Deputy Mills is the son of Dr. Ernie Sr., and Gail Mills, founders of the Durham Rescue Mission. The couple started the mission 32 years ago with only a calling from God in their bank account.

While the calling has remained constant, the Mission has grown. Today, it's an impressive 42-property operation. Headquarters for the homeless men is the former Fuller Memorial Presbyterian Church at Alston and Main. The women's ministry is housed at the former Durham Inn, a 60,000-square-foot, 130-room complex. Even though the Mills built this impressive portfolio, they don't own it. The property belongs to an independent entity.

In the ministry's early years, while Ernie Jr. and his sister Bethany were growing up, nearly every nickel his parents made found its way into building the operation.

Money that could have provided the Mills children with Christmas presents of Ataris or Vans topsiders, was instead spent on strangers, many of whom were shunned by their own families. To save money, Dr. Mills even moved his family from a six-room single-family home into a 500-square-foot storage space inside the men's shelter.

If Deputy Mills were like his fellow Gen-Xers, I figured he'd be a cauldron of boiling resentment. He's not.

"Those were good times," he said with a laugh Thursday as he awaited his plate at the mission's annual Thanksgiving Dinner.

Yeah right, Ernie. Being poor and living alongside an assortment of addicts and criminals had to be a scream.

"I know that's hard to believe," Mills said, "but my friends always wanted to be at my house."

It couldn't have been for the creature comforts.

"The reason my friends liked to come over was because they were guaranteed the attention of an adult," he said. "Most of their parents were off at work. Mine were too. But we lived where my parents worked."

Adult attention was never in short supply for the Mills kids. Mission residents morphed into surrogate parents. Much of the oversight was nickel-dime stuff. But Deputy Mills is convinced many residents would have risked life and limb to protect him and his sister.

Like a good law enforcement officer, he has evidence.

One day, he was throwing rocks at pigeons that had roosted on the mission building's roof. One of Durham's less sane citizens walked by and accused him of aiming only at black pigeons. Ernie Jr. explained that all pigeon poop is damaging, regardless of the pigeon's color. The passerby disagreed, pulled a knife and charged. Only the intervention of a mission resident saved the boy from serious harm.

Still, living at a homeless shelter wasn't always one big happy testimony of faith. Ernie Jr. remembers nasty confrontations when his father evicted residents who had refused to abide by the strict rules. And as an adult, Deputy Mills has arrested former residents he counted as friends during his childhood.

Now, with his parents heading toward retirement, Ernie Jr., isn't sure whether he will one day work at the mission his family founded. He's a lawman, not a preacher. His duty is to provide security at the Durham County Courthouse, not save souls.

Yet he admits to occasionally offering advice to women who come to the courthouse to support men appearing before a judge. "I ask them to think about how different their futures could be if their friends were the men with the briefcases instead of the court cases."

Sounds like soul-saving to me. After all, he's a Mills.

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