The Decision You Make Before You Have to Make It

I have interviewed a lot of people who built something real. Most of them can point to a moment of strategy, a pivot, a launch. Chad Temple doesn’t talk that way. When I asked him what kept him going for three decades of knocking on doors in neighborhoods most people drive past, he didn’t give me a framework. He gave me a pay phone in the Bronx, a mother standing on a bus, and a Snickers bar delivered in a blizzard.

This post is inspired by our latest segment of The Create Your Art Podcast. Watch here.

By the time Chad finished telling these stories, I understood something I hadn’t fully named before. The reason some people are impossible to forget, the reason a name becomes shorthand for trust in an entire neighborhood, has almost nothing to do with talent or platform. It has to do with whether you do what you said you would do, over and over, long after anyone is watching to see if you will.

A Pay Phone in the Bronx

Chad told me about a night early in his marriage. He was out on his route in the Bronx, cold, soaked through, and done. He found a pay phone, dropped in a quarter (it had just gone up from a dime, he remembers that detail clearly), and called his new bride. “I just want to come home,” he told her.

Her answer was four words. “Chad, finish, and then come home.”

That is not a motivational poster line. It is a small, unglamorous instruction that a lot of people never receive, or never listen to when they do. Finish the thing you started before you let yourself off the hook. Chad kept working that route because he knew which kid wouldn’t be there Saturday and why, because he’d already told a family he was praying for their weekend, because the community had started to expect him. Not the organization. Him.

That is the part most people skip when they think about building something that lasts. They imagine the big moment. Chad’s story is made of small ones, repeated on a schedule nobody was forcing him to keep.

A Year Gone, and a Mother’s Answer

Here is the story that stopped me. A neighborhood Chad’s team served lost its route captains and went untouched for a full year. No visits, no bus, nothing. Eventually a new staff member, Stephanie, was sent back in, not knowing what she’d find.

What she found was a party already in progress. A new community program had set up an ice cream truck and an event, actively trying to pull the kids in. By every reasonable measure, Chad’s organization should have lost that neighborhood. A year of silence is usually enough to erase you.

Instead, the kids left the party and came to the bus. And when the woman running the event tried to call them back, saying, “I’m right here,” one of the mothers answered her. “Because Caring Place is the only thing that has never left us. They’ve been faithful.”

Read that again. A year of absence didn’t erase a track record built over years of presence. That’s not luck. That’s what happens when consistency becomes identity. The neighborhood wasn’t loyal to a program. It was loyal to a pattern of behavior it had come to trust completely, even when that pattern had a gap in it.

Whose Kid Is This

The story that hit hardest wasn’t about a party. It was about a shooting.

A route captain named Elissa got the call that a child in her neighborhood had been killed. She drove straight there, pushed to the edge of the police line, and asked the first officer she saw, “Is it one of my kids?”

The officer didn’t understand the question. But a man standing nearby did, and later told Chad what happened next. He looked at Elissa, a woman who didn’t share the neighborhood’s background or skin color, and said, “My kids? This is a white lady standing here. How is this your kid?” She told him who she was. “I’m Elissa with Caring Place.” And he understood immediately, because everyone in that neighborhood already understood. “That was the feeling out there,” Chad told me. “And it wasn’t because of me. It’s because you had all these route captains who showed up rain or shine. Didn’t matter.”

That is what it looks like when your name becomes a promise other people can rely on without having to ask twice. Nobody builds that with a single grand gesture. It gets built visit by visit, in weather nobody wanted to be out in, until the community stops seeing you as a visitor and starts seeing you as theirs.

A Blizzard and a Snickers Bar

Chad’s team operated under a simple, almost uncomfortable principle: God is everything you are and nothing you’re not. Meaning, if you told a kid you’d be there, you represented something bigger than yourself every time you didn’t show. So when a blizzard shut down the buses one winter, and the team had already promised every kid a Snickers bar, the answer wasn’t to cancel. It was to load the candy into personal cars and knock on every door by hand.

One staff member reached a two-story apartment, and a father who’d clearly seen a lot of broken promises in his life came down to the door expecting nothing. When he realized why they’d come out in a blizzard for a piece of candy, he broke down. “That’s what makes you guys different,” he said. “You always do what you say you’re going to do.”

