A Few Good Men

My wife and I are about to have our first-born child this week. Maybe even tonight. Her contractions are a few minutes apart, and we've already had one false alarm a few days ago. She's a little girl, named Lily Paige. I've never even met her... I've only seen her on a sonogram. But she already has my heart. Friends of mine know I'm already kind of a sensitive guy. (I get choked up when Goose dies in "Top Gun". And Bubba's death scene in "Forrest Gump". And "Armageddon." And any movie with Meg Ryan.)

Now, I'm about as calloused and grizzled as a chenille throw blanket.

Because of my newfound smarmy gooshy sensitivity towards my beautiful little girl, I now view every human male between the ages of 11 and 19 with thinly veiled, skeptical, contemptuous distrust. They are animals, seething with unbridled lustful fury, and they must be stopped.

Joking aside, I have been thinking about the state of young men in our country and in our cities. How we view them. How we educate them. Our hopes for them and fear of them. Much has been made of the capacity for our young men to cause damage to property and harm to people. I've lost count of the faces of young men that I've seen on the 11 o'clock news... most of them in mug shots.

Obviously, I care about every student with whom I work. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a particularly strong desire to teach, shepherd, and love the young men that walk through my classroom every day. Given our relatively short time together, I'm desperate. I will only teach most of them for a semester -- a year if I'm lucky enough to have them in my Fundamentals AND Geometry classes back to back. Knowing the crossroads at which many of them stand brings a sense of urgency to our relationship, even if they don't know it.

Mostly, I want to help teach them how to be good men. To use their anger and passion to effect change in their lives and the lives of others. To love selflessly. To reject passivity, accept responsibility, and lead courageously. To expect God's greater reward. I agree with an author named John Eldredge. Eldredge says that, while the strength of men can be harmful, it is also the foundation of much that is good, profitable, and loving. Young men can defend, build, learn, teach, work, and provide. In young men exists an Imago Dei that wants to show itself.

In that spirit, I wanted to refer readers of this blog to a website for an organization called "Invisible Children". This is a group whose mission is to bring change and aid to child soldiers in Uganda -- young men forced into military service from as early as 5 years old. This is a major battlefield in the war for young men's hearts and souls, and I hope you'll give it a look.

http://www.invisiblechildren.com/home.php

On a related note, another organization close to my heart is Stop Child Trafficking Now, dedicated to ending the worldwide trade of child sex slaves.

http://www.sctnow.org/

Praying and Working

The past few days have been really meaningful for me. God has given me renewed encouragement and hope. Plus, I've just gotten to rest. Sometimes a brother just needs a nap.

Somtimes I just need to be reminded why I'm doing what I'm doing. Ultimately, I'm a Christian who wants to be used by God to change lives on an eternal level, primarily through the power of the Gospel, and also through education. Thinking about the young men and women I work with daily and praying about the various challenges they constantly encounter led me to a song and a passage of Scripture that express the tension between my working towards God's goal, and God's working towards His goal.

This tension was first summed up by the church father, Ignatius: "Work as if everything depends on you. Pray as if everything depends on God."

Despite every effort I make to effect change in young lives, we must always be aware that Jesus's desire for and pursuit of their hearts are greater than ours will ever be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You're the God of this City
You're the King of these people
You're the Lord of this nation

You're the Light in this darkness
You're the Hope to the hopeless
You're the Peace to the restless

There is no one like our God
There is no one like our God

For greater things have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this City
Greater thing have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this City

"God of This City" ~Chris Tomlin

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

6 "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness [a] will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
"If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.

11 The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.

12 Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

~Psalm 58:6-12

Making a Real Difference

4 years ago God dropped a vision in my heart to start schools in the inner cities of America founded on the truth and power of the gospel.  3 years ago I visited 6 inner city Christian private schools along the east coast in an effort to learn how different people were impacting their urban communities through Christ-centered education.  Among those Atlanta Youth Academy really made an impression on me.  I felt something different the moment I stepped into their school.  There was hope there.  There was joy there. There was even a certain kind of boldness and courage in the kids voices and eyes.  The Spirit of the living God was full in that school and I felt him.  During my visit I got a chance to meet with the school's principal and executive director and could not help but be challenged and encouraged by their vision and determination for excellence.  Before I left they sat me down and showed me their promotion video and  I wept like a baby because all I had been dreaming about, of God's promise for our inner city children were being shown in front of me.  It was moving.  They came out with a new video recently.  Here it is.


