What Difference Do It Make?

by Ron Hall

  Later, Pastor Dave had another idea. He’d invite Denver and me up to Washington state to speak at his church. In a leap of faith, Pastor Dave picked up the phone again and, somehow, got hold of my cell-phone number. Fifteen hundred miles away, in a rat-shack relic of an ancient log cabin high atop a mountain near Angel Fire, New Mexico, I heard two things in rapid succession:

  Ding-a-ling-ling! Ding-a-ling-ling! . . .

  . . . and . . .

  “Turn that thing off!”

  The first was my cell phone ringing. The second was my hunting partner, Rob Farrell, who was hopping mad that I had probably just scared off the muy grande bull elk we’d been tracking for two days.

  Embarrassed but hoping it was good news about our book, I whispered furtively into the phone. “Hello?”

  “Is this Ron Hall, the author of Same Kind of Different as Me?” Pastor Dave said.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Praise God!” said Pastor Dave. Then, “Why are you whispering?”

  “Because I’m hunting elk on top of a mountain in New Mexico,” I whispered, “and we’ve been sitting here for days waiting to see an elk.”

  Not seeming to grasp my dilemma, Pastor Dave launched into a bubbly tale of what was going on at his church and invited Denver and me to come up and speak. After a ten-minute call—punctuated by Rob’s angry glares and me whispering single syllables to let Pastor Dave know that Rob hadn’t shot me yet—I hung up.

  Rob shot me a final frown. “You just ruined our whole hunt,” he said.

  Five minutes later, I shot an elk worthy of the Boone and Crockett record book.

  Now, here’s the reason I said earlier to hang in there with me on this story. Two weeks later, I received a phone call from a woman who had been in the congregation when Pastor Dave preached his first sermon on Same Kind of Different as Me. For months, she said, she’d felt as if she were drowning in a swamp—a failing marriage, declining health, and a formerly vibrant spiritually life now on life support. She and her husband were living under the same roof physically, but emotionally they were oceans apart, like two rowboats bobbing in high seas at opposite ends of the Pacific. The only thing keeping them paddling was their two small children.

  “My husband was clinically depressed,” she told me. “The doctors didn’t know why, but he was suicidal and couldn’t even go to work anymore. While I went to work every day, he stayed in the bedroom with the door shut. When I came home every afternoon, I wasn’t sure whether I’d find him alive.”

  But one day the previous week, she said, something had changed. She came home from work as usual that afternoon, but when she entered the bedroom, she heard sobbing.

  The cries were coming from inside the closet.

  Her first thought was that her husband had tried to kill himself but had failed. Terrified, she reached for the doorknob. Inside the walk-in closet, she saw her husband curled up on the floor among a dozen pairs of shoes. Tears streamed down his cheeks and neck, and sobs racked his chest visibly, the sound seeming to come from deep in his soul.

  He raised his eyes and looked at her. “I found this book on your nightstand.” He continued to weep as his wife stared in disbelief at the copy of Same Kind of Different as Me lying in the floor near his head. “I’ve been having an affair. It has destroyed my life and your life and was about to destroy our whole family. It was eating me alive, and I was so ashamed of the pain I had caused and the pain I was in that I thought it would be better for everyone if I was dead.”

  As I listened to the woman tell me her tale over the phone, I knew exactly how the man felt. When I cheated on Deborah, I felt as if I had ripped her apart physically. The guilt was excruciating, as though I had taken an ax to the neck of an innocent.

  In my ear, the woman continued her story. As she stared at him on the closet floor, her husband had said, “Today, I read this book about how Debbie forgave Ron, a man just like me. If you will forgive me the way she forgave him, I promise to love and honor you the way he loved her.”

  Holding the phone to my head, I sat there astonished at the incredible chain of events that started with a woman who checked out a book in Syracuse because she liked the cover, then ended in Washington state with a saved marriage—with an elk hunt in between. That chain of events would never have occurred if an ordinary Texas woman named Deborah hadn’t decided to forgive and a man who could neither read nor write hadn’t decided a book needed to be written.