Chad’s takeaway from thirty years of this work wasn’t complicated. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. That single discipline, he told me, also keeps you from saying things you were never going to follow through on in the first place. It sounds good in the moment. Don’t say it if you won’t do it.

The Decision Before the Decision

Near the end of our conversation, I compared what Chad described to a wedding vow. You don’t decide to stay faithful in the middle of a hard year. You decide it before the hard year ever shows up, so the decision is already made when the test arrives.

That’s the thread underneath every story Chad told me: the pay phone, the empty neighborhood, the shooting, the blizzard. He wasn’t relying on willpower in the moment. He was living out of a decision he’d made long before that moment existed.

If you’re building something that needs people to trust you before they’ve had much reason to, this is the part worth sitting with. The platform, the content, the visibility, all of it means very little if the people on the other end can’t count on you to show up the way you said you would. Chad Temple never set out to be findable. He set out to be faithful, in a specific place, to specific people, for as long as it took. Findable followed.

Watch the full segment with Chad Temple, and subscribe to Create Your Art for more conversations with people who did the work before anyone was watching.

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Full Transcript

Darren: We made the joke earlier about the hundred year old tree. Even though it’s ugly, it’s just impressive because it’s there, right? Which is funny in itself. That’s a total Chad joke, but we love it. When we look at it that way, I don’t think a lot of us have that in us right now in culture today. It’s easy to just move to the next thing, move to the next thing. But what your story has is this thread of consistency over time. Can you speak to that a little bit? What kept you there? What kept you going?

Chad: Well, I guess because you do see the effectiveness. Honestly, these kids and these people that we’re working with, they have everybody in and out of their life. Families have people in and out, you know? Whoever it is that’s working with them, whoever is around them, the community itself is very, very mobile. People, humans, are looking for connection. But for us, it was just a real simple thing.

They weren’t a project. I wasn’t going to visit people because it was my job. I had made friends with people in a neighborhood, and I was going to say hi to my friends. That’s really what it was.

Darren: Yeah. And often it can become a project if there’s a job piece related to it, or a ministry piece related to it. Oh, I have to, I have to.

Chad: Well, there was some of that. I mean, when you don’t want to, it’s raining, it’s cold offshore. I remember one time I was actually in the Bronx, and I just got married, and it was pouring rain, and it was cold, and it was dark. I just wanted to go back to Brooklyn. That’s where our apartment was. My bride was there. I didn’t want to be out here. I remember they had pay phones, so I called her, because that’s all we had back then. That’s a thing you put a quarter in.

Darren: Yeah. Well, it was a quarter too.

Chad: It used to be a dime. I remember when we went to a quarter. But I put the quarter in there. I called her, and I said, “Man, I just want to come home.” She goes, “Chad, finish, and then come home.”

Darren: What a novel idea. Just stick it out and then come home.

Chad: But seriously, I would have a ball out there talking, knocking on the doors, talking with people. Why? Because I knew what was going on in their life. Maybe this kid wasn’t going to be there this Saturday because they were going to their dad’s house, and I already knew that. So I’d go check in on them and say, “Hey, look, I know you’re not going to be there Saturday, but I’m hoping, I’m praying you have a great time with your dad.” And so we became friends, somebody that they knew they could count on.

We had parents that knew, on my route or on any of the routes we had, that the Caring Place staff was showing up at this time, because they always showed up on that day, right around that time. And so there might have been something going on in their life that said, “Okay, we knew you were coming, and we need to tell you this.” That’s impressive to me, because again, we showed that we honestly cared.

And so when we were attacked, people would say things about us, like, “You’re just doing it for whatever reason.” There was always someone in the neighborhood saying, “You don’t know them then. They’ve asked nothing. They’re just here.” It really was an honor. We were just talking to kids, having a good time, talking with families, talking with moms and dads. And then we’d run the bus on Saturday, and they’d get on and go.

I’ll never forget, and I share too many stories.

Darren: No, I love the stories. Come on.

Chad: We had a neighborhood where the route captains had to step down, and I didn’t have any new ones. So we were gone for a year. Now, that’s important. We were gone out of that apartment complex for one year. I got some new staff, and she had been with us before, so she knew what she was doing. I said, “Hey Stephanie, go here. We haven’t been there in a year. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” So she visited, and the bus rolls up, and there’s a party going on. The new community program manager had an ice cream truck out there, and an event, and all this going on. So Stephanie’s thinking, we’re not going to get anybody.