Seeds of Hope from Atlanta Youth Academy on Vimeo.
 

You Cannot Be Serious!

Two of my students said things to me today that had me channeling my inner John McEnroe. For those of you not familiar with the reference, McEnroe was a tennis icon of the 1970s and 80s who was known for his acumen in the doubles game, his phenomenal net play, being left-handed, and most of all, for possessing a temper with a bit of a short fuse. He made famous the phrase which I used for this post's title.

The first thing I heard from one of my students happened when I was talking with him about his ambitions in high school and his career aspirations. It wasn't a confrontational conversation -- I was talking with him because he had missed a couple of assignments and those consequences had shown up on his most recent test. On top of the fact that he's not the hardest worker in the class, this incident made me ask him about his motivation, what he wants to get out of high school, and what field he would like to work in someday.

His response?

"I'm gonna try to file for disability because of my ADHD and broken ribs."

YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!

1) Filing for disability, as a career goal, is less than optimal.
2) ADHD is treatable.
3) Broken ribs heal.
4) What the heck?

The next comment came from another student in the same class. We were working on a partial area problem. Their task was to calculate the area of a square, and subtract the area of an inscribed circle in order to find the area of the remaining four corners. After we had already figured out that the square's area is 64 and the circle's area was 50.74, all that was left was to subtract one from the other. Here's how the next exchange went:

~~~~~~~~~
ME: Alright [Bob], we've got the two areas... now we need to subtract. What's 64 minus 50.74?

[BOB]: I dunno.

ME: You've got a big, beautiful, expensive calculator in front of you... just tap in 64 minus 50.74.

[BOB]: Man, that's too much.

ME: (stunned expression)
~~~~~~~~

YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!

1) You learned to subtract by borrowing in 2nd and 3rd grade.
2) I know for a fact that your thumbs work because you use them to text message your friends like it's your job.
3) What the heck?

When I stepped back from these situations and screwed my head back onto my shoulders, I was able to see the situation more clearly. My task is two-fold:

1) Cast a vision
2) Raise my expectations

If we have failed our students in any area, and if we absolutely MUST succeed in any area, it is these two. I am as guilty of this crime as anyone else. Upon seeing a poor test score or assignment or performance from a student, my all-too-common instinct is to lower my expectations. Make it easier. Put the cookies on a lower shelf.

Instead of saying to them, "There you are. Make yourself at home right where you are. I'll see to it that it's okay for you to stay there," I should be yanking them upward, looking them in the eyes, and saying, "You're not there yet, but you can be. You're intelligent, gifted, and capable of succeeding. This is how you do it."

Instead of saying, "Make sure you lock down a job at Burger King, just in case you flunk out of community college," I should be taking them on college campus tours, saying, "When you're choosing a major, make sure you're aware of the careers held by professionals with those same majors. That will give you an idea of some common options you'll have after studying that field."

Those two comments by my students weren't the issue... they were just symptoms. But they brought into sharp focus the crying need for our students to sense a higher calling than squeezing out low C's on their report cards.

Lost in Translation

Remember that scene in "Titanic"? You know, the one where Rose and Jack are running through the ship once everyone knows it's sinking?

Hold on...

Okay, I had to remove my manhood temporarily and place it in its cage while I use a "Titanic" analogy. It was trying to get away.

Anyway, Rose and Jack are running through the ship trying find a lifeboat or something, but the part I'm talking about is when they pass an immigrant family trying to read a sign with the evacuation map printed on it. They are frantically flipping through an English-to-Russian dictionary in order to decipher the words and escape to safety.

We only see them for a couple of seconds, but that family made an impression on me. Learning a new language is difficult and frustrating on its own. I tried to imagine compressing the stress of an entire year's worth of learning into 30 seconds, and adding to that the stress and panic of a life-or-death situation. It must be a terrifying and disheartening feeling. To empathize, I opened my new baby's dresser, and assembled it using the German directions. I'm proud to say the dresser works just fine, as long as you have a pick axe handy with which to open it.

