Farmville business owner helps change young lives
November-December 2025
From left, Dave Simpson and his neighbor, retired Southside Electric Cooperative Line Technician Supervisor Ricky Hux, preparing a shipment. (photos courtesy Dave Simpson)
by Gregg MacDonald, Staff Writer
On Jan. 30, 1983, Dave Simpson listened to a cassette tape that changed the course of his life and started him on a path impacting the lives of thousands of underprivileged children every holiday season.
“I remember that date well,” the Farmville, Va., resident says. “It was the day I gave my life to the Lord.”
Simpson, who was 20 years old at the time, tended to his father’s cows and helped with the family’s tobacco harvest. “I never thought I’d ever do or amount to much more than that,” he says.
But on that memorable January afternoon, Simpson and one of his three brothers listened to the recording of a Christian broadcast on cassette tape at a family friend’s house. “I had grown up in the church, but I had never really understood how Jesus gave his life for my sins,” Simpson recalls. “That message came through to me loud and clear while I was listening to that tape. I then gave up some bad habits I had acquired and started living the right way.”
His brother was also deeply moved by the message — which, Simpson laughingly says, prompted their father to exclaim, “There is a God!”
“Not long after I was saved, I got into the insurance business, adjusting claims for farmers,” Simpson says. “Had I not listened to that cassette tape, I probably would have never changed my ways and gone that direction.”
Today, Simpson owns Simpson Insurance Services in Farmville. Through Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse program, he and his company donate 3,000 Operation Christmas Child boxes to underprivileged children worldwide each holiday season. “We put school supplies, hygiene items, sunglasses, a ball cap and either a soccer ball for boys or a jump rope for girls, into each box,” he says. “The boxes are then taken to a local church where they are picked up by a tractor-trailer and taken to locations in North Carolina before being delivered all over the world.”
Simpson says he is eternally grateful for that day when “God came knocking” — and to the family, friends, neighbors and clients who help him pay his good fortune forward each holiday season. He says, “They make it all possible.”
For more information about Samaritan’s Purse and Operation Christmas Child, visit samaritanspurse.org.
Dave Simpson is pictured with children in Haiti. (courtesy Dave Simpson)