  Suddenly, I pictured God in heaven, all these seemingly unconnected lives unfolding under His omniscient eye, rubbing His hands together and telling the angels, “Now watch this!”

  Two weeks after that amazing phone call, Denver and I met the woman and her whole family, who considered themselves the beneficiaries of a miracle. And I considered how, every now and then, God answers prayers for healing with dazzling, resurrection-caliber feats. But more often, He does it using humble tools, like an illiterate, homeless man and an unbelieving woman with a library card.

  MANDY

  The Blessing Bank

  A humble prayer and a chance exchange with a store clerk put Mandy Elmore on the path to helping kids help the needy—and Mandy can’t even be around kids. In 2008, a little boy sneezed near Mandy. Two days later, she was hospitalized, one of three times she was hospitalized that year. Mandy, age thirty-six, suffers from cystic fibrosis (“CF”), a chronic respiratory disease that puts her at severe risk of life-threatening infection.

  “If I catch a cold, within two days I’ll have pneumonia,” Mandy told us. That means she has to be careful about contagions, which means she has to be very careful around kids, especially little ones who carry germs like the postman carries mail. As a CF sufferer, she can’t have any kids of her own, either. And the sad irony of the whole situation is that Mandy Elmore loves kids.

  “My husband, Matt, and I are kind of alone in our age group, in our community, in our world,” says Mandy. “Here we are in Texas, where everyone has 2.5 kids. But we don’t get to go to Little League. We don’t get to trade kid stories. It’s different, and sometimes it’s a hard difference. Sometimes, when people are complaining about having to take their kids to Little League, it’s hard for us to hear those complaints.”

  So it was especially hard when Mandy felt a tugging on her heart to reach out to kids. In 2007, she got the sense that God was telling her to do something for children. “But I didn’t know what. I can’t have kids, I can’t even be around kids. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

  Then a friend, Mary Lynn, gave her Same Kind of Different as Me.

  After reading about Deborah Hall’s commitment to the homeless, Mandy knew she, too, wanted to make herself available for whatever God wanted her to do. Knowing she wanted to make a difference for kids, but not knowing how, she cried out to God in prayer. “Whatever You can do to help me find my purpose, Lord, just lead me,” she prayed. “Let me fulfill Your purpose and, in doing so, be fulfilled. I know I’m here for a reason. Just show me what to do.”

  In October, the Lord did just that. Mandy and Matt were doing some Christmas shopping for family when she saw what she thought was a child’s bank with a cross on it. But when she asked the store clerk to show her “that cross bank,” he said, “No: that’s a cross, and that’s a bank. They’re two separate items.”

  Like sheet lightning brightening an evening sky, inspiration lit Mandy’s mind. She turned to Matt. “I know what it is!”

  “You know what what is?” Matt replied, his face a question mark.

  “I know what we’re supposed to do!”

  In that moment, Mandy’s purpose arrived in her mind fully formed. “We’re supposed to make banks that teach children to give to others!”

  Before the night was through, Mandy and Matt had gone home and searched the Internet, looking to see if anyone was already doing what Mandy wanted to do. When they didn’t find anything, Mandy went to the craft store and returned with an armload of balsa wood.

 
; “I didn’t even know what balsa wood was,” she says. “I am the least creative person on the planet.”

  For the next three days, Matt watched in wonder as Mandy designed and constructed four banks for children. She worked well into the night, burning with a conviction that she knew what her message was. It was the same message her own father had passed to her: to give to others freely. The banks would be a special place for children to set aside money to give to people in need. It was Matt who came up with a name for the project. They’d call the little boxes “Blessing Banks.”

  “If we couldn’t have children of our own, maybe we could help other parents teach their children to live lives of compassion,” Mandy remembers.

  In November 2008, Mandy began telephoning manufacturers of wooden toys and other products and telling them about her vision, hoping to find a way to mass-produce her banks. After all, who would want a balsa bank?

  One company she contacted was the largest manufacturer of toy wooden trains in the country. The man on the phone listened kindly as Mandy told him about her balsa prototypes. Then he tried to let her down easy. He thought the Blessing Banks were a great idea and was sure Mandy’s heart was in the right place, but he already had too many customers and more work than he could handle. Still, just to be nice, he agreed to take a look at her balsa creations.

