Nathanael Rowe

Tonight a kid from our cabin had to pee really bad.  Instead of looking for another toilet, since ours was being used, he decided to pee in the trash can.  He of course thought this was hilarious, but as soon as I realized what was going on, I was a little upset.  I asked him several times if he really just did that, because my mind could just not comprehend his thought process.  There was an open toilet no more than 20 feet away just across the room.  So I started yelling at him to pick up the trash can and take it out back.  On his way out I told him that the back patio would be his new home for the night, since he didn’t mind peeing anywhere, I thought he wouldn’t mind sleeping outdoors as well.  I was of course kidding, but he didn’t think so.

When I came back outside just a mere 30 seconds later, he was in tears, terrified that was to be his new home, and that I was going to call his parents over this.  In all honesty I thought the whole incident was hilarious, I just didn’t want a trash can full of urine 6 feet from my bed all night, nor did I want to see this repeated.  I calmed him down and brought him back inside.  When we got back in our room, he made it clear that he was now terrified that this incident would cause him to be the laughing stock of camp.  I tried to explain to him, that the story was funny, and he should just learn to laugh at himself.

Now this is where the story starts to get good.  We all started sharing embarrassing stories from our past, and how we had to learn to just laugh at ourselves about it.  So as we go around the room, finally a kid shares the following story.  Apparently one day, he was in his dad’s living room, and he accidentally pooped his pants.  However, instead of taking himself to the rest room, he managed to place this poop in a plastic grocery bag, and then instead of disposing of the poopy bag in a trash can, he quickly and conveniently hid it underneath the couch where it remained for 3 weeks!

Now as he is telling this story we all start laughing, because that is absolutely ridiculous.  But here is where it gets really great.  I look over at the kid telling us this story, and he is laughing so hard, that a wet spot starts to appear on the front of his shorts.  That’s right, in the midst of him telling a funny story about pooping himself, he peed himself from laughing so hard.

This ladies and gentlemen, is why I do youth ministry.

He graduated high school right when WWII ended.  All through high school he had planned on going off to war, everyone before him had, and so why wouldn’t he.  God spared him from the war, and instead he found a girl, Virginia Eileen, and got married, Kind of.  See in those days the law was that the girl had to be 18 to get married, but the guy had to be 21 or have a parents consent.  Well both he and his future wife were 20, so he got his fake ID, and headed to Vegas.  The rumor I have heard from other relatives was that they couldn’t make it to Vegas and ended up fornicating in the back of the car on the trip there.  Pretty funny story if you ask me.  They ended up getting married hours later, and have been together ever since.  My grandpa would always joke that since he used a fake ID to get married, they weren’t legally wed, and therefore, he could leave her whenever he wanted.  I don’t think he would have known what to do if he did.

They went on to have 2 boys, Dave and then Kent, the oldest of which was my dad.  My grandpa enjoyed things like fishing, shooting, hunting, camping, smoking (which he did several times a day for 50+ years) sailing, just about everything that screams adventure.  Since the war was over he joined the National guard, and during his service time one of his jobs was to ride an Indian motorcycle as security during different excursions.  I suppose I get a lot of my sense for adventure from him.

When I was young, around 10 and 11 years old, my sister, Bethany, and I would drive or fly up to Redding and stay with my grandparents for a couple weeks.  I really enjoyed those times, even though I often would end up board and just playing solitaire.  Although my favorite things to do were to target practice with grandpa’s BB gun, and watch old Westerns with him at night. One of the summers we were up there, my grandpa got really sick, he went to the hospital, and we went home.  God spared him from his ailment then, and he was back to shooting squirrels in his backyard in no time.

Some time later, he had a stroke, and while everyone was worried that this might be the end for my grandpa, it was not.  However the stroke did change him, for the better I would say. The first thing it did was it convinced him to stop smoking.  My uncle Kent says that when he was in the hospital from the stroke, someone reminded him that he smoked, he looked confused and said, “I smoke?”

