What Difference Do It Make?

  © 2009 Ron Hall, Denver Moore, and Lynn Vincent

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920. www.alivecommunications.com.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Texts of Scripture quoted in this book are taken from the following:

  New American Standard Bible®. © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission:

  John 12:24 (introduction and chapter 12)

  Matthew 25:32–36, 40 (chapter 23)

  New King James Version®. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved:

  Matthew 10:16 (chapter 25)

  Authors paraphrase:

  Matthew 10:24 (chapter 12)

  Matthew 19:26 (chapter 19)

  James 1:22 (chapter 21)

  The letter from Vincent Van Gogh, quoted in chapter 9, is excerpted from “Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh,” Cuesmes, July 1880, tr. Mrs. Johanna van GoghBonger, ed. Robert Harrison, number 133, and can be found at WebExhibits, an Interactive Museum, www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/8/133.htm.

  Information about homelessness in Sacramento on page 65 is taken from Paul Thompson, “The credit crunch tent city which has returned to haunt America,” Mail Online, March 6, 2009, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1159677/Pictured-The-credit-crunch-tent-city-returned-haunt-America.html (accessed 9 July 2009).

  The dialogue between Denver Moore and Mike Daniels, which appears no pages 152–4, was written by Mike Daniels.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hall, Ron, 1945–

  What difference do it make? : stories of hope and healing / Ron Hall, Denver Moore, and Lynn Vincent.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8499-2019-6 (hardcover)

  1. Hall, Ron, 1945– 2. Moore, Denver. 3. Hall, Deborah, d. 2000. 4. Whites—Texas—Fort Worth—Biography. 5. African Americans—Texas—Fort Worth—Biography. 6. Homeless men—Texas—Fort Worth—Biography. 7. Indentured servants—Louisiana—Red River Parish—Biography. 8. Art dealers—Texas—Fort Worth—Biography. 9. Christian biography. 10. Fort Worth (Tex.)—Biography. I. Moore, Denver. II. Vincent, Lynn. III. Title.

  F394.F7H157 2009

  261.8'325092—dc22

  [B]

  2009029214

  Printed in the United States of America

  09 10 11 12 QW 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of Debbie,

  Denver and Ron dedicate this book to

  those who read Same Kind of Different as Me

  and were inspired to make a difference.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  LUCY

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  ABE

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  ASHLEY

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  DARLENE

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  CARINA

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  DON

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  MANDY

  Chapter 17

  JOSHUA

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  CARMEN

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  CAROLYNE

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  MICHAEL

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Authors

  Photo Section

  Introduction

  Hello again.

  If you’re reading this book, it might be because you already have read Same Kind of Different as Me, a true story about my wife, Deborah, and the man who changed our lives, Denver Moore. If you haven’t, don’t worry—we’ve included enough of that story to catch you up. (The “catch up” sections from Same Kind of Different as Me are in italics.)

  Since June 2006, when Same Kind of Different as Me snuck first onto bookstore shelves, then onto the New York Times bestsellers list, Denver and I have traveled thousands of miles back and forth across America. We’ve spoken at hundreds of venues, from local book clubs filled with sweet little old ladies to the Bethesda, Maryland, symphony hall. (We were in Bethesda as guests of Doro Bush Koch and her mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, who quite possibly is Denver’s biggest fan.) Throughout that time, we have seen thousands of lives changed—homeless shelters started and millions of dollars raised for the homeless, yes, but also astonishing changes in the lives of everyday Americans that we never could’ve imagined or predicted.

  That’s why we wrote this book, to tell you just a few of the stories of hope and redemption that God continues to write in the lives of so many—and in our own.

  One day in the spring of 2009, as we were writing, I was in the kitchen at the Murchison estate, where Denver and I live, on a conference call with executives at Thomas Nelson, our publisher. During the call, Denver walked in.

  “Hey, Denver,” I said, putting the call on speaker. “We’re talking about titles for the new book. Got any ideas?”

  “Title for the new book?” he said, screwing his eyelids down into his famous hard squint. “What difference do it make?”

  “What Difference Do It Make?” I said. “That’s it!”

  Denver shrugged and walked off, shaking his head.

  It was the perfect title. Since Same Kind came out, over and over, like the needle stuck in the groove of an old vinyl record, we’ve repeated a single message: one person can make a difference. My wife, Deborah Hall, is proof of that.

  As many of you know, God took Deborah in 2001. Cancer. But if she were here today, she would tell you she was nobody special. If you had come to our house, she would have made you fresh coffee or tea and invited you to sit down at the kitchen table and tell her about yourself. And you would have felt loved. Because that was Deborah’s gift. She loved God and, because of her intimate walk with Him, loved people. Her whole life was about forgiveness and unconditional love, two qualities that most of us find difficult to master on a regular basis.

