Walking Through Samaria

Meet Bob Dalton. He’s the founder of Sackcloth & Ashes, a mission-driven company that donates a blanket to a local homeless shelter for each one purchased. It’s an admittedly “insanely ironic” place for him to find himself because he used to perpetuate the stigma of homelessness. He was the guy who would drive past a homeless person and mutter, “Go get a job” under his breath.

That changed when his mother, a waitress with two college degrees and a healthy work ethic, spiraled into homelessness on the streets of Florida in 2013, after leaving Oregon and trying to restart her life after the deaths of her mother and brother.

Her plight inspired him to call his local homeless shelters and simply ask what they needed most. All said blankets. That also became the impetus behind his Blanket the United States campaign, which has a goal of donating 1 million blankets to homeless shelters by 2024. He even tried to make blankets himself when he read the words “what are you waiting for?” on the sleeve of a coffee cup.

“What coffee company puts quotes on a sleeve?” he says. “That was my first thought. And then my second thought was, ‘I’m going to do this.’ … I’m just going to go buy some fabric and a sewing machine and I tried to learn how to sew. And I realized really quickly that I’m horrible at sewing. That was my first obstacle. I had two choices at that moment: I can either quit or I can find somebody who can sew. And I found a sweet old lady named Tammy and Tammy started sewing blankets for me.”

Dalton didn’t want to start just another one-for-one business but wanted something that would make Sackcloth & Ashes, clothing symbolic of mourning and repentance in the Bible, stand out. He asked himself, “How can I innovate, how can I evolve, how can I reimagine it to make it unique?”

The company’s hyper-local emphasis, something that could allow concerned people to benefit their own communities, seemed to work best. “The local component sets us apart,” Dalton says. So, when a person purchases a blanket, the company donates a blanket to a homeless shelter in that person’s community.

Dalton says anybody following his example shouldn’t do so out of guilt. If they can meet a need, they should simply do so. “However, 90 percent if the time, most of the time, you don’t have the ability to meet every need, but you do have the ability to be a bridge-builder and you have the ability to connect somebody who can meet a need with the person that has the need,” he says. “Most of my work is bridge-building.”

Meet Shaunti Feldhahn. A well-known ground-breaking social researcher, best-selling author and popular speaker, Shaunti is a Harvard graduate and former Wall Street analyst who lives in Atlanta with her husband, Jeff, their daughter, son, and two cats who think they are dogs.

She has authored devotionals and Bible studies for iDisciple Publishing — her “Find Series” of includes Find Rest, Find Balance, Find Peace, and Find Joy. They guide women to discover the path that will take them from stressed-out to peace when they lean into God’s truths and begin to live the life designed just for them.

“Living in a fallen world is going to come with some stress, but the whole point is He wants us to navigate that, so we don’t have a life of stress and that we have that sense of joy no matter what,” Shaunti says. “[The books] are not just about reading something and going, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ It’s about ‘How do I apply that every day to my life?’ ”

Shaunti’s books delve deep into relationships — the best-selling For Women Only, followed by For Men Only (co-authored with Jeff) and her most recent work, Thriving in Love & Money – the money book that has little to do with money. These rigorously researched books help couples finally “get” what has been so often misunderstood about each other and what the roots of stress in their relationships might be. 

The books have been sources of insight while much of the country — and, indeed, the world — has been under stress with COVID-19. On a personal note, Shaunti has dealt with that and then some. She not only battled COVID-19, but stage 1 breast cancer and a withering attack from a Christian sister on the teachings in her books concerning sex.

She has resisted a public back-and-forth battle, citing Scriptural teachings and the common-sense that says, “You can’t heal hurt with further hurt.” Instead, Shaunti aims to help because that’s the essence of a Good Samaritan — one who goes out of their way to help.

Meet Rich Stearns. He’s the former and longest-serving president of World Vision U.S., an organization committed to human transformation, seeking justice and bearing witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God. After 20 years as its president, and now as its president emeritus, Stearns has authored a book, “Lead Like It Matters to God.” In it, the Bellevue, Wash., resident expands upon 17 crucial values that transform leaders and their organizations.

He and his wife, Reneé, are the parents of five children and grandparents of six. Stearns holds a B.A. in neurobiology from Cornell University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined World Vision to answer God’s call on his life, forsaking a corporate career that included CEO roles at Lenox and Parker Brothers Games.

That choice was hardly easy, one borne of what he calls “grudging obedience,” but few walking in the spirit of the Good Samaritan find avenues of convenience. His became a course of sacrifice and surrender to God, a walk steeped in accountability to the One to Whom we must all answer. It led to his direct involvement in combatting HIV/AIDS in Africa, where more than 13 million children have been left orphaned by that plague.

As Stearns can attest, God honors even grudging obedience.

“What are the things that are going to matter to God when you stand before Him on that day?” he asks. “It’s going to have very little to do with the business you were in or the profession you’ve chosen. It’s going to be about how you treated the people entrusted to your care, the people that you led. It’s going to be about the human beings around you during this whole career you’ve chosen, and how you helped them to flourish.”