  “I sent him the four banks, and I sent him the book,” she said, referring to Same Kind of Different as Me. She also sent him a note. “Read this book and be inspired,” it said. “You never know what God has in store for us.”

  Then Mandy gathered a group of friends to pray that this very successful businessman would somehow be moved to work with a Texas woman who knew nothing about business at all.

  Six weeks later, Mandy’s phone rang. She’s still not sure whether it was the businessman who read the book or his wife. But when he called in January 2009, he told Mandy, “My wife is a cancer survivor. She was very interested in Deborah Hall’s story, and she says I’m crazy if I don’t do these banks.”

  Soon an acceptable prototype was complete, and within weeks the Blessing Bank was ready for market, complete with a prayer card suitable for the simple kindness of a child: “Dear Lord, thank You for blessing me. Please help me use this bank to bless others.”

  Mandy and Matt opened a Web site at www.blessingbanks.com. Slowly the banks began to catch on, and parents began calling to report the impact of the banks on their children.

  In Connecticut, a young girl’s best friend lost her home in a fire. The girl saved all her money in her Blessing Bank and gave it to her friend.

  In Dallas, one child is filling his Blessing Bank with money to buy shoes for kids in his city who have none.

  An El Paso boutique owner called Mandy to tell her that she was buying Blessing Banks in bulk to sell in her store. Her young son, she said, had never expressed an interest in saving money before, but after his mom bought him a Blessing Bank, he asked if he could do chores around the house so that he could earn money to fill it. But the chores weren’t filling the bank quickly enough to suit him, so he decided to sell rocks. And when they heard why the boy was selling rocks, people actually bought them.

  “The little kids get it,” Mandy says. “All it takes is a heart for giving.”

  17

  Denver

  I had known Mr. Ballantine when he stayed at the mission. Sometime before Deborah and I started serving there, Denver told us, he had watched a car screech up to the curb on East Lancaster. The driver shoved an elderly man out of the passenger-side door, pitched a beat-up Tourister suitcase out behind him, and roared away. Abandoned on the curb, the old man staggered like a drunken sailor on shore leave and fired off a salvo of slurry curses. But to Denver, he also looked . . . scared. At the time, Denver had still been an island, a stone-faced loner who didn’t poke about in other people’s business. But something—he thinks now maybe it was how helpless the old man looked—plucked a string in his heart.

  Denver walked up to the man and offered to help him get into the mission. In return, the man cursed him and called him a nigger.

  I’d been livin with Mr. Ron for a good while when I got a call from some lady said she was a nurse. Said she was takin care of my friend, Mr. Ballantine, at a gov’ment nursing home. He wadn’t doin so well, she said, and didn’t have too much longer to live. Mr. Ballantine had told her he wanted to see me one last time.

  I had known Ballantine from the first day he came to the Union Gospel Mission. He wadn’t no volunteer. His son had drove up to the curb in a car, put Ballantine out on the sidewalk with no more than a suitcase, and drove off like bank robber leavin the scene of the crime. That was the last time Mr. Ballantine ever saw anyone in his family.

  He was purty old, in his eighties, and he couldn’t get around real good, and didn’t nobody like the man ’cause he was as mean as a cottonmouth snake. Matter a’ fact, the first time I tried to help him was that very first day when his son put him out of the car.

  “Here. Let me get that for you,” I said, reaching for his beat-up ol’ suitcase.

  “Get the hell away from me, nigger!” Mr. Ballantine said. He sprinkled a few other words in there I won’t put in this book.

  But something about that ol’ man made me want to help him. He couldn’t get around too good, and it was tough for him to come down to the dining hall at the mission, so whenever I got my plate, I took one to him too. Ever time I did, he called me a nigger, but I just figured that’s the way he was raised up. He didn’t mean nothin by it. ’Sides, a man’s got to eat.

