Millard Fuller's Million-Dollar Fast

By age twenty-nine, Millard Fuller had amassed a fortune. His law practice and business ventures in Montgomery, Alabama, had made him a millionaire. He had the Lincoln Continental, the lake house, the country club membership. He also had a marriage on the verge of collapse and a gnawing emptiness that no amount of success could fill.

In 1965, Fuller and his wife Linda made a decision that bewildered everyone who knew them. They gave it all away — every dollar, every asset — and went searching for a life that actually meant something. That search led them to Koinonia Farm, a small interracial community in Americus, Georgia, founded by Clarence Jordan. There, amid peanut fields and simple living, Fuller discovered what Isaiah's prophet had been thundering about for twenty-seven centuries: that true devotion is not about what you deny yourself but about what you give to others.

Fuller began building simple, affordable houses alongside the families who would live in them. That modest effort became Habitat for Humanity, which has now built or repaired over 800,000 homes worldwide. Walls went up. Families moved in. Communities were restored.

Isaiah 58 promises that when we share our bread, shelter the homeless, and refuse to look away from our own flesh and blood, we will be called "repairers of broken walls, restorers of streets with dwellings." Millard Fuller took God at His word and spent the rest of his life proving the promise true.