The Second Half
by Lloyd Reeb
(c) 2008 by Lloyd Reeb and Halftime
My guess is that Leo Abdella and I like hanging out together and understand each other so well because we are both “recovering real estate developers.” See, it just gets into your blood.
Even when you feel called in a different direction for your second half, it’s still there. We drive around West Palm Beach together, looking at cranes, and architecture designs and properties. In fact, Leo moved here intent on resurrecting his career as a developer, and, in retrospect, that’s exactly what he did. He just never imagined he’d be developing service opportunities rather than beach condos and retirement villas.
“The real estate industry – and the development side of the real estate industry – is an interesting education process of how so many moving parts fit to make this engine work,” Leo says. “I use the experience every day in my current life.”
Leo, the missions and outreach pastor for Christ Fellowship in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., began his professional career in real estate and quickly became a junior partner in a firm that specialized in second homes around the ski areas and lakes of New Hampshire. “We did everything from buy the land, develop the land, do all of the site work on the land, do the architecture, build the buildings, and furnish the buildings,” Leo says.
The company did well until 1987 when the stock market crashed, causing a landslide of real estate values and property foreclosures. “Virtually overnight I went from making millions building high-end resort homes to losing millions and owing millions,” says Leo. “It was brutal. … Before the crash, I lived in a work-hard, play-hard world of materialism. I thought that it was all under control – that I could earn everything, do anything. Then it was all gone.”
After a dissatisfying stretch managing foreclosure properties for banks, he and his family moved to south Florida. “We really thought that we would get into the same business down here,” he says, “but it didn’t work out that way, not at all.”
Instead, Leo and his wife Candace followed their teenage daughter to a church, where they began to explore spiritual things and launched into a new kind of relationship with God. With that new perspective, they began looking for ways to focus the second half of life on helping others rather than helping their bank account. In particular, Leo felt drawn toward global relief work.
“It became clear to me that God had prepared me to be a facilitator for those who can’t do it on their own, an ambassador of compassion,” Leo said.
Leo, who came by his work ethic from his depression-era parents, began putting his experience as a facilitator of development deals to work with a friend who had been a missionary in South America. They started a company that imported and exported a natural nutritional product, then used its profits to fund missionaries, children’s homes and schools in the jungles of Peru. Six years later, Leo pursued his second-half calling as an ambassador of compassion and founded MedCorps International Foundation. He used his contacts in the natural products industry to make deals for nutritional products that were, for one reason or another, no longer of use to companies. He then shipped them to partner organizations serving the needy all around the world. Leo says, “A little nutrition can make a huge difference in millions of people’s lives.”
In one case, a company bought out a competitor and decided to discontinue a product line designed to help children’s neurological development. The supplements came in what looked and tasted like candy bars and shakes, and the company asked Leo to take them off its hands.
“They faxed me a list, and it was five 40-foot trailer loads full of this stuff,” he says. “We’re going to bless the socks off the kids all over the world. Sure enough, that’s what we did.”
Leo continued to connect resources with missionary organizations that focused on serving the poor, which made him a natural fit when Tom Mullins, his pastor at Christ Fellowship, recruited him to lead the mega-church’s missions and outreach department.
Leo not only energized the missions efforts, but also looked for creative ways to connect its members to all sorts of projects, local and international, ranging from inner-city, to the migrant worker, to health care advocacy for single moms, to children’s homes and medical supply delivery. Leo started with 900 square feet to create a “clubhouse” where he invites business leaders to brainstorming sessions to help solve a range of community social problems.
Seven years later, the space has grown into 3,000 square feet called The Outreach Center, and the number of marketplace leaders has grown, as well as the scope of the projects they take on. Leo believes that the intersection of compassion and commerce creates a unique place for talented marketplace leaders to fulfill the second half of their lives.
Leo sees his work focusing more and more on helping plug business leaders into projects that fit their skills and experiences. And in a church with more than 15,000 people on many Sundays, there are lots of them.
“Our church is filled with people from the marketplace who come with life skills multiple times more interesting than mine,” he says. “It’s only a matter of figuring out how we harness that, motivate that, encourage that, and empower them. The possibilities of what can be done just thrill me. Their skills, compassion and creativity can impact generations. … That fires me up!”
So let me take you to a place where commerce and compassion converge. It’s early on a Saturday morning, and trailers begin backing up to one side of a small parcel of land purchased by business individuals. They’re unloading horses from some of the wealthiest polo communities around and putting them in newly constructed open stalls. On the other side of the riding ring, families pull up in minivans so that their disabled children can enjoy the therapeutic value of riding one of these well-trained horses. Those whose hearts love horses and have a passion for special-needs kids could not find more pleasure – just to hear the giggle of a little girl who for a few moments is lost in a new world with a wonderful, gentle animal. And in my book, God smiles on that.
It’s simple but transformational for everyone involved. Now that fires me up!
