Math of Compassion Multiplies Blessings

By Ray Waddle

In Southern summer dust and humidity, Steve Lainhart marvels at the math of compassion.

Lainhart helps organize his church’s Habitat for Humanity house-building effort, and he sees the blessings multiply with every new coat of paint and every nail hammered into a new house frame.

“This is bigger than the sum of the parts,” he says.

He rattles off some numbers. More than 2,000 volunteers will be involved this year in building some 20 Habitat for Humanity homes in Nashville. Habitat for Humanity uses volunteers to build houses that are mortgaged to families who otherwise could not afford them.

Lainhart’s church, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Nashville, has enlisted more than 200 donors to raise approximately $40,000 to sponsor one of those homes. Another 200 church members volunteer at the site, on four successive weekends, to build the Westminster-sponsored house. Lainhart, a mechanical engineer by training, is a Supervisor on Site, an overseer who teach people how to drive nails and install doors and everything else about erecting a 1,200 square-feet house in eight days. Lainhart’s competence and enthusiasm recently got him featured as Volunteer of the Week in The Tennessean newspaper. He helps out at nearly a dozen Habitat house sites throughout the year, not just the one his church is sponsoring. That usually means sweaty all-day weekend work, starting at 7 a.m.

The “Volunteer of the Week” attention embarrasses him — he’d rather talk about Habitat’s collective mission and the social good it does. “Habitat is always about the collective effort; it’s really bigger than any one person,” he says.

Habitat benefits both the homeowner who moves in and the volunteers to build it, he says.

A Habitat build promotes pride of house ownership, which improves neighborhood selfimage and helps lower crime. That pride gets passed on through the children who grow up in such a house, and so an attitude of responsibility stretches forward generationally, he says.

“There’s something significant about owning your own home,” he says. “You have the opportunity to change the way you look at your environment.”

Then there’s the effect on the volunteers.

“People come out there in the heat and dirt because it takes them outside their comfort zone and they know they’re making a contribution,” he says. “A lot of ministry is about making people feel better about who they are. This does that.”

That’s why he started his Habitat volunteer work nine years ago through Westminster church: “I found it was something I enjoyed — I got a lot more out of it than I put in.”

It’s also gratifying to see the human diversity at work on such a build site, he added — the various church members getting to know each other better under the circumstances, and everyone getting acquainted with the prospective house owners, who work at the site as well.

“And you see kids getting hot and dirty with their parents all working on the site together, and you see those kids start thinking about their own role in the community, their obligations in society.” (Youngsters are allowed to work a Habitat site if they are at least 16 years old.)

Other volunteers know Lainhart’s enthusiasm well. “He has an incredibly positive attitude,” says Amy Dennison, cochair of the Habitat steering committee at Westminster church. “There’s something very special about him. I think he’s humbled by the whole process. ... And we couldn’t do it without him — he knows how to build a house.”

Lainhart, 51, an Ohio native and father of three, is general manager of the engine division of Thompson Machinery. He says people who are thinking of volunteering for a Habitat build shouldn’t let a lack of expertise stop them. “People bring muscle and enthusiasm and good intentions, and they build a home in the process,” he says. “It doesn’t require many technical skills. You can become a Habitat for Humanity veteran pretty much in a weekend.”

Ray Waddle is a Nashville writer.