The Luau that Launched a New Journey
Note from Mike: Below is the third and final installment of Rob Pettigrew’s story of God’s call on his life; in this section, his story begins to merge with that of Living Water. Read the first and second installments of his story at these links.
Living Water working in El Salvador, 2007.
In 2006 and 2007, I went with Second Baptist Church on Living Water International well drilling trips. First to Honduras, then to El Salvador. Despite all my experience, I found myself to be just along for the ride. The national teams were so well organized that really anyone could participate. Being a hydrogeologist and having been a driller didn’t make the way I shoveled cuttings from the borehole any better than anyone else.
By 2008, I was burning out on volunteering. In addition to the Living Water trips, I had been making trips to the Mexico border to install water purification systems at an orphanage in Diaz Ordaz and Tijuana. The orphanage in Diaz Ordaz had to be closed soon after it was built due to drug violence along the border. The poverty in Tijuana was just as bad as I had seen in Honduras, but it was just a few miles from the affluence of San Diego.
We changed to a smaller church closer to our house to avoid the exhausting Houston traffic. I met the pastor and told him I had done a lot of mission’s volunteer work in the past but now I was pretty much done. I wasn’t sure I was making a difference and those puzzle pieces, the grief of lives lost along the way, still didn’t have a place to fit.
In April 2008, I took my 5-year-old daughter to a Daddy Daughter Hawaiian Luau. I was glad to spend time with her but I was not expecting a stimulating evening. I was sitting with some dads watching my daughter jump around the floor. (At 5 years old, I don’t think they get the concept of a dance.) A friend introduced me to Scott Young. He was a few years younger but had grown up in Abilene, like I had. He had gone to Baylor like I had. He had moved to Houston like I had. And he was on the board of Living Water. I shared I knew a few things about water wells and ministry. Toward the end of the event, Scott dragged me across the room to meet Gary Loveless, one of the founders of Living Water. Gary and I were both a little old to have young daughters, but we chatted briefly as our children pulled on our legs. It didn’t take Gary long to see an opportunity to draw me into the Living Water family. By January 2009, I was on the board of directors of a ministry about to undergo great change.
Mike Mantel had joined Living Water in 2008. He would spend a year as executive vice president and then in November 2009, the board would vote for him to become the new CEO, assuming it all went well. I was going to be part of that decision. I had never really been on a board of directors. My conversations with Mike were honest, but not all that encouraging. He quoted the statistic that something like only 10 to 15% of founder-led organizations are able to make a hand-off to a next generation of leadership successfully. I was a year into my first volunteer board role and I was going to vote for something with a 90% chance of sending the organization down the tubes.
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God’s army of volunteers is peculiar. As the playwright Thornton Wilder put it, “In Love’s service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.” When Christians encounter people suffering and wounded by life and they invest in showing God’s love, they end up with some emotional pain, some woundedness of their own. I still think about the people I have met in hopeless situations, and there is a twinge of emotional hurt for them. Gary Evans was one of the founders of Living Water and was serving as its leader when the time came to turn things over to Mike Mantel. Gary had empathized and emotionally invested with not dozens but hundreds of people. When we had board meetings, Gary would talk about needs and lives impacted, and he would “tear up.” I am not sure about other non-profit organizations, but I hadn’t expected crying in the boardroom to be a regular event. Brokenness and humility go together and if Gary Evans could cry in the boardroom, I figured he was humble enough to let go of the organization. He probably needed a break anyway. Gary had strong opinions and Living Water had grown as large and as fast as it had because of a good strategy and good decisions. But, if LWI was going to reach its potential impact, it would need to change and Mike was the right guy for the job. In November 2009, Mike came into the board room and shared his heart and we voted unanimously for him to be the next leader for LWI. The was one thing I never expected: now 12 years later, Gary is still part of the LWI leadership team, still investing in the organization and still empathizing with the wounded.
I served on the LWI board for 3 years and then for the past several years I have been chair of the program effectiveness committee as an advisory board member. This year we are starting our third strategic planning process. Over the past 12 years, God has led LWI to continually improve it’s the ability to provide consistent, reliable, clean water; to teach healthy behaviors; to engage the local church; and to share the gospel the way Jesus did, seeing the whole person and meeting physical, relational, and spiritual needs in an “integral” way. LWI certainly didn’t go down the tubes. It thrived.
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I still have some puzzle pieces in that drawer in my mind. Why were the lives of sincere and serious people, whose lifelong calling to integral mission, cut short? I suppose if it all made sense, if the puzzle pieces all fit into place, then I would be the storyteller, but I am not.