And then all the kids left from there and came over to the bus, and she’s like, “All right, come on.” And this lady who had thrown the party comes over and is getting on the bus, saying, “Kids, come on, come on, you need to come back.” And the moms got up on the bus, they looked at her, and they said, “You come off of there. The kids are going to Caring Place, they’ll be right back when they’re done.” And the lady said, “Why would you do that? I’m right here.” And the mom literally said, “Because Caring Place is the only thing that has never left us. They’ve been faithful.”

Now remember, we had just been gone for a year, but there was such an understanding, such a feeling about the love that these route captains had, that even when there was a shooting in one of the neighborhoods, I always knew that route captain was going to get a call, because a mom in that neighborhood was going to let her know this just happened. It was a Wednesday night. We were coming out of church. I’m driving up Post Road. I see lights on 42nd Street down a little bit. I went, “I wonder what’s going on.” Whatever.

And that route captain, it was her neighborhood, got a phone call. A kid had just been shot and killed, and it was one of her kids. What’s amazing is that when Elissa was a route captain, when she pulled up there, of course there’s all these police and police lines and all that, she gets right to the edge, and she looks at one of the cops and says, “Is it one of my kids?” The cop says, “I don’t know who he’s talking about.” And the guy standing next to her looked at her, and I heard this from him later, because he and I became friends. He looked at her and said, “My kids? This is a white lady standing here. How’s this your kid?” And he goes, “Who are you?” She said, “I’m Elissa with Caring Place.” He said, “Oh, I get it.” That was the feeling out there. And it wasn’t because of me. It’s because you had all these route captains who showed up rain or shine. Didn’t matter.

One last story, and they all come to mind.

Darren: I love it. I love it.

Chad: If we always said we were going to be there, we were always there. We had four principles we operated under. One of them was that God is everything you are and nothing you’re not. Which, from a theological point of view, that’s horrible. But from a person’s point of view, you’re representing Christ. You came into the neighborhood saying, “I represent God.” That means if you’re honest, God’s honest. If you care, God cares. If you’re faithful, God’s faithful. So I used to tell the staff, if you say you’re going to do something, you better do it. Better be there. Because you’re repping God.

Well, a blizzard hit. We could not run the buses. There was no way the buses were getting through. But we had promised every kid Snickers bars. So what are you going to do? Every staff member showed up, because they knew we were going. Even though, how are you going to get in? Well, they figured a way. Everybody got there.

We loaded all the Snickers bars up in everybody’s cars, sent them on out to their routes. They were going to knock on every door and hand the kid a Snickers bar. These were the ice cream Snickers bars at this point, not the other way. We actually did give those out one time, but not that time. These were just frozen ones.

[Editorial note: a staff member’s name is unclear in the source audio at this point, rendered inconsistently as “Chad Michael” and “Joe Michael.” Held as “Michael” pending verification.]

But Michael was knocking on a door, and it was a two-story apartment, and the dad leans out and says, “Who?” He says, “Michael with Caring Place.” “That’s it, just a minute.” He comes down, opens the door, goes, “What are you doing here?” He said, “Well, we promised the kids they were getting a Snickers bar. So we’re here to deliver it.” “A Snickers bar? Who cares?” The dad said, “That’s what makes you guys different.” And Michael goes, “What?” He goes, “You always do what you say you’re going to do.” He called the kids, and he was crying.

He obviously had grown up in a situation and dealt with it, because he went into this story, but that wasn’t the norm. That’s what I’ve tried to tell even to other ministries: if you say you’re going to do something, it’s not that hard to just do it. Which also keeps you from saying a lot of garbage that you’re not going to do. “Oh, it sounds good,” but you’re not going to do that. Don’t say it. Stick to what you know you’re going to do. It’s a simple thing.

But that had to be instilled in the volunteers. I had the best volunteers in the world, I’m telling you. And so that’s what it was. And it’s all those principles. Like I said, we had four that we operated under, that being one of them. But that controls you then, doesn’t it? So there’s certain things you can’t do, and certain things you have to do.

Darren: Yeah, and it sounds like you make the decision before the decision has to be made. It’s kind of like a wedding, isn’t it?

Chad: Very true, very true. You made a decision before you had to make the decision. I decided I’m with you forever, and not with any of you. Before I ever had to make that decision, I made it, and I stuck with it.