Looking Back to Christmas and New Year's Past

Here are a couple of pieces (the first one an e-mail) I wrote this morning, thinking back in my teen years and some men who sacrificed to make them enjoyable and rewarding:

David,

A blessed Christmas and New Year to you and Ruth,

I was thinking the past few days of my teen aged years. On a few occasions this week in between Christmas and New Year's meant going on the New York District Teen Winter Retreat in the Pocono Mountains. I remember you driving the school bus and making stops at some of the churches as we picked up kids along the way. Originating in Bay Shore, we made stops in East Rockaway, Paterson, Edison and perhaps one other spot.

I remember our first evening one year. The fire was roaring in the dining room and you prayed for the evening meal. You sat at our table, right in among the teens. We had fun filled activities and met in a barn with a pot bellied stove for our times of worship and the Word.

The date of the retreat were December 29-31, 1969. It was held in a little town called Swiftwater, PA and was limited to the first 75 teenagers that registered . The cost was $27! The next year it was held at the Gymbo-Lynn Lodge December 28-30, 1970 and the cost was $28! At one of those times we were going out to a horse back riding event. You were driving the bus. The roads were iced and we went into a slide and you yelled out for everyone to hold on. Like right out of a line in "Jingle Bells" we were in a snow bank where the road crews had piled it up. No one was hurt but the bus was stuck. There was a farm house nearby and and they provided us with sand and salt and shovels and in a few minutes we were out and on our way.

I began to thinking this week of the sacrifice you made to drive a load of teens up there and give up time away from your young family. I remember coming home in 1969. It was dark when we pulled into the Suffolk Bus lot here in Bay Shore on Brentwood Road. I went over to the Bedell's house in West Islip and waited for my dad to pick me up. He arrived and we went back to Bellmore in time for me to change and join my family heading over to Freeport to Oliver Wirth's church for the watch night service. (Bellmore and Freeport joined in on such ventures back them) What struck me is that you no doubt had a watch night service yourself to lead after three days of supervising teens. True we didn't have cell phones back then. There was no e-mail. The only computers were made by IBM and the thought of having one in your home was only on the Jetsons. Families had little breakdown at that point in our country's history. Yet I am sure we wore you out some with all our energy and even some of our problems. They seem like small potatoes with what the teens of today contend with but they were big to us.

I wanted to say thanks (only 38 years late on it!) for we knew you loved us and cared about us. We looked at you as a man of solid faith and we were right. What I never thought of was the sacrifices you made so that some teens could have a time of fun and spiritual growth and memories of it that would stay with us for the long haul.

God bless you and Ruth, David!

Yours In the Savior,

Larry Mancini

Hebrews 13.16

_______________________________

This week between Christmas and New Years is what we called The Christmas Break. I spoke to one of my nieces a week ago and remembered the feelings of having a week and a few days off. We spoke about how that last day before the break was somewhat a waste in that it was hard to concentrate. I remember in 1971 that day being sort of a free day to hang out in the cafeteria or go to the girl's gym and hear some bands play.

What I remember most of those breaks was that they really weren't breaks at all for me. It was Winter Track Season and we had practice all week. We'd arrive at the school around 9 or 10. We would gt our instructions from Mr. Limmer. Then we would run. Usually the weather was like it is this particular week. It was cool but no snow.

Running was a little different in December in Bellmore. The houses were decorated. Nowhere near as many are today, but a wreath on a door, some garland hung, and other small changes were apparent. Kids were outside in the morning and so were we. There was a sense of freedom to it.

We would talk about what we got for Christmas that day after. I remember getting a Lafayette clock radio in 1971. It had a weather band. It was made right here in Syosset. Confession I still have it down in the basement! After I got that it made getting up a bit more pleasant. Before I had this buzzer alarm that would break up my winter slumber. But after I received the radio I would wake up to 77 WABC's Harry Harrison playing the top 100 for the year 1971. It made leaving the warm bed in the upstairs of the Cape Cod at 2804 Martin Avenue run out in the winter's cold over to Mepham a bit more enjoyable.

Thanks Coach for driving all the way in from your house each day do those breaks for practice.