My uncle says he responded by saying, “Yea you smoke, you should stop it.”  And so he did.  So in some way, he quit because he just kind of forgot about that habit.  The stroke did something else too, see my grandpa was a cool old man, but he was a tough old brute too.  And the stroke kind of softened him up.  He went from showing little emotion, to saying how much he loved us, and getting almost giddy when we would visit or call.  It also got him to slowly start asking serious questions about his life.  Questions that I am sure he had thought about before, but had never admitted, at least not to his sons or grandchildren.  Later or around the same time, I am not really certain, my grandpa was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  He fought this cancer off and on several times over for the last 10 years or so, most of the time he was beating the awful disease.  But in the last couple years the cancer was only getting worse, and the chemo wasn’t fighting it off anymore.  Sometime around the summer of 2008, we knew his time with us would be short.  But even with stage 4 cancer, he held on quite a bit longer.

Towards the end of my trip in 2009, I stayed with my grandpa for about a week.  Most of the time we would just stay in and watch WWII movies, and he would share stories from his youth.  I secretly recorded most of these stories, and still have them filed away for future reference.  I got to talk to my grandpa a little bit that week about faith.  He confessed to me that he thought he was just to bad for God, that he didn’t deserve any salvation.  I tried to explain to him that was the whole point.  Forgiveness wasn’t something he deserved, but instead something that we all needed.  I shared with him a story of an ex-con I had met in Hawaii who eventually turned his life around and became a pastor.  Before that his job was to break the bones of whoever he was told.  I told him “If God could save him, I am pretty sure he can handle you.”

Weeks later after I got home, I called him to check in.  He told me that my grandma and him were going to start going to church.  I was pleasantly surprised.

Two weeks ago, after my grandpa went into hospice care, a witness was needed for the power of attorney documents to all be taken care of.  My grandma got the neighbors, but they brought more than just a willingness to sign a legal document.  They brought the gospel with them.  They shared with my grandpa exactly what he needed to do to be right with God, and on that night he humbly accepted the salvation of Jesus Christ.

Tonight my grandfather went home to be with our creator.  And while I am writing this through tears of sadness, I am extremely grateful that my Lord spared him from the war, spared him from his ailments, spared him from the stroke, and spared him from the cancer, just long enough so that his heart would finally soften to the point where he was ready to hear the gospel.  If you ask anyone in my family they will probably tell you that he should have died years ago, I mean who gets to smoke for 50+ years and still live to be 80.  There were so many other times he could have been taken, but the lord allowed him to live till tonight, just 2 weeks past his rebirth into the Kingdom of God.

Thank you lord for the grace you showed my grandfather, thank you for the grace you show all of us.

So I preached for the first time in front of adults at Westside Christian Church this morning.  I think it went OK.  I talked for longer than I planned, but I think it went over OK.  Here is the link if you want to listen to it.

The Wheat and The Weeds

The doped up cholo raced through our skateside parking lot in his green Ford Explorer as fast as he could.  After almost hitting a couple kids, the skaters started yelling at him as he proceeded down the alley.  I walked up to see what was going on when I saw 2 women who apparently just got out of this car, walking towards us yelling at the kids.  Then the vehicle raced backwards almost hitting his own 2 passengers.

When he got back into our parking lot he jumped out of his car and started swinging at one of the kids at the park.  The man was about 5′8″ 150 pounds, and violently angry for some reason.  As soon as he started to swing my first thoughts were about whether or not this guy had some kind of weapon or not.  Once I saw he was only using his fists I grabbed him and threw him to the ground.  Somehow I landed on the ground with him, and I was trying to put him in a choke hold to keep him from attacking more kids.   As I was trying to get my arms around his neck, I felt him attempting to chew through my arm.  It was about this same time that a large shadow came over me, it was one of the ladies he almost ran over, and she was screaming “Get off my man!” as she started to swing at me.