  It really was that simple. Deborah’s life showed that kind of love is attainable for anyone willing to put in the time on their knees, then overcome their fear and go out and get their hands a little dirty. And I have talked to literally hundreds of people who told me that Deborah’s story inspired them to do just that. Through the difference her life made, others are now making a difference, and that’s in part what this book is about. It’s packed full with stories folks have shared with us about how Deborah’s example inspired them to do more, both in their own homes and in their communities.

  A lady named Ann, for example, wrote to us from Vivian, a small Louisiana town just north of Shreveport—not too far from Red River Parish, where Denver worked the plantations. Ann wrote of how she has loaned Same Kind of Different as Me to about twenty different friends. Every fr
iend who brings it back has a very different story about how the story affected him or her.

  “One person notices the friendship Denver and Ron share,” Ann wrote. “Another feels shame over the way her grandparents treated the ‘Denvers’ in their lives.”

  One woman surprised Ann by telling her that the portion of the book that dealt with Deborah’s cancer battle stirred her to go and have a colonoscopy she’d been putting off!

  Like Ann, we’ve been struck by the amazing variety of stories people tell us about how Debbie’s story affected them. Here we thought we were writing a book about one woman’s determination to make a difference for the homeless, and we started getting letters about marriages restored, friendships renewed, ministries begun, even babies adopted!

  In Fort Worth, a high school teacher named Carin told us that, “unbelievably,” she’d been able to get the school administration to approve our book to be read by her entire mental-health class. “The students have learned how so many issues affect our mental health,” Carin wrote. “I have also used the book to help relay to them the importance of community involvement, passion, and what it means to be a servant to others.”

  Shortly after Deborah died, her best friend, Mary Ellen, told me that God had whispered to her during prayer that Deborah was like the kernel of wheat Jesus refers to in the gospel of John: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

  Mary Ellen told me she thought that maybe Deborah’s death would be like that—fruitful. I cannot even express how much I absolutely did not want to hear that at the time. But it appears that Mary Ellen was right, more right than even she knew.

  She told me about the wheat kernel just a couple of days before the dedication of the Deborah L. Hall Memorial Chapel, the new worship facility built at the Union Gospel Mission in my wife’s honor and funded by donations that poured in after local folks heard Denver’s story at her memorial service. At the time, we thought the chapel, along with the new care facilities for the homeless, were the fruit God would bring from my wife’s death. I had no idea that the Union Gospel Mission was just the first fruit in what would become a cornucopia of blessing.

  Take Detra, for example. Detra, who lives in Austin, Texas, wrote to tell us that after reading Deborah’s story, she decided to start carrying food and socks and blankets in her car so that she can bless the homeless. Also, her church had a picnic in an Austin park and had so much food that they began feeding hungry people who were in the park that day.

  One little girl asked Detra, “When are you coming back?”

  After that, the church made the picnic a monthly event where church members sit down and break bread with the homeless.

  Would I take back blessings like that one and those you are about to read about in this book? If I could rewind time like a video and create a cancer story with a happy ending, would I?

  I’m sorry to say there’s a big part of me that says, “Yes! I want my wife back!”

  But I can tell you without reservation that Deborah would say, “No, Ron. I’ll see you soon.”

  And so the story goes on—men and women all over the country inspired by the story of Denver and Deborah to make a difference in other people’s lives. Over the past three years, I thought I was making a difference too—traveling and speaking all over the country, “carrying Miss Debbie’s torch,” as Denver calls it. And I suppose I was.

  But in 2009, I learned that sometimes the most difficult difference to make is the one that’s closest to home.

  — RON HALL

  Dallas, Texas

  July 2009

  1

  Ron

  Tennessee sour-mash whiskey defined my daddy. He pledged a lifetime of allegiance to Jim Beam, and ol’ Jim never had a more loyal friend. As a boy, tucked into bed in a ratty blue-collar town outside of Fort Worth, I sometimes cried myself to sleep wishing my daddy loved me and my brother, John, as much as he loved Jim.

  My father’s given name was Earl F. Hall. The F didn’t stand for anything, but over the years I assigned it lots of unprintable meanings. Earl was a chain-smoking, chain-drinking ladies’ man, who slicked back his wavy brown hair with Vitalis and favored wife-beater T-shirts, pleated gabardine slacks, and wing-tip shoes. He was not a mean drunk and most of the time could walk a straight line and recite the alphabet if he had to. Once he even recited poetry till he sobered up.

  When my daddy came home from World War II in ’45, we all lived in his mama’s little shack in Denton, Texas, until he could find a job. After a few months he found one working for Curtiss Candy, driving a 1947 GMC panel truck painted red and white like a Baby Ruth wrapper. Not long after that, we piled our meager belongings into the candy truck and moved them over to a one-bedroom bungalow in the West Fourth Street slums near downtown Fort Worth. The neighborhood was planted smack in the geographic center of a shabby circle formed by a rail yard, a hobo camp, a gravel pit, a junkyard, a dog-food factory, and a sewage plant.

