The house he built
In New Brunswick a father in the faith built a Bible school with volunteer hands and hospital sheets for walls. Thirty years on, with severe heart disease, he has no thought of stopping.
Brother Don Carpenter had visited both of us in our own cities, Calgary and Winnipeg. In May 2026 we drove some four hundred kilometres from Halifax to see him at Valley Waters.
At breakfast he counselled us as a father, plainly and without flattery: “I have no vested interest. I don't pay your bills. I don't have your vision.” A work must be given a fair time and then judged by its fruit. “It doesn't mean you're a failure. I'm talking about you being a good steward.”
The man of God is not done until God is finished with him.
That afternoon he told us how the house was built in the 1990s, men building and women cooking. One year two or three hundred bed sheets came from a Montreal hospital and were hung between the rooms for walls. “We never made any money in Bible school. We just fed them and taught them and sent them home.”
“You will pay a price every time you move ahead in obeying God,” he said. “The worst thing to do is to stop.” If he had a Bible school again, he told us, he would bring us in to teach.
“They shall still bear fruit in old age; they shall be fresh and flourishing.” Psalm 92:14