Meet Brian Roland. He’s the co-founder and former CEO of Abenity, a Tennessee-based company that helps employers, alumni groups, and associations supplement their employee benefits with private perks and discount programs. Now living in Scottsdale, Ariz., he’s also a husband, a self-proclaimed girl dad, coffee nerd, trumpeter and drone pilot.

But what stands out about Roland is his generosity. The company he built — and served as CEO for 13 years before resigning in 2019 — has made the Inc. 5000 list for six consecutive years while giving more than $1 million to causes like World Vision, which battles global poverty. Many companies plan to give, almost as an afterthought, but built into Abenity’s DNA was a sustainable plan for generosity: The company committed 15 percent of its annual profits toward the United Nations’ goal of ending global poverty by 2030.

Roland says we can make the same thing can work in a smaller scale in our daily lives, ensuring a way to put legs on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Likewise, it simply starts with a plan that helps us avoid being the priest or the Levite who walked by the mugging victim on the other side of the road.

“By having the plan to give and being present in the moments around you, that’s the story of the Good Samaritan,” he says. “The priest that walked by — his head was just in the wrong space, and he didn’t have a plan that he could follow that allowed him to serve that person right then. He let his schedule, to wherever he had to go, take precedence. … One thing we like to do is we keep $5 McDonald’s gift cards in the middle console of our car, so when we see somebody in our community standing around, we’ve got a McDonald gift card and a Bible verse card in there, and it’s like ‘Here’s a meal.’ … There are simple steps that you can do.“

Remember Batya Ungar-Sargon? She’s baaaaaack. Officially, the first repeat guest on the Walking Through Samaria podcast, Batya rejoins us in response to a fresh outbreak of violence in the age-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

She lived in Israel. She went to high school there before earning a Ph.D. over here at the University of California-Berkeley. Not only can Batya recount the history of the Holy Land hostilities, she tells us why that history is so important. But then, she looks forward, not backward.

“To me, when I look at the problem there, I try to see it through a political lens, through a moral lens and through a lens of justice,” she says. “And, of course, then it’s very obvious what needs to happen, which is that every single person living in that territory should have full civil rights and should have access to safety, security and dignity.”

A few things have changed since Batya last visited with Dan and David. She is now the deputy opinion editor for Newsweek magazine, where she co-hosts a podcast called The Debate, in which people from opposite ends of the political spectrum engage in substantive conversation about real problems, rather than spewing talking points at each other without listening. Even though she approaches the Israeli-Palestinian problem from a Jewish perspective, she can see faults on both sides. Because rhetoric matters, she strives to avoid the kind that keeps the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raging.

“They’ve rebranded the problem in such a way that will make sure it will never be solved,” Batya said. “You have these very vocal Congresswomen talking about Israel as committing genocide against Palestinians or as being an apartheid or as engaging in ethnic cleansing, and these are all rebrands of actual problems that exist in such a maximalist way the only thing that would solve it for them, the only thing that would make them feel that there was redress to the Palestinians, would be what Hamas wants — which is Israel not to exist, and that is never going to happen.”

Meet Terry Johnson. He’s a major-gifts fundraiser for World Vision, a global Christian humanitarian organization tackling poverty and injustice.  Johnson serves as the organization’s area director for philanthropy in the southeastern United States.

A husband to one wife (Suzanne) and father to one daughter (Meredith), Johnson was destined to do something great after he survived tumbling out of the “suicide doors” of a Lincoln Continental at 70 mph and onto the sizzling pavement near El Paso, Texas. He was 3 years old at the time.

Now, he wants to make sure underprivileged kids around the world and their families survive their tumbles — which are far more dire than a momentary case of road rash. The people Johnson tries to help face an ongoing pandemic of poverty, living on less than $2 a day, which makes the coronavirus crisis look mild and short-term by comparison.

“There’s no stimulus check coming to the lion’s share of the world,” says Johnson, whose mission work has taken him to the hardest-hit areas of Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Honduras — “places their own governments won’t even go.”

Johnson endeavors to show that Jesus is alive in the places that it’s hardest to be a child and encourages more people to make something good happen.

“If we have the good fortune to travel and see the real need in the margins, how do I fit into that?” he says. “How do I become a part of that? I think those are the questions we need to ask ourselves.”

Meet Rick Dunham. He’s the founder of Dunham+Company, a Plano, Texas-based organization that is a global leader in providing fully integrated marketing and fundraising strategies for nonprofit organizations. It has served more than 100 organizations in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Dunham holds a bachelor’s degree from Biola University in Los Angeles and a master’s in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary. He’s on the board of The Giving Institute and is the immediate past chair of the Giving USA Foundation, which publishes the most widely respected annual report on giving in the U.S.

Dunham also is a member of The Giving Coalition, the national voice for American charitable organizations. To him, success isn’t about how much money you have or can generate. It’s all about the heart.