A Day After Christmas Surprise!

Whenever I need my soul renewed I go to a place in my house that is simply wonderful. It is a little breakfast nook. By the bay window in our kitchen we have a little table and chairs.

This morning I sat there sipping on some coffee and eating some breakfast while taking in the birds at the feeders. I put out my homemade suet recently and after 23 years of living here I saw my first nuthatch. He has become a regular now.

Here it is the beginning of winter, the day after Christmas. We are at the point when the days begin to grow longer but having just left the shortest day of the year, it is barely noticeable yet. But this morning a beautiful robin came and hopped around the backyard. A robin! Is that too cool?!

The icing on the cake is this comment made by Lucy, my wife, the other day as I pointed out the nuthatch in the tree outside our bedroom. I said, "What a beautiful bird!" Lucy remarked, "To me, all the birds are beautiful." Oh to see life with her eyes a little more than I do!

Its Christmas In New York!

There is nothing like New York at Christmas time. Right next to the big tree in Rockefeller Center is Radio City Music Hall. My family and I have gone there a number of times to see the Christmas Spectacular. I love walking down 5th Avenue and seeing all the people and store fronts and smelling chestnuts and hot pretzel stands.

Seeing the Empire State Building lit up in green and red makes the season bright.

New York is my birth place. It is such a privilege to live here and to celebrate Christmas here each year.

Have a very Merry Christmas as you celebrate its true meaning- Christ's Birth.

The Otherside of the Story

Youth With a Mission takes in just about anyone -- even an unstable young man who would later shoot and kill 4 in Colorado.

By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 18, 2007

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- Paul Filidis thought little of Christianity as he backpacked through Afghanistan in the early 1970s, searching for top-grade hashish and Eastern enlightenment.

Then his passport was stolen and he took shelter with a group of missionaries who had moved to Kabul to help wanderers on the hippie trail. "They looked just like me," Filidis said.

Seeking guidance

The missionaries took Filidis in and helped him get a new passport. Filidis, who had believed Christianity was only for old people, eventually became a convert. He has spent the last three decades with that group, Youth With a Mission. His 20-year-old, tongue-pierced daughter, Noelle, just finished a YWAM mission to India, where she nursed sick villagers and was attacked by a mob of Hindu fundamentalists.

The mission "gave an opportunity to kids to go out," Noelle said. "Like kids can impact the world."

Youth With a Mission is a nondenominational Christian network that takes in just about anyone -- punk rockers, misfits, retired engineers, schoolteachers, fresh-faced teens. After a little training, they are sent to preach the Gospel in some of the most dangerous parts of the globe.

That nonconformist approach brought tragedy to the group last week when Matthew Murray, who had been expelled for apparent mental health problems, fatally shot four people -- two at the Arvada Youth With a Mission office near Denver and two at New Life Church in Colorado Springs -- before killing himself.

The attack exposed what Youth With a Mission members acknowledged was the group's greatest vulnerability and its greatest strength.

"YWAM has been known as a mission that believes in young people and gives them a chance," said Jarod Marshall, 32, a staffer in the Colorado Springs branch. "You believe in people, and there's a risk in that -- but it's a risk worth taking."

Youth With a Mission is considered avant-garde, on the "bleeding edge" of the evangelical movement, said A. Scott Moreau, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois who studies mission programs.

"They are passionate, they are a bit wild," Moreau said. "A lot of agencies are wondering how they're going to mobilize this generation. YWAM has figured it out."

One veteran calls YWAM (the acronym is regularly pronounced Why-Wham and members are known as YWAMers) a Christian Peace Corps. Projects include working with prostitutes in Holland and orphans in Mexico, and providing clean drinking water or dental care in Third World countries. Youth With a Mission also launched the Reconciliation Walk, a 1,500-mile trek through Turkey and the Middle East to atone for violence perpetrated in the name of Christianity during the Crusades.

In places where Christian missionaries are typically not welcome, such as Afghanistan or the Middle East, Youth With a Mission operates under other names and does not publicly proselytize. The group believes that doing good works is the best way to save people's souls, members say.

