The Millionaire Who Traded His Fortune for a Hammer

By age twenty-nine, Millard Fuller was a self-made millionaire. He owned a mansion in Montgomery, Alabama, a Lincoln Continental, a lake house, and a cattle ranch. He also had a marriage falling apart under the weight of his relentless ambition. When his wife Linda left him in 1965, Fuller faced the kind of reckoning Isaiah describes — the moment when all our religious gestures and outward success ring hollow against the silence of God.

Fuller sold everything. He and Linda, now reconciled, moved to Koinonia Farm, an interracial Christian community in rural Georgia founded by Clarence Jordan. There, among peanut fields and shared meals with people most of America had forgotten, Fuller discovered what the prophet had been saying for twenty-seven centuries: true worship is not performance — it is providing shelter for the wanderer and loosing the chains of injustice.

In 1976, Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity. Over the next four decades, the organization built more than 800,000 homes worldwide, housing millions who had never known a decent roof over their heads.

Isaiah 58 promises that when we spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry and provide the poor wanderer with shelter, our "light will break forth like the dawn." Millard Fuller staked his life on that promise and watched it come true — one house, one family, one hammer swing at a time.