“If you look at the whole teaching of Scripture around money, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the one consistent thing is the heart,” Dunham says. “Go back into Exodus and you’ll see where God ordained the first fundraiser in Exodus 25. He says you need to command the people to come and you need to take up an offering and [accept from] everyone whose heart moves them to give. So God established back in Exodus that it’s really about the heart. … What giving is is really the exercise of demonstrating that we are not owned by what we have, but that we’re owned by God. … God doesn’t want His people on a guilt trip about giving. What He wants is a heart that’s wholly His.”

Dunham has channeled his heart into a pair of books — Secure: Discovering True Financial Freedom and If God Will Provide, Why Do We Have to Ask for Money? He has also been published and quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, USA Today, Dallas Morning News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, among others. He has served as a commentator on Fox Business News and is a frequent guest on numerous regional and national radio programs.

Dunham is married and has three children and nine grandchildren.

Meet Benjamin Watson. A first-round draft pick out of the University of Georgia in 2004, and a Super Bowl Champion with the New England Patriots in that rookie NFL season, Watson was a star tight end until retiring in 2020.

He had 44 touchdowns on the field but may be best known off the field for his courageous pro-life stance. He starred in Divided Hearts of America, a moving pro-life film he produced with Housing and Urban Development secretary Ben Carson, former Georgia state representative Alveda King and activist Abby Johnson.

Watson and his wife, Kirsten, devote time and money to assist pregnancy resource centers and he spoke at the 2017 March for Life in Washington, D.C. The Watsons also formed the One More non-profit organization, a source of educational and enrichment opportunities through charitable initiatives and partnerships. Watson also works with the International Justice Mission to combat sex trafficking.

Abortion isn’t the only hot-button topic this former football player tackles. In 2015, his thoughts on racial tension in America made him an internet sensation, reaching more than 44 million people. That opened a door to his first book, Under Our Skin, which earned critical acclaim, and a second literary work, The New Dad's Playbook.

“So many of the ills we see — whether it’s teen pregnancy, incarceration, poverty or self-esteem [issues] — so many of those things are tied to the lack of, or presence of, a male figure, and more importantly, a father in the home,” Watson says. “There is an imperative call for men. When men are involved, all those things I talked about before are flipped on their heads.”

His positions often put him in a tug of war politically, but Watson welcomes the tension as long as he stands for truth.

“The truth should rise above the tribe, rise above the trends,” he says. “That truth also, as we discover it, it may change our stances and we have to be OK with that.”

Meet Paul Byrd. Many may feel like they’ve met this former Major League Baseball pitcher already because of his familiarity as an Emmy-winning commentator on Fox Sports’ Atlanta Braves broadcasts or a best-selling author. He’s a man so genial he was widely considered “the nicest guy in baseball.” In fact, former Braves manager Bobby Cox once was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper that Byrd was “too nice to pitch.”

Broadcasting for one team and pitching for seven — including two stints with the Braves — have given him a platform by which he can communicate his faith in Jesus Christ. And while there’s a baseball idiom that “nice guys finish last,” Byrd isn’t so nice that he won’t fight for what he believes in.

“When you are considered the nicest guy or a nice guy, there’s this feeling of that you’re weak, you’re soft, and you may not want that guy on your team if you’re going to war,” says Byrd, who almost got into a brawl in 2006 with a Cleveland teammate needling him about his faith. “There’s a time to turn the cheek and there’s a time to crack the whip in the temple and both are manly.”

Byrd inherited that toughness from his father, whom he led to Christ only minutes before he died in 2017. He had doubts when he hung up his cleats and walked away from three guaranteed contract offers to pitch after the 2009 season but had the strength to put first things first — his 27-year marriage to Kym, with whom has two sons.

“I want to connect to Jesus and have such an intimate relationship with Him, talking and listening and learning,” Byrd says. “I want to go love other people because that’s who I am. And that only happens when my heart is right with Him.”

Meet Rev. Marian Edmonds-Allen. She is the executive director for Parity, a New York-based national nonprofit that works at the intersection of faith and LGBTQ+ concerns. She’s also the director of Blessed by Difference, a project that seeks to promote curious and collaborative bridging across the LGBTQ+ and faith divide. A longtime holy warrior against homelessness, Rev. Edmonds-Allen has served in many pastoral capacities, including church planting, parish ministry and chaplaincy. She is married, has four children, and is a passionate skier and outdoor enthusiast.

She has paid a price for her controversial stances on LGBTQ+ issues, even losing her place in one seminary because of it, but Rev. Edmonds-Allen still tries to bring people together through what she calls “holy dialogue.” It’s the “curious and collaborative bridging” in which she helps the LGBTQ+ community find and build relationships with the faith community, based on common ground. “I’m seeing God at work in it,” she says. “Everyone’s a winner when people come together and share core to core.”

Through her Good Samaritan-type efforts, members of the LGBTQ+ community are rediscovering their place in the church. Strangely enough, the COVID pandemic has helped. With people forced to quarantine and shelter in place because of the virus, many now interact with their churches online. What physically closed doors worldwide has figuratively opened doors previously shut to LGBTQ+ community members.

“Some LGBT people feel really worried about walking through the doorway into a church,” she says. “But with now all these online services available and churches advertising what they offer in terms of services, LGBT people are now able to explore different faith settings and worship services and to find something that works for them.”