Life, at the top of my lungs

My platter of General Tso's chicken arrived, but it didn't appeal to me at that moment. Across the table from me sat James. He hadn't ordered anything. Instead, he gave me his own special platter of perspective, with a side of honesty. No fries.

"You've got to live as out loud as possible," he jabbed.

I invited James Mello to the local Chinese restaurant to chat and catch up. Mello is a theology major at Union College. He spends his extracurricular hours working, either at Cedar's, working for children and youth on probation; Nighthouse, a youth development center run by a local high school that strives to offer a safe place for the youth community of Lincoln; or at home, as a foster parent.

"Isn't it scary sometimes?"

"No, not scary. Stressful, yes. Rewarding? Absolutely. Here you get children who have been given up on, who need someone who cares. It is difficult because they are children that have been raised entirely different, and sometimes the hardest part is teaching them purity and respect, especially towards women. But when you see how far we get together, you can see God's work."

"So you have these children for a long time."

"You never know. Some of them you have for a while, while others can be there for a couple of days or a couple of weeks. One teen we've had for eight months now. Any one of them may get you stressed and discouraged, but when you see the big picture you notice the difference."

Busy man, yet loving every second of it. I know very few people who would put loads as heavy--and important--as these willingly. Mello, however, believes in this with his whole heart.

A minister's son, he spent the first 10 years of his life immersed in the church. "I had a pretty typical Adventist upbringing," he reminisced. "At the age of 10, my parents split up. My mother took us five children and moved to Tennessee. There, she started over from scratch."

For the next six years, Mello sought to forget all. He surrounded himself with the wrong people, made the wrong decisions, and wanted nothing to do with God. "I was an angry kid. The way I was living and thinking was very unhealthy."

God, as he does, had other plans. At the age of 16, he became a Christian again, and this time he knew he had to go all out. "I realized that Christianity is something that is lived fully. You can't be a so-so Christian. It's all or nothing. I had empathy and sympathized with those around me who were as broken as I was. I became passionate about helping them, especially overseas and in the inner city."

A year later, Mello decided to join a youth group headed to China along with 40 other youth. "It was life-changing," he asserts. "I had never been in a group like this one. We were all there in one accord: unity in God and in love for other people, in this case children. It has been the best experience of church I have ever been in."

"Why China? Why children?"

"Because I saw in them that they were as broken as I had been, and I want to help them."

"You've got to live as out loud as possible."

I had taken a total of three bites out of my rice and chicken. He went on with the story.

"I graduated High School and met Kyra, a wonderful person. We went back to China, got married, and worked at a boys' home for six months. Living in a different language really put things into perspective. With their minimal English and my lack of Chinese, I noticed that everything I did and how I acted had a much bigger impact. This is where I got the concept of living intentionally, carefully calculating every word and every action."

I was curious. "What does living out loud mean? Living intentionally?"

"Every moment is an opportunity to speak truth by your actions and words. This can only happen if you let Him take control of your life, for how do you portray someone you don't know?"

"And how does this translate into working every day with the foster kids at home and the kids you tutor at Cedar's?"

"There is no regular day as a foster parent. Every day there is something new. The biggest goal is teaching children to trust when they have never had a reason to trust anyone. We all have scars, and I want the children to know that Kyra and I aren't giving up on them--we're sticking it out along with them."

I looked at my chopsticks and decided to get one more bite, but my meal had gone cold. Somehow, though, I felt like I was being fed. "Is there anything that would make you stop? Say, you wanted to start a full family?"

He smiled at this last. "Kyra is pregnant. And we talked about it and we don't see ourselves stopping anytime soon. Kyra is a nanny, so at any given point there are up to six children and teens running around the house. We can handle it, and they need us as much as we need them."

I asked the waitress for a to-go box. "How do you handle it," I asked, thinking of the amount of time and commitment and energy that having one child could mean.

He smiled again. "Matthew 11:28 says, 'come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.' I find that if I give time to God and do what he expects of me, set in Micah 6:8, I will never be overwhelmed. I have to allow God to speak through me, act through me, as out loud as possible, and He will grant me rest."

Lent

When I came back from the ONE project at Chicago, I did not want it to die as all the other Jesus highs I've had. I wanted it to last.

For my interpersonal and intercultural communications classes, I have to do something I don't partake of and journal about it.

So I thought I should do Ramadan. But that isn't 'til June so that won't help my grade any. The next thing that popped in my mind was Lent.

For fourty days, I have to give up something, starting last Wednesday.

What to give up was the hardest thing to come up with. I was constantly battling myself and justifying keeping certain things. Then I decided I would give up one of those things I was justifying--you know, logic right? Give up something I've idolized.

Then it hit me. What if I truly give my tithe?

Not just money wise. I would give up a seventh of my life. I realize that is not ten percent, but it makes more sense: do something throughout an entire day other than just the Sabbath; give 3 hours of my day to Him.

Harder than I thought. But I plan to stick with this. Hopefully I can pull it off.

And no, I'm not becoming Catholic.

My ability to sleep . . .

has been forever changed.

At the University snack shop, they have ZzzQuil, sleeping pills that self-proclaim no addictive or habit inducing abilities.

I asked how much they were and they said they would give me a discount. I got them for one dollar.

Friday night it was 2 in the morning and I wanted to sleep. I read the directions and it said "two pills for children and adults over 12 years of age." I popped one and didn't wake up until 12:20. Thankfully, I had a shirt and some trousers ironed from before (thanks dad for the habit!) and headed to church and only missed the protocol.

I slept like a baby. Felt so good, although a little guilty at missing Sabbath School and a bit of the service.

I didn't take anything last night, and it took forever to fall asleep again.

