VOLUME I • ISSUE NO. 9

THE MAN WHO DUG DEEP - FROM ROCK BOTTOM TO OFFSHORE

For the last few weeks, we have walked through seasons of testing, loss, and the Father's comfort which eventually leads to contentment and joy.

But sometimes the Pilgrim's path gets harder while you are still asking God to make it easier. One problem is solved and another arrives at the least convenient time.

You try to do the right thing and still seem to be losing ground.

R. G. Le Tourneau knew that road well. Born in 1888, he left school after the seventh grade. He educated himself through engines, welding torches and heavy machinery instead.

His first business, a garage and auto dealership, collapsed after his partner mismanaged it while R.G. was away working at the Navy Yard, leaving him unemployed and $5,000 in debt. With a wife and children to support, he needed work, so he bought a used Holt tractor and began taking land-leveling and construction jobs. Jobs lost money, equipment broke, and during the Depression he eventually sank roughly $100,000 into the red.

At one point, things became so tight that his own employees took up a collection to help him.

He later said they had more faith in him than he had in himself. At 44, he was starting from scratch. Again.

R.G. had known the Lord since he was 16, but somewhere in all that losing he began wondering if he had missed his calling. Perhaps really serving God meant leaving business for ministry. He took the question to his pastor, who told him,

“God needs businessmen too.”

That sentence stayed with him, as did Matthew 6:33:

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

R.G. later admitted, “That I had not been doing.”

He didn't need another calling. He needed God to be first in the one he already had.

The pressure didn't let up. After a construction job left R.G. in debt, the company that had guaranteed the contract now had enormous leverage over his business. When R.G. refused their demand to work on Sundays, the company's owner, Mr. Hall, boarded a train intending to shut him down and foreclose on his business and home. But somewhere along the way, he had an unexpected change of heart. He arrived and allowed R.G. to keep going.

R.G. had barely escaped one disaster when an accountant opened the books and discovered the situation was even worse than they thought!

But R.G. did what he knew to do. He prayed, went back to work and kept solving problems. When the equipment available couldn't do what he needed, he invented better equipment. When Caterpillar declined to build the power unit he wanted, he built his own. His Tournapull helped change earthmoving, and eventually even the companies that had said no were following his ideas.

The seventh-grade dropout went on to hold 299 patents. During World War II, his company produced roughly 70 percent of the heavy earthmoving equipment used by Allied forces. In 1953 he sold his earthmoving division for $31 million.

But there was a catch...

The sale included a five-year non-compete that restricted what he could build in parts of the earthmoving business. For an inventor who had spent his life moving land, that could have looked like one more closed door.

Instead, it made him dig deeper.

The agreement applied to his work on dry land. It didn't own the seas. In his sixties, R.G. turned offshore, working with a young man named George H. W. Bush to build the Scorpion, a revolutionary mobile drilling platform.

R.G. put his own money behind the idea. If it failed, the loss was his.

It worked.

His designs helped change offshore drilling. Sometimes the barrier in front of us is the very thing that stretches us beyond where we would ever have gone on our own.

His engineering legacy reached construction, transportation and offshore energy around the world. Yet perhaps the most telling number in his story isn't 299 patents or $31 million.

R.G. and his wife Evelyn eventually gave roughly 90 percent of their income away and lived on the rest. Somewhere along the way, the money stopped being the measure of wealth.

In the end, the greatest treasure wasn't in the ground his machines moved, beneath the sea his rigs reached, or in the bank.

It was knowing the One who made the earth, drew the shoreline and had been faithful when R.G. had little more than the ground beneath his boots, a dream and enough faith to begin again.

So this week: When you hit a barrier, dig deeper. When the ground runs out, look farther. When everything else shifts beneath your feet, seek first the One who doesn’t. Sometimes what looks like the end of the road is simply where God introduces you to a blue ocean of possibilities.

Seek first the Kingdom. Then go and make your mark. Do what you were made for.

Until next Tuesday, may your blessings be double and your burdens be light.

Michelle Driscoll

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