We had made it. After years of struggling we had achieved the American Dream. Our lives were finally working out as we had planned. Meredith and I both owned our own businesses, we had three beautiful daughters, were part an incredible church, had great friends, and were preparing to build the perfect home. We were finally getting everything we had worked and hoped for.

All that changed with a phone call in January of 2002. Meredith was on her way to a business meeting and I was loading up to head towards a job site. Meredith didn’t begin with the usual pleasantries. There was no “hi” or “good morning,” just a simple statement. “If this is the American Dream, we’ve been lied to.”

I didn’t know how to respond, but she continued, “I want you to close your business, take a year off of work and figure out what God wants to do with this family.”

My answer was short and to the point. “No!” We had worked for years to get where we were and I had no intention of changing our course. Long story short, we argued…I lost. I was going to close my business to “figure out what god wanted to do with our family.”

I spent the next year reading, studying and praying. I learned that life was not about me, but more importantly I learned that God has a plan for how we are supposed to serve the poor and many of our services are actually causing additional pain and holding people in bondage.

As the year ended, Meredith went to a women’s retreat and provided a ride to a young woman at our church. During the 2 ½ ride, Meredith heard her story. She was a single mother in generational poverty with very little hope of changing her future.

Our oldest daughter (Amanda) was also on the trip and was beginning her prodigal stage. During one of the session breaks, Amanda was in Meredith’s face, saying, “You can’t tell me what to do. Just leave me alone. I can make my own decisions.” You know, the normal stuff for a rebellious teenager. Well, this young mother looked at Amanda and said, “If I only had a mother like yours, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” In the excitement of the weekend, Meredith replied, “I’ll be your mom.”

When Meredith came home and told me this young ladies story, I knew exactly what we should do. I ran down stairs, flipped open my laptop and wrote out an outline. I handed it to Meredith and she began to cry. “This is exactly what I thought we should do,” she said.  We called the young mother and invited her and her children to our home for dinner that night.

After dinner we talked about how we could help her overcome the challenges that were holding her down. We told her we would not give her money, but would walk with her and help her gain what she needed to live independently. She accepted the help and our lives changed forever. By June we had nine moms with 28 kids that we were working with.

We were both excited and completely terrified, but we knew this was so much bigger than we were and we needed to get some structure around it. While both of us had run our own businesses, neither of us had experience setting up something like this.

I met with my pastor and another local church that was active in the community, but found that the churches were not able to help and they didn’t think it would work. Meredith and I met with the moms and told them that the churches weren’t able to help. Their response hurt, but confirmed everything I had read over the last year.

“That’s ok, we don’t trust the churches anyways,” they said. “They come in, start a program, and we get all excited because we begin to believe our lives could actually change. Then something happens and we are left hanging. So we get out of the church what we can get out of the church.”

Meredith and I learned that our service had been counterproductive. We had been making things worse and adding to their struggle. We were actually breaking the broken.

For the last 15 years we have used God’s plan to help people break negative cycles and become everything God created them to be. In the next post, we will take a look at God’s plan for mankind.