Glen, Joy & their sons lived in Houston, Texas in 1982 after he graduated from the University of Texas in Austin. Glen felt strongly that the Lord had called him and Joy to serve as house parents to troubled girls in a halfway house run by the Harris County (TX) Juvenile Department. Joy would finally get a girl, or two, or half-­dozen in the family. So they interviewed for the job and were hired.

The first step, before the girls could move in, was to remodel the large bunkhouse-­style accommodation where the Riddles and the girls would live. Since I lived in Houston, Glen recruited me to help him perform the remodeling job himself, a task he would sandwich between intense house-­parent training sessions. It was typical Glen—throw himself into the project 110%. As part of the remodel, Glen & Joy were provided a large budget to spend on new furniture.
He insisted that the girls were to all sit at a large round table with he, Joy and the boys at breakfast and dinner. Finding such a table to fit a dozen people or more was difficult. So was finding large sofas around which they could all sit at night and conduct a mandatory 'group processing' session. [If you can believe it, Glen was all set to write a 'service plan' for each girl's therapy and monitor it daily. Talk about organized! Who was that guy?]

Then, a few days before the girls were set to move in, the home's administrator changed his mind and fired Glen & Joy. Little explanation was given other than that they were not 'right for the job.’ They were crushed.

For the next few months, the Riddles lived with us in our small home in the Clear Lake area of Houston near the juvenile prison where I served as a chaplain. I had camped with Glen many times during our wilderness camp ministry to juvenile delinquents [1977-­78], but living with him 24/7, with wife & kids, was a different animal altogether. We were crowded!

Worse, Glen was lost, completely clueless as to what to do with his life. Those who only knew Glen in later life as the confident, daunting, trail-­blazing foreign missionary, or the humble servant prison chaplain, would not recognize the doubting downcast Glen that was my dearest friend.

But God blessed us all through that time of trial. The Riddle boys and Newton kids played happily—no, fabulously—in the dirt pile on the empty lot next to our house. The kids filmed a 'war movie' they wrote, produced and starred in, the first of several such productions they made together, even after the Riddles moved away. Glen and Joy's bond of love with Melanie and I emerged stronger than before.

We were sad—and glad!—when Glen & Joy moved to his childhood home in Tahoka, Texas to prayerfully seek a fresh perspective on where God was leading them. Those who know them from their ministry days with Light & Liberty, Albuquerque Bible College, Chafer Theological Seminary, and BEEWorld already know the direction God gave them in Tahoka: move to Albuquerque. Now you know the depths from which they came to get there.

It was just like my dearest friend Glen to walk away from stressful times in his life with a funny story or two. He’d finish these stories with a silly nervous giggle at the end, a comedic form of mea culpa given in disbelief that he had escaped a sticky situation in life that he himself had largely created. His confessions usually went like this. “Man, Newt, I can’t believe that I . . . [You complete the statement.]”

One of those funny-­but-­dangerous moments occurred as Glen and I were spray-­painting the interior walls of the halfway house in Houston. The paint was an unusually intoxicating mixture of enamel and paint thinner. While I painted the living room, Glen worked his way into the girl’s bathroom, a long, narrow room with a door at each end. To spray the inside of the doors,
he shut them both.

Soon after, Glen started yelling through the doors, "Newt, turn on Paul Harvey! It's time for NEWS," imitating Paul Harvey as he loved to do. Then he yelled repeatedly, "PAUL HARVEY, NEWS!" "PAUL HARVEY, NEWS!" It was 10:00 AM, well before Paul's airtime.

I opened the bathroom door and quickly realized that Glen was sky high. Staring at me with a blank look, he kept pressing the nozzle gun but not moving his arm. The paint was running down the door, dripping onto the floor. The boy needed drying out.

I drove him around Houston in my pickup with the windows rolled down for an hour as Glen stuck his head out the passenger side window and gulped in fresh air. I swear there were times during that ride that he reminded me of Jeeves, the slobbering dog my granddaddy used to take on country rides in north Louisiana