A House His Mother Never Built

In January 1993, Baton Rouge police officer Betty Smothers was murdered while working an off-duty security detail. She left behind six children. Her oldest, eighteen-year-old Warrick Dunn, became their caretaker overnight — cooking meals, driving siblings to school, holding the family together through grief no teenager should carry.

Betty had been saving for years to buy her family a home. She never got there.

Warrick channeled his pain into football and was drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1997. But what he did with his first NFL paycheck is what preachers ought to talk about. He launched Homes for the Holidays, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide down payments and furnish homes for single mothers. Not one home. Not ten. Over the next two decades, Warrick Dunn helped more than 170 families move into houses of their own.

He built the house his mother never could — and then he kept building.

That is what love does. It doesn't just grieve. It doesn't just survive. Love takes the worst thing that ever happened and asks, "How many people can I keep this from happening to?" The Apostle Paul wrote that love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:7). Warrick Dunn bore an unbearable loss — and let it become a door that 170 families walked through.

The question for us is simple: What has broken your heart, and who might the Almighty be asking you to build for?