  Our neighbors were mostly workaday folks, bagging kibble at the plant or spelunking in the sewer lines. Except for Andy, who lived across the street. Andy was a Harley-riding professional wrestler who stayed home all day and wrestled at night. When he wasn’t wrestling in the ring, he wrestled naked in his living room with his redheaded bombshell wife, Rusty Fay. For some reason Rusty Fay had never gotten around to hanging curtains in the front room, so the picture window that faced our street drew neighborhood boys like the hootchy-cootchy tent at an old-time carnival. We never could figure out how little Rusty Fay always managed to pin her big, brawny husband and wind up on top, but we all thought it was the best show in town.

  From a boy’s perspective, that was about the only thing my neighborhood had going for it. For one thing, the place stunk to high heaven. Smelly emissions from the sewage facility and the dog-food plant settled in the trees like an invisible fog with a combined scent that reminded me of a roomful of old men after a chili cook-off. Those fumes competed with equally unpleasant ones from hobo campfires, backyard chicken droppings, and the working outhouse that our next-door neighbors kept out back. Once, on a school field trip, I smelled the warm, cinnamon scent of a bakery and was jealous of any kids fortunate enough to live nearby.

  Our house sat near a rail yard with acres of tracks planted like row crops that produced a year-round yield of multicolored boxcars and a round-the-clock clang of crossing bells. Day and night, the cars collided in a steady, drum-like rhythm as screeching engines slammed them together to form mile-long strings that chugged out of the yard with hobos in hot pursuit. (The good news about the rail yard was that my friends and I, through many scientific trials, disproved the old wives’ tale that a single penny on the tracks can derail a moving train.)

  Playing second fiddle to the rail-yard symphony were the grain elevators and the dog-food plant, each of which produced an uninterrupted, high-pitched whine. But none of these noises was as obnoxious or caustic as my parents’ constant fighting.

  I have heard it said that a thin line exists between love and hate. From the epithets I often heard floating through the open windows into the front yard, I thought Earl and Tommye Hall were hell-bent on erasing the line entirely.

  Most of their screaming matches took place in mornings and afternoons since most nights Daddy hid out at the Tailless Monkey Bar. Then, just before midnight, he’d call home and make Mama come and get him. She’d wake us up and drive the mile or so to the Tailless Monkey. She’d honk, and he’d stumble out. After we were old enough to walk and talk, John and I would fight until the loser had to go in and get him. Earl would usually be sitting with his buddies at a table, sometimes with a woman on his lap. Daddy was handsome and attracted the barflies like ants to a family picnic.

  “Gimme some sugar,” he would slur, trying to kiss me on the mouth. I’d wiggle out of his grip and turn my head because I hated the way beer and smoke smelled on his breath.


  Daddy didn’t set out to destroy me, and I didn’t let him, though there was no avoiding his influence. I promised myself I’d never drink or smoke, and I managed to make it to age five before I started smoking grapevine and age six before I started smoking Kool menthols stolen from Elizabeth Henson’s daddy, who drove a dump truck for the neighborhood gravel pit. I had my first drink, a Pabst Blue Ribbon, at the age of fourteen. It is sometimes a sad irony of boyhood that sons can emulate their fathers and simultaneously loathe them.

  2

  Denver

  Lotta times, people look at homeless folks the way they used to look at me: they’d kinda eyeball me up and down, and I could see them wheels turnin in their heads, wonderin, how’d that fella get that way?

  See, that ain’t the right question to be askin ’cause it might be that ain’t none a’ our business. Our business is to find out is there anything we can do to bring a change in their life. To bring opportunity. To bring hope. Sometimes that might mean gettin a man off liquor or drugs. It might mean helpin him find a job.

  Here’s my story. When I showed up in Fort Worth, Texas, I couldn’t read, couldn’t write, and couldn’t do a lick a’ rithmetic. I had growed up on a plantation in the Deep South and never went to school a day in my life.

  I was born in Red River Parish, Louisiana, in 1937, a time when whites was white and blacks was “colored.” Officially, there wadn’t no slavery, but that didn’t mean there wadn’t no slaves.

  All around the South we had what we called sharecroppers. Now, my daddy, BB, wadn’t no sharecropper. He was a railroad worker, I think—I never did know for sure—and a ladies’ man that couldn’t set foot in the New Mary Magdelene Baptist Church on Sundays ’cause he’d been steppin out with some of the women in the congregation. But BB got stabbed to death one night in Grand Bayou right out there by Highway 1. My grandma, Big Mama, had already burned up in a house fire by then, and me and brother, Thurman, went to live with my Aunt Etha and Uncle James. They was sharecroppin on a plantation down there near Coushatta.

  When you is croppin, here’s how it works. The Man that own the plantation give you everthing you need to make a cotton crop, ’cept he give it to you on credit. Then you plant and plow and chop that cotton till pickin time. And when you bring in that cotton, you s’posed to split that crop down the middle, or maybe 60/40, and the Man take his share and you take yours. ’Cept somehow it never did work out that way ’cause by the time you pay the man back for all he done loaned you on credit, ain’t nothin left outta your share a’ the crop. In fact, most a’ the time, you in the hole, so you got to work another season on the plantation to pay back what you owe.