Today, I finished a research paper around 2:45 ish, but still can't go to sleep. It's 5. I have a class at 8:30. I guess it's too late to take one of those puppies.

I even went running today. Why can't I go to sleep?

But Pablo, that doesn't make sense!

Ah, let me explain.

I hate guns, but I am anti-gun control.

Here goes, once again, my opinion no one wants to hear anyway.

I hate guns. Guns were a man-made solution to problems that could have been solved by conversation. "That only happens in a perfect world," I was told.

Really?

I recall that not two weeks ago I had the day off of school in honor of a man called Martin Luther King, Jr. Also, I remember being a Christian, follower of a man who called all to lay down their arms and love each other. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that the key to love is communication.

I realize that it's too late to not invent guns, and, at least ideally, no one should have guns. Not even the government. I would call for global disarmament. No one, absolutely no one, should have a gun. Yes, the gun isn't the problem, and since we can't take the man out of the man, we can take the gun out of the hand of the man. All worldwide guns should be in the ocean somewhere where they cannot be retrieved.

"This is so pro-gun control!"

Hold your horses.

See, the problem with this debate isn't guns and whether they're automatic or if criminals can get to them or if Obama shoots them, it's about rights. If we let the government take away a right that is so explicitly set forth on the Second Amendment to the Constitution, it becomes that much easier for the government to take away other more important rights. That's just the way things work with people with power: give them an inch and they'll go a mile.

That's why I'm anti-gun control.

Giving back

At the end of probably one of the worst days I've had in a while, I decided I needed to look away from myself for a second.

The entire day had been less than enjoyable, and even the weather decided to get against me: it started snowing. (We might get up to 5 inches. . .)

When I decided to stop complaining, something told me to go outside. So I did, and it instantly hit me: build a snowman, and give it to someone.

So I built a snowman and put it in my neighbor's yard, where tomorrow the kids will see it when they go out to play.

From "the Bard of the Yukon" Robert W. Service

The Quitter

When you're lost in the Wild, and you're scared as a child,
    And Death looks you bang in the eye,
And you're sore as a boil, it's according to Hoyle
    To cock your revolver and . . . die.
But the Code of a Man says: "Fight all you can,"
    And self-dissolution is barred.
In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow . . .
    It's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard.

"You're sick of the game!" Well, now, that's a shame.
    You're young and you're brave and you're bright.
"You've had a raw deal!" I know — but don't squeal,
    Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight.
It's the plugging away that will win you the day,
    So don't be a piker, old pard!
Just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit:
    It's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard.

It's easy to cry that you're beaten — and die;
    It's easy to crawfish and crawl;
But to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight —
    Why, that's the best game of them all!
And though you come out of each gruelling bout,
    All broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try — it's dead easy to die,
    It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.

And the Sky Darkened

Looking towards the South. My backyard in Shallowater, Texas

(click on the pictures to view larger)
My room had a weird earth color to it, reflected from outside. I smelled dust and my nose was runny all day. The next morning I blew my nose and it came out bloody.

I never thought I'd live in West Texas.

There was a time in which I considered applying to Texas Tech here in Lubbock, but I never did. The thought of living out in the middle of nowhere didn't sit well with me at the time. What was I going to do in the middle of dustfields?

Granted, where I ended up and the snow storms there are the other end of the spectrum. The very next day I arrived in Texas for Christmas break, there was a small dust storm. I was amazed at how much dust was picked up. My mom and siblings told me that was not the worst it had been at all. . .

A couple of days after that, I checked weather.com and was surprised to see a warning I had never seen before: Dust Storm Warning, beginning at 11:00 AM. As in, Dust Storm Warning. (Ironically, I had seen a PBS documentary on the dust bowl not three weeks prior when I arrived for Thanksgiving.)

I could see the sky getting brown towards the west, so I ran out side with my camera and saw this . . .

. . . the storm was closer than I thought. The train tracks at the end of the road there are less than a quarter of a mile away, and as you can see, the dirt has begun encroaching this side of the tracks.

I snapped the photo and flew back to my house in a speed I haven't hit since High School. I admit I may have overreacted, screaming bloody murder at the top of my lungs: "Train tracks! The storm is at the train tracks!"

I'm sure any neighbor who heard me merely smiled and said, "Foreigners."

Within five minutes, all doors and windows were shut tightly and my family got back to business. This was all new material for me, and I just couldn't stop looking out the windows.

Here's about five minutes after the "train tracks" incident:

That's my backyard, and you can notice the sky isn't the normal clear blue of the Great Plains. The whole place had a weird red color to it, and I realized that there were worse things than the snowstorms we get in Nebraska.

As the day wore on, things only got worse. The wind blew harder and harder and only picked more dust up.

All I could think about was the Dust Bowl. They say that the sky went black during these storms, that candles were lit. I could not imagine living in a time when all you saw when you went outside was sand and a dust storm would hit you fairly regularly.

After some time, I went around and looked at the windowsills. What surprised me was that, even though they were tightly shut and had plastic sealer going around it, dust still crept through and there was a thin film of it all across the sill.

Here's looking out my window looking north, in front of my house:

As with any storm of any sort, there is a time where it is the thickest. At the height of it, here's how things looked:

For a glorious second, the sun grew a bit brighter. . .

. . . but all it did was make things more dreadful.


The storm didn't quite clear up until after the sun had gone down, and I was taken aback. Apparently, it had been one of the worst storms the Lubbock area had seen in a while, and there ended up being many accidents on the roads.

Then I got to thinking about the Dust Bowlers again.

If I were them, with a house with no plastic sealant on the windows, much less on the doors, with no crops to sustain the family/sell, I would have picked everything up and left. Many did, but to the ones that stayed I tip my hat.