Running Back, Giving Forward

When Warrick Dunn was eighteen years old, his mother, Betty Smothers, a Baton Rouge police officer, was murdered during an ambush while working a security detail. She left behind six children. Warrick, the eldest, became their caretaker overnight.

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

When Dunn reached the NFL with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1997, he did something remarkable with his first contract. He launched Homes for the Holidays, a program that provides fully furnished houses for single mothers working toward homeownership. Not a check mailed from a distance. Dunn shows up with the keys. He stocks the refrigerator. He makes the beds. He has now helped provide over 175 homes.

When asked why, Dunn has said simply that he does it because his mother never got to have that moment herself.

This is love in its most biblical shape — not a feeling that warms and fades, but a wound transformed into a doorway for someone else. First John 3:18 says, "Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth." Warrick Dunn took the worst thing that ever happened to him and turned it into the best thing that ever happened to 175 families.

The Almighty works the same way. He takes our brokenness and builds someone else's home with it.