Have you ever had a friend who cared enough for you that he would ask you to go out and have lunch? After you order, you put your menus down, he looks you right in the eyes and tells you how much he loves you. But you have some heavy-duty problems with your personality, and he loves you enough to be willing to take whatever amount of time necessary to help you work through them. Now that’s a true friend! That actually happened to me 30 years ago with Ron Harris.

     Ron was the assistant to the Senior Vice President and Controller of the largest bank between Kansas City and Los Angeles, located in Denver. Ron and his wife Maribeth have been married forty years and have a son Ron Jr., and two daughters Norrie and Andy, and four grandkids. Maribeth was raised in a very staunch catholic family and had just about had it with Ron, when Ron’s boss, Lee Ashley cared enough about him that he introduced him to his best friend Jesus Christ. That introduction literally saved Ron’s life.

     Shortly after Ron and I had been meeting every week working through a series of problems, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ came to me in the summer of 1975 and asked me to be the local chairman of the national Here’s Life Denver campaign. I told Bill that I was too controversial for that important position, but that I knew the guy that would be perfect for that job, and that was Ron Harris. I also agreed to be chairman of the fund raising committee and together, with God’s guidance, we had one of the two most successful campaigns in the country.

     In the fall of 1978, Ron shared with me that he was led to leave the bank, sell his home, cars, and join an operation outside of Ft. Collins, Colorado, called Mercy Farm Pie Shoppes. We prayed about it for nearly six months, and finally Ron resigned as Senior Vice President and cashier of the bank and moved his family 65 miles north of Denver to be Vice Chairman of Mercy Farms. They were there for 18 months when it became abundantly clear that this was a ministry of men, not of God, and that he needed to extricate the family immediately. He took a job with a bank in Ft. Collins for six months until God opened the door for him to move back to Denver.

     As the President/CEO of Mid Continent Corp, A large data processing company serving the S&L industry, Ron had put together a tremendous program to buy the company from the parent company, when he found out that the company was sold right out from under him. Suffice it to say that Ron resigned as the President and formed his own consulting company, until God opened up the opportunity for him to join a local software company. As Executive Vice President and COO, he served for almost four years until he realized God really didn’t want him there anymore. However, he was able to leave with some very valuable stock options, which would ultimately set him up for life.

     Ron’s oldest daughter Norrie had fallen in love with our pure bred Arabian horse, Ahnwar, and Betsy and I agreed to give Norrie the horse with the proviso that she kept him at our horse which she did and was there 6-7 days a week for nearly three years. We used to load the horse into the trailer and Norrie would show him at different shows around Colorado. We all became very close over the years, and Norrie was sort of the daughter that we never had and we learned to love her very much.

     While I was the chairman of the advisory board at the University of Colorado Business School, Ron and I talked about his getting his MBA degree in a new program, which we designed for the local business people. The big hang up was that Ron had never taken time to finish his undergraduate degree. Well, I knew he had about six degrees in the school of “Hard Knocks”, so I got Dean Bill Baughn to waive that requirement. Ron not only graduated with honors, but was also elected President of the class, and I was so proud of and for him.