Member Spotlight: Rick and Lynette Driggers

Rick Driggers’ soft Texas drawl crawls through the telephone.

“This is as bad as it gets,” the Fort Worth-based financial advisor says when asked about the stock market. “It’s very emotionally disturbing for a lot of people.”

Then he adds: “Part of my career is helping people through hard times.”

Part of his career?

Forget that!

Helping people is at the heart of his entire life.

Rick and his wife, Lynette, are in the final stages of certification by the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors (NANC), which takes a Biblical approach to counseling. They’re already helping engaged couples get ready for marriage.

Their home is a way station for babies heading for adopting families through the Gladney Center for Adoption. Lynette also serves food to the homeless at Union Gospel Mission in Fort Worth, prays outside an abortion clinic a few mornings a month, teaches a Bible study for the young women living at Gladney, and ministers to women in jail.

And Rick, 62, has been a Samaritan Ministries board member for about six years.

The couple has also raised five children, two of whom are now married, home educating them all starting at a time when that type of schooling was rare.

“We heard about it at a point in time when not many people were doing it,” Rick says. “It seemed like the Biblical approach. Over the years, looking back on it, I think it was a benefit and a blessing to our children and especially to us, because it charged us to give our children a Christian worldview. It was interesting and fun, and I don’t know of anybody we’ve ever met who had more fun with their kids than we did. The whole world is our classroom.”

Rick says his responsibilities to his children, especially his daughters, didn’t end when they finished school. He has been committed to protecting them through their single years.

“We see the downside of dating,” he says. “We believe that serial recreational relationships can be dangerous in a number of ways. We think the more Biblical pattern is to have the parents involved in the process. Courtship has flaws and it’s not a perfect system. We’ve seen some situations where there was a broken heart because it didn’t work out. However we believe it’s a better alternative than traditional dating.”

The Driggers have gone down the courtship road with two of their five children so far. Mark, 25, has been married to Jessica for a year-and-a-half, and on October 25 last year their daughter, Leah, was married to David Spina at age 28.

“That was a long wait,” Rick says. “I was able to give the glory to God because when my daughter was 16, I gave her a promise ring. She promised to keep herself physically and emotionally pure for the man that we were believing God would bring some day. By God’s grace, that’s the way it happened.”

The Lord’s grace was with Rick even before he became a believer in Christ. After he graduated from college, he was a Marine Corps officer and helicopter pilot for six years. His duties included transporting troops and cargo in the Far East toward the end of the Vietnam War. Rick and his crew survived a helicopter malfunction in Japan that he doesn’t believe any other crew has survived before or since. During a landing one of the blades broke off, the helicopter crashed, exploded, and burst into flames. Two passengers were killed. Rick was awarded the Navy-Marine Corps Medal for Heroism for pulling his crew chief out of the aircraft.

“That was one of three situations in my life where I saw that the Lord for some reason wanted to keep me alive,” Rick says.

That reason was probably for him to become the active believer he is today.

Rick says he came to the Lord in the 1970s in an “interesting way.” He had gotten involved in occult activities, including Transcendental Meditation, “in which there were enough dark manifestations of the supernatural that I began to seek help.”

“As a result, I ended up meeting with a believer who assisted me and guided me through being set free of some strongholds,” Rick says.

Shortly after that, he and Lynette bought Bibles and “left the country for kind of a working honeymoon,” one that lasted a year-and-a-half.

“We spent most of that time in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where we were discipled by a small care group from an English-speaking Baptist church,” Rick says. “They loved us and showed us God’s order for marriage. As a result, small group meetings have been an important part of our lives ever since.”

Rick says that when he wed Lynette, he “married way over my head.”

“You can print that,” he says.

“We came to know the Lord together. She is the consummate virtuous helpmate in my opinion. She’s smart and organized and godly.”

That godliness no doubt helped the Driggers as they raised their children, four of whom are still Samaritan members.

“We have had situations with which we were concerned for our children. Over and over we have seen that in the things we tried to bring about, God miraculously changed their hearts,” Rick says. “We’ve seen total transformations. I would summarize it by advising parents to have faith in the Lord. Children go through seasons of change. Don’t get so discouraged when you see them going through a season you’re not really pleased about. Seasons come and go. Just keep praying and having faith. We go through a lot of unnecessary worry, because we forget that God may not be finished yet.”

Other ways that God has worked in Rick’s life include bringing him out of chronic fatigue syndrome, which not only left him constantly tired, but also made him vulnerable to colds and sinus infections.

“I got really sick, missed a lot of work,” says Rick, who wrote about his experience in the January 2007 issue of Samaritan Ministries Christian Health Care Newsletter. “God saw fit for me to have a complete recovery.”

The condition lasted for 10 years. For 2½ of those years, he felt like he had the flu and on some days lacked “the energy to come to breakfast, much less go to work.” He missed 3½ months of work one year.

After several attempts at a variety of both conventional and alternative treatments—all unsuccessful—he tried proprietary herbal blends created by a doctor in Holland. He followed six months of that treatment with the glyconutritional product Ambrotose. The “detoxification” of his body that resulted from the Ambrotose was for a time even worse than the problem itself. But one day 4½ months later, Rick’s energy suddenly returned—“a night and day difference.”

“I’m back on track now, working out three times a week, and in great shape,” he says.

Besides the chronic fatigue syndrome need, the Driggers family has benefited from other published needs during their seven years as Samaritan members.

“It works,” Rick says. “The needs that we’ve submitted have been handled very well. It’s such a pleasant contrast to having to fight the insurance companies.”

Joining the ministry “just made sense” to them and fit with their worldview, Rick says.

“We understood the concept,” he says. “It was a Biblical pattern of life that we were attracted to.

“When we started home educating, we started to rethink many different ideas of our life. Many times, we would discover Biblical alternatives that were superior—a better, more workable way of doing things.

“In a way, I’d say that we believe that God’s ways work across the board: financially, finding a life partner, for your sons and daughters, family life, and governmentally.”

“I believe the leadership of Samaritan Ministries has been responsive to what’s happening in the health care environment and insightful in the issues that we’ve addressed.” But, he says, the health care need-sharing ministry concept continues to face challenges, like “the socialist, excessive government regulations that some states are moving toward that would remove a family’s choice about how they would take care of their health care needs.”

“One quote that has shaped our involvement in Samaritan, in our political party, and in counseling is, ‘Evil prevails when good men do nothing.’”

Rick and Lynette Driggers determined a long time ago that they would do something.