I yelled back, “I’m just trying to keep him from hurting any of the kids.”  That distraction was all he needed to be back up and his car searching for a weapon.  He quickly turned around with a crow bar, and started running and swinging at the same kid he originally went after.  Turns out the 16 year old kid got quite a few good hits on his now bloodied face, and he was looking for vengeance.  I yell to all the kids, around 35 of them, “Someone call 911 now!”  I then try to take a mental image of the license plate.  One of the women from the vehicle sees what I am doing and stands in front of it.  I tell her “It’s too late, I got it, so you better leave now because the cops are coming right now.”

She yells back something about me being a big redneck, and then runs into her vehicle, along with the enraged thug. I couldn’t help but laugh at that comment.

I started to walk towards the kid making the phone call to ensure that the police were on their way.  While I am walking away the lady by the truck is yelling, “Lets just get the gun, Lets get the gun!”  I turn around to see one of the women right behind me about to swing a skateboard at me.  I step towards her quickly and clench my fist.  I was about to hit a woman for the first time in my life.  She dropped the skateboard once she saw I was about to fight back, and went back to their car and took off.

We brought the kids inside to wait for the West Long Beach Police, but something was taking them a while.  More than 45 minutes have passed and so I take a look outside, and ask one of the pedestrians if they have seen any police around.  One guy answers back that there are some cars just down the street.  My thought is that maybe they have grabbed this guy, so I walk towards them.  There are three police cars parked about 200 ft away from our church, all of which were responding to a traffic accident there.  I asked them if they had gotten a call about a man attacking some kids.  One officer looks and says someone should be on their way.  OK, I say disappointingly, and I turn to walk back to the church.  Why are there 3 cars for a traffic accident, and no one at our church in response to a crazy man attacking some kids?  It takes another 45 minutes before an officer finally shows up, over an hour and a half from the original call.

He takes the report, we send the kids home, and I head to the ER for my bite wound.  I spent 4 hours there, until finally I saw a doctor, had some tests run, got a tetanus shot, and got some antibiotics.  Turns out human bites are actually pretty dangerous.

In the end, just another typical night of ministry in West Long Beach.

So I have been working at Skateside in West Long Beach for about 3 months now, and I love it.  I especially love the relationships I have been able to develop with some really cool kids.  I have been thinking about this a lot, and well, I would like to move to West Long Beach.  I want to move into this community where a lot of the Skateside kids are from.  As soon as I got home from my trip, I could feel a deep pull to this city, and that this is where God was calling me to be for a long time.

The more time I spend at Skateside, the more I wish I lived in this neighborhood with these people, but for now I live with my grandparents in East Long Beach.  West Long Beach is kind of rough area, but the kids are great, and a lot of fun.  My sister and a lot of her friends have done a similar thing in fullerton called Solidarity, obviously a lot more involved, but I feel a similar calling to West Long Beach.  Anyone want to join me?

I am not financially stable enough yet to move out on my own, but I am praying that it happens soon.   If there is a way for me to afford moving out, I am going to do it.  The only problem right now is that most of my work ends with the school year, so I need to start thinking about what I could do for the summer.  Any ideas?

My first car was a 1986 Dodge Caravan.  This is not a picture of my car, but this is what it looked like.  It was a fun car, with a lot of stories, some of which I will share here at another time.  Today I want to share a specific story that resulted from a unique feature on my van.

See the hose that connected my wiper blade to the wiper fluid reservoir was broken in a very specific way.  It is important to point out that I did not break this part on purpose, but that instead it was simply a natural deterioration of the clearly superb Dodge Caravan.  This convenient break caused my wipers to squirt out a solid stream of liquid to the right of the car each time I pressed the fluid button from the inside of the car.  The stream was so perfect that if there was a car directly to my right it would go right into that car’s driver side window, and if their window was down, it would go right into their face.  So needless to say, I went through my wiper fluid reservoir pretty frequently.

