, I would’ve died.”
I said “That’s a wonderful story. But…” and I was cautious about asking this. “What about your wife? What happened there?” I was afraid that that wouldn’t be a happy ending.
He beamed. “In fact, you met her.” I took a breath. “You met her right over there. That was her there who gave you your name tag as you came through the door. He called out, and sure enough, Marge, the treasurer, looked up and smiled a lovely smile at us, and waved. George beamed again. Sure enough, in putting houses together, he put his life together. It was the building that saved him.