I've been thinking about this more lately, after receiving the latest statistics regarding my school's ethnic composition. 15% of our students are of Hispanic origin, most of them classified ESL or ELL or LEP or whatever the most current acronym is for not having grown up in an English-speaking home. I have about 10 of these students spread over my three classes, and from my conversations with Hoek, he has an even greater percentage.

Most high school students have little love for math in the first place. I wonder how much more frustrating it is trying to learn math in a foreign language. Using what broken Spanish I know (I want to buy some butter, where is the airport, etc.), I've tried desperately to help my ELL students grasp the new concepts of geometry. Despite my own shortcomings, I see the relief in their faces when they are able to digest congruent angles and isosceles triangles by using familiar words.

More and more, God has been growing my heart for these students. Someone once said to me that, in the United States, you can be a missionary to the nations without leaving home... How true. I pray that God would give me not only linguistic skill, but a heart of compassion and availability to help meet their needs.

Thirst No More

I'd rather talk to you about it in person, he said. But what about? I was hopeful. Maybe he finally flipped through the untouched pages of the bible I bought for him almost 6 years ago and a passage touched him so deeply that he had to tell me. I was cautious. Maybe he did more than just throw a trash can through the school bathroom window which unfortunately landed on his principal's car this time and has to go back in to do more time in juvie. Either way I was curious and eager to spend time with him especially because HE had reached out to ME for the first time.

Since he graduated from middle school with all A's and B's and moved on from my class 4 years ago, he started slipping and no matter how much I prayed and spent time with him he continued to make one bad choice after another. God, why do keep pushing me toward him? I had asked as I made my way up to the Bronx to stand in as his character witness in family court. Father, what good is any of this doing? I had asked when I found out he lost the backpack, all the notebooks and other school supplies I had bought for him. Lord, how long must I do this for? I had complained whenever I called to only hear that he wasn't in for our weekly phone appointments. He even missed my wedding where he was to give a speech and hasn't been home the last few times I tried to get in touch with him. So for him to call me on his own accord and request to meet up downtown was no small thing.

From across the street at Union Square, I noticed he had grown out his hair a bit which was tied into a small pony tail. He was also thinner and his broad chest made him look more grown up and tough. His pants were more fitting now and there was no question he was taller than me now. Not only that, he had his own cell phone now, and the fact that he knew how to take the subway down to 14th street was a nice change.

I be getting mad when I walk around here Mr. Choi. I want to do my own thing, you know? I don't have my own space and I gotta get outa my grandma's house. These people have beautiful homes and with their nice balconies, you know what I'm saying? He was frustrated with his life. He felt trapped and didn't know what else to do but call me. He wanted a better life like the people around here. He realized he isn't getting any younger and that if he doesn't straighten out and take care of his business things weren't going to change for him. He wanted help finding a job and earn his high school credits for a diploma.

I was relieved because he wasn't in any more trouble. I was thankful that he was feeling frustrated enough to take action and not simply react when things to happened to him. I could still see that money was his only goal, his life savor, his get-out-of-jail card. I wanted him to understand that freedom is not hiding in modern New York City apartments or stuffed inside expensive leather brief cases. What he needed was to break free from his poverty mindset, victim mentality, and his search for some kind of magic wand that would fix all his wrongs and discontentment with one flick of the wrist.

I caught myself talking at him again, but God moved in my spirit and I knew my words were lost on him. I wasn't going to change him. But I loved him all over again at that moment and wanted desperately for him to see beyond the tangible things of life. But I realized that he needs to see, touch, observe, feel, and come to his own conclusions for things to actually drop in his heart.

Then God, what am I supposed to do? You keep telling me to reach out to him, but it all seems vain.
Love him, and involve him in your life. Let him love you and Purim. Make yourself available to him and consistently pursue him with your heart and in prayer. Let him come to you and he will eventually find me and I will give him everlasting water, and he will thirst no more. Be patient and obey me, and see what I do.