I would often pull up to friends and sometimes even strangers, ask them to roll their window down, and then squirt them right in the face.  It was so fun, and people would want to ride in my van just so they could be a part of this hilarious prank.  I remember one time pulling up to an elderly lady at a light.  My buddy was sitting shotgun, so he promptly signaled to her that he would like her to roll her window down to ask her something.  As soon as he did, I squirted, and it hit her right in the face.  Now in retrospect I admit this is pretty cruel, but that lady’s reaction was simply, “Wow, you got me, that was pretty good.”

One time while in High School, I was driving to the beach with some classmates.  Along the way we noticed our science teacher was driving next to us.  So we of course signaled her to roll her window down, and as soon as she did, I soaked her.  The interesting thing about this, is that she was not a teacher I had any grudge against, her name was Mrs. Brown, and if anything she was one of our favorite teachers, but something about that vehicle just made you take advantage of the opportunity to squirt your teacher in the face.

The next day at school I was terrified to see her, but eventually I slowly walked into her classroom with my head down.  She just stared at me and shook her head.  I apologized immediately, and she had come up with some devious plan of humiliating me for revenge.  I willfully took her punishment, although I no longer remember what it was exactly.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun in that van, and squirted a lot of unexpecting victims, If you can mod your car in this way, I highly reccomend it.

During the trip I had a lot of time to think about what I want in life, I thought about future occupations, a future family, where I would want to live, and what I would want to accomplish by the time I die.  After much consideration, I decided I would like to get married some day, probably still some years off if it does indeed happen, but if it does, there are a couple of specific things I am looking for.  I know many people who want to get married and that is it, that is the end goal.  For me, I think I only want to get married if the conditions are right, that is to say, I see no need to dive into a life long commitment with someone unless they meet certain criteria.  The following is said criteria, which I share mainly for the purpose of being held accountable to my own current convictions.  It would be marvelously challenging if somewhere down the road, I am involved in a relationship where something from here is left out, and that is made aware to me by a friend or acquaintance who read it here some time before.

1. Although it may be obvious, I want to be completely in love with that person.  I want to feel for her what I read about it books, and see in the movies.  If I am not in love with a person to the point where I truly care about them, more than I do myself, then I really see no need to get married.  I want absolute love or nothing else.  Perhaps this is foolish, I really don’t know.  Its just that so far as I can see, marriage doesn’t seem worth it unless I am head over heals for her.

2. She would need to be someone who is in love God so much so that she is willing to follow Him wherever He may lead us.  Right now I do not see a specific call to anywhere but Long Beach, CA, but I want to remain open to wherever I can be used most.  I love adventure, and would hope that I could find that same excitement in a mate.  Again, if she does not share that excitement to follow God wherever, I hope that I would always prefer to stay wildly devoted to God and single rather than to settle for a dull safe life with a partner.

3. I am frugal, and would like a partner to be so as well.  This is not so much to save money, which is indeed part of it, but more so because I value good stewardship, and am passionate about being able to give generously.  I am not saying this should be true of everyone, but I personally feel guilty any time I buy something that is not essential.  I understand buying nice things every once in a while, but I would hope that my partner would feel the same desire and urge to give and support those who do great acts of charity, more so than she would see the need to spoil herself with luxuries.  Maybe I just sound cheap, but I find it incredibly attractive when women value the needs of others more than they do their own jewelry.

4. I have recently seen the need for a more healthy lifestyle, and I think I can thank daily stops at Mcdonald’s while traveling the US for that conclusion.  With that I would like to find someone who values their health as well as mine.  I think I would do well with someone who challenged me to maintain a healthy lifestyle, both in how I eat, and the activities I do.  It would be ideal that this person likes to prepare healthy food with me, and engaged in healthy activity with me as well.

