Millard Fuller's Million-Dollar Conviction

In 1965, Millard Fuller was a thirty-year-old millionaire in Montgomery, Alabama, with a Lincoln Continental in the driveway and a marriage falling apart. He attended church every Sunday, tithed faithfully, and could quote Scripture with ease. But his wife Linda had packed her bags. The wealth he had chased so relentlessly had hollowed out everything that mattered.

Something broke open in Fuller that year. He and Linda reconciled, then did something their friends called insane — they gave away their entire fortune. Every stock, every business interest, every property. They moved to Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, a small interracial Christian community, and began building simple, affordable houses alongside the families who would live in them.

That experiment became Habitat for Humanity. Over the following decades, Fuller's organization built more than 800,000 homes worldwide, sheltering over four million people. Fuller himself swung hammers well into his seventies, mud on his boots, sweat on his brow, working beside future homeowners in the Georgia heat.

Isaiah 58 draws a sharp line between the fast God rejects and the fast God honors. The Almighty has no interest in bowed heads and sackcloth if the hungry remain unfed and the homeless remain exposed to the wind. "Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?" Fuller discovered what the prophet already knew — that true devotion has calluses on its hands.