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Phil and Don (right) with Habitat homeowner

Doing What Needs to be Done

We are Called: A series on St. Paul people taking their faith to work

A dozen years ago or so, Don and Barb Hiesterman were trying to figure out what to call their homegrown construction business. They perused the alphabet. They considered their goals and the values that anchor their life. ABC. No, that wasn’t quite right. They moved to the next trio of letters: BCD. That was it! There’s B for Barb, D for Don — and Christ at the very center.

BCD Enterprises. The name is pretty specific about the place of faith in their daily work. But enterprises? That’s general enough to encompass building, remodeling, fixing, repairing, and electrical wiring.

“My whole goal in life is to use the gifts God has given to me to help people do what needs to be done,” says Don, an “easy-going” guy at home in flannel and denim. “The Bible says that if we see some hungry people, we should feed them. If they need a house, a place to live, we should provide that. If I can help in any way, then I’m going to go for it.”

Don and Barb are a home-building team — starting 30 years ago with the first home that gave early shape to their blended family of five children, to the houses that spring up in the Blue Grass area, to homes built for people in need.

There’s nothing like the raising of a newly-constructed wall or the placing of rafters to ignite Don Hiesterman’s passion. With God as his dwelling place, Don’s mission is to build houses that will provide solid shelter for others, that will hold love and a future.

Certain “divine interventions” along the way have put him on this home-building journey, have given him a heart for people in need, and keep him driving nails straight and true. He looks back and recognizes God’s hand in early memories. As a boy, his grand-father’s backyard workshop — full of intriguing drill presses and table saws — drew him and his cousins “like a magnet.”

At 19, Don entered an apprenticeship as a journeyman electrician — a trade that stood by him for a year’s tour in Viet Nam with the Seabees (the U.S. Navy’s construction battalion). “That was the first time I saw what the other half of the world lives like,” he recalls. “Coming from a little Iowa town where everyone has a house and nobody goes hungry, where there was no war, it touched my heart to see kids standing by the road and waving. There was true need there.”

Back at the Rock Island Arsenal, where Don was an electrician for 30 years, he met this lively woman who took care of his timecard. Married in 1977, Barb and Don suddenly were a family with five kids, his two and her three, ranging from ages two to eight. They crafted Hiesterman family homes where each child had his or her own space. They packed a home-on-wheels for summer camper adventures.

And in every home, there was always a workshop where kids built birdhouses and imaginations blossomed in wood and paint.

In 1993, Don “retired” and started his own BCD Enterprises business out of a workshop on the back of his garage. As a home-builder and general contractor, he has built 16 houses in the Blue Grass area. No computer-assisted design for these folks. Each house begins with Barb’s penciled design on graph paper.

Don is a man devoted to prayer, and he keeps an active conversation running with God. Each morning he studies the sign on his bathroom mirror: “Good morning. This is God,” it reads. “I’m going to be handling all your problems today and I won’t need your help. Relax and have a good day.”

“No matter what happens, I try to remember that promise. In my work, you have to be flexible and easy-going. It has to be about relationships and integrity,” says Don. He pays close attention to “the times in my life when I can see God was looking after me” — through replacement of two hips, in daily work and family life, and in unfolding opportunities to serve.

It was 1993, in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, that Don volunteered on a house-rebuilding crew in Homestead, Florida. That experience gave rise to founding the QCA Habitat for Humanity affiliate. And now, 15 years later, Don has served as site construction supervisor on eight local Habitat houses (and Barb is office manager in the Habitat office). The reward comes when “we get a house done and we see how happy a family is.” Built of a family’s hopes and dreams, a home is surely a sign of God’s sheltering love.

The TV news can bring Don to his feet. “I was watching how Hurricane Katrina had destroyed everything, and I told Barb, ‘I have this urge. I have to go down there and see.’” Human need compels him to serve. He has sloshed through mud in post-Katrina Louisiana and Mississippi. In Juarez, Mexico, a crew built a wood-frame house on a concrete pad in the landfill.

Nails, lumber, prayers, and grace are the stuff of Don Hiesterman’s daily work. The words of Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity, have become Don’s personal credo: “It’s not your blueblood, your pedigree, or your college degree; it’s what you do with your life that counts.”

Don’s vocation, after all, is “to do what needs to be done.” Count on it.

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"Let us be silent that we may hear the whisper of God." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, author