  After his health got real bad, Mr. Shisler said they couldn’t take care of Mr. Ballantine at the mission no more, so they moved him to a nursing home that was just about as nasty as you could get. I remember that time when Mr. Ron’s friend brought Mr. Ballantine some cigarettes and Ensure, and he said to me:

  “Why would that man buy me cigarettes when he doesn’t even know me?”

  “’Cause he’s a Christian.”

  “Well, I still don’t understand. And anyway, you know I hate Christians.”

  I didn’t say nothin for a minute, just sat there in a ole orange plastic chair and watched Mr. Ballantine lyin there in his bed. Then I said to him, “I’m a Christian.”

  I wish you coulda seen the look on his face. It didn’t take but a minute for him to start apologizin for cussin Christians all the time I’d knowed him. Then I guess it hit him that while I’d been takin care of him—it was about three years by then—he’d still been callin me names.

  “Denver, I’m sorry for all those times I called you a nig-ger,” he said.

  I told Mr. Ballantine that it was okay, and he stopped calling me nigger that day.

  Well, now they’d moved Mr. Ballantine again, that nurse on the phone said, and then I went to see him. The new place was near downtown Fort Worth, across the tracks from the mission, and it wadn’t too much better than the old place. The attendants didn’t do much for him ’sides drop his food and leave.

  His cancer had gotten real bad, crawled down his throat and was eatin up his tongue, the nurse had told me on the phone. I went on up to the floor where they said his room was, and when I walked in, Mr. Ballantine was sleepin. I didn’t say nothin, just stood real quiet at the foot of the bed. He was nearly naked, covered in just a bedsheet, and that was soiled. Thick nails covered his bony ol’ toes like potato chips. His old gray head was greasy, and his hair stuck up from his head in patches like scrap cotton.

  I didn’t think he even knew I was there, but all of a sudden Mr. Ballantine spoke up. “Well, Denver . . . glad to see you.”

  His voice came out raspy, like his mouth was full a’ sand or steel wool.

  “How you doin, Mr. Ballantine?” I said.

  “I’m not doin so good, Denver. Don’t have much time left. Not much time at all.”

  “You all prayed up?” I asked. I had taken Ballantine to church, and he’d liked it, but I didn’t know if he’d ever done business with the L
ord.

  “Well, I’m not sure about that,” he said, turning a little in his bed and motioning me over. “But I did want you to know how much I appreciated you looking out for me, bringing me food at the mission, and all that. You were a real friend to me, Denver—about the only one I had.”

  I walked over beside the bed and looked down at Mr. Ballantine and saw a broken-down man. I thought about his son, dumping him on the curb like a piece a’ trash. I thought about how he had at one time been somebody’s son, somebody’s true love, somebody’s husband. Now here he was, about to die, with nobody but a sorry fella like me to say good-bye to.

  “Mr. Ballantine,” I said, “I didn’t do nothin for you that somebody else hadn’t done for me.”

  “Well, that may be so, Denver, but you were about the only person who showed me love when I wasn’t very lovable. I just wanted you to know that I didn’t forget.”

  Then Ballantine got a twinkle in his eye. “Denver, there’s something else I need to tell you,” he said.

  “Yessir?”

  “You’re still a nigger!”

  We laughed together until Mr. Ballantine broke down coughin, then purty soon he quieted down and looked at me real serious. Finally, he closed his eyes and slipped away. I was honored to be there to see him on through to the other side.

  JOSHUA

  Dirty White Spot

  Joshua Plumley doesn’t want to write a book or become a famous painter. “If I wanted to do that,” he says. “I’d go to an art gallery or hunt down that John Grisham guy.”

  So instead, Joshua wrote us a letter—a letter about the struggles of race.

  “I can imagine telling my wife the choice I made to write y’all like this,” the letter said. “Silence and a stare would be her response, her way of telling me she loves me but figures I operate on half a brain sometimes.”

  But Joshua was compelled to write, he says, having grown up a “dirty white spot” in Birmingham, Alabama.

  “I spent all my time with black kids,” Joshua says. Growing up in the shadows of the civil rights movement, “I never knew that skin color meant God either liked you or didn’t.”