5. The last thing is beauty, and this is something that roots itself much deeper than just one’s skin.  I have known plenty of sexually attractive women that were just down right ugly.  Likewise I have met plenty of women who I did not find attractive at first glance, but who grew in beauty as I discovered their elegance in how they treated others and myself.   I do want a woman who is physically appealing don’t get me wrong, but on top of that she needs to be someone who shows beauty in the way she interacts with people.  This can mean so many things, her sense of humor, her compassion towards others, her strength, her independence, and so many other things that make a woman beautiful.

I know some people who are concerned for me and my singleness, and have even mentioned this to me, as if there is something wrong with me for it.  However I am quite proud to be content with my independence.  I do not feel as though my life would be incomplete without a spouse, but it does seem like a pleasing way to live.  With that said I am in no rush to find a wife, and like I said before if I can not find all of the things I listed, then I would just as well prefer to stay single.  For me marriage is not an absolute, under the proper circumstances it would be most beneficial and pleasant, but outside of those circumstances it seems rather unnecessary and simply not worth the difficult effort involved in maintaining a relationship.

I am amazed how many revolutionary inventions I see on regular basis.  I am pretty sure I was told somewhere in science class that this concept is impossible, but here it is, and you can buy it at Best Buy.  I am both excited and terrified of what we might invent in the next 5 to 10 years.

Here is another funny story from almost 10 years ago.

When I was in high school I worked at Hollywood Video on Spring st in East Long Beach.  For some reason we had a plethera of expired sodas, specifically Pepsi product.  Now I don’t know exactly how the whole legalities work when it comes to selling expired sodas, but we did.  So many of the sodas that sat in that fridge were actually expired.  Well I knew this, and so I justified to my self, stealing the sodas since they were expired anyways.  I would also occasionally hook my friends up with an expired soda as well, cause who really cares right?

Well one day Ron Delaney comes into Hollywood Video while I am working, and if you know anything about Ron it that he is quite the stickler when it comes to spending, so anything that is free he is excited about, as am I on many occasions.  So Ron asks if there are any expired Pepsis and if there is could he have one for free.  I say sure if you can find an expired soda, go ahead and just have it.  He of course promptly found some expired Pepsi One, and proceeded to open it up and drink it.  Meanwhile he is hanging out in the store and just talking to me while I have another boring day at work.

After a few minutes go by, Ron says his stomach is hurting him, and that he thinks its from the Pepsi being bad.  Almost immediately, as if he had planned it, he lays down on his back on the floor right in the front of the store.  Remember customers are going in and out this whole time, and he is on the floor grabbing his stomach and screaming, “Don’t drink the Pepsi, The Pepsi is bad!”

I was furious, the nerve of this guy to complain about the free soda I gave him.  I promptly kicked him out of the store, and never gave away free expired soda again, especially to some one so ungrateful.

I have been home now for almost 2 months, and to be honest it is kind of weird.  Having a job (or three) a place to live, and lots of friends and family is all a real blessing, but I just can’t stop thinking about my life on the road.  Everything is so simple and organized now, I know the days of the week, and I even have deadlines.  Its not bad, its just strange.

I used to spend many of nights under the stars, uncomfortable yes, but at peace knowing I was living as best as anyone could.  Now I spend many of nights in my bedroom, staring into my computer.  Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for the walls, its just that I used to live with out them, besides the ones I would borrow from the occasional generous local.  Living a normal life is good, its dependable, its steady, its just kind of boring sometimes.  I don’t really remember being bored like this while I was on the trip, even if I had nothing to do, I was in a new place with new people.

Writing has been good, it helps me think about the amazing experience Ryan and I both shared, but more and more frequently I get the urge to just take off again.  I know I can’t now, once again I have responsibilities, and a goal, yet its still all so tempting.  For now I will do my best with these walls, but to go on so fast for so long and then to just stop seems anticlimactic.

Who knows what the next adventure holds, maybe its not even traveling at all, but whatever it is, I think I am ready for it.