Youth With a Mission is non-hierarchical, allowing any of its 16,000 staffers or the 3 million people it estimates have gone through its training programs to develop their own mission and go anywhere to pursue it.

"There's this growing sense among younger people that they want to be part of something that's bigger than themselves," Marshall said. "YWAM's in a position to say, 'You want to do something? We can help you go abroad and make a difference in somebody's life.' "

Marshall joined the group when he was a teenager after taking one of its trips to the Caribbean. "I was smacked in the face by the huge distance between people in the world -- our affluence and their extreme poverty," he said.

Marshall and his wife, Carly, also a missionary, are leaving for Thailand next month to work in refugee camps along the border with Myanmar, also known as Burma. Another YWAMer they know invited them -- a typically informal way for a mission to start.

The mission group was the brainchild of Loren Cunningham, who was a Pentecostal college student on summer break in the Bahamas when he had a vision of waves of young people crashing onto the shores of all continents. He founded Youth With a Mission after he graduated in 1960. He still works out of the group's main office in Hawaii.

"He wanted to reach young people, especially college-age people, before they got stuck with a job," said Filidis, 57, who works in the group's communications office.

Filidis took a break from the mission in the late 1970s to get his degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. He also worked at Christian ministries in Glendale and Seattle. But the experience drove him back to Youth With a Mission.

It was "the attitude in YWAM that wants to serve, that wants to take the lower road rather than the higher road, that will do the dirty work," Filidis said. "I'd rather take those attitudes than those of organizations that want to be on power trips."

Filidis recounted one mission that he views as emblematic of YWAM's hands-on approach -- working in refugee camps in Southeast Asia after the fall of Saigon, since renamed Ho Chi Minh City. YWAMers volunteered to take care of the latrines and spent hours standing in human excrement. A U.N. report noted the group's commitment to doing practical work, no matter how unpleasant. "I hope we never lose that," he said.

Mark Lang dropped out of college in 1983 to join Youth With a Mission. Raised in a Lutheran household, he had longed for missionary work. "If I was going to become a Lutheran missionary, I would have had to go to four years of college and four years of seminary," said Lang, 43. "Would you like to do that or go to school for three months and go out and do something? You go make that choice when you're 18."

Lang joined a theater troupe that performed allegorical religious plays. He moved to Europe, traveled with the company through Greece and Italy camping on beaches, then worked in the Youth With a Mission branch in Amsterdam, which ran a nightclub on a houseboat that featured a band called No Longer Music.

"YWAM kind of pioneers a lot of things in ministries that are later replicated or perfected by other groups," said Lang, who is based in Colorado Springs. He oversees health projects in a central Asian country he would not name for fear that the Muslim nation would shut down the operations if it realized they were directed by missionaries.

The intention is not simply to rack up converts, he said. "We can't provide a spiritual solution" to poor people, Lang said, "unless we can come into their lives and provide practical solutions as well."

The group's 1,000 bases are linked solely by the three-month training course consisting of lectures and workshops on biblical principles, plus an official set of shared values. The bases independently stage missions.

"It's so decentralized that it's very difficult, even for them, to tell you everything they're doing," said Jonathan Bonk, executive director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Conn.

The bases are a cross between Christian crash pads and college dorms. The Colorado Springs branch is in a former hotel. The dining room has been converted into a coffee bar -- fixed up with worn couches, tables and board games -- that is the scene for all-night discussions. Many of the 120 staffers live in the hotel rooms, as do the few dozen students who cycle through every three months.

Andrew Williams, 23, is the campus barista. He prides himself on mixing new blends of teas. He heard of Youth With a Mission at his church in Sonora, Calif., in 2005 and has stayed partly because of the sense of community. "Just the relationships I have with people here is amazing," Williams said.

Gil Datz, the base's worship coordinator, said that the emphasis on communal learning and living means YWAMers learn a lot about their colleagues. "It means a guy like Matt cannot hide," he said.

Murray enrolled in 2002 at the base in Arvada, about 80 miles from here. Staffers there decided he should not finish the program because of unspecified health problems that would have made it "unsafe," so he left.

He returned five years later, just after midnight on Sunday, Dec. 9, and asked to stay the night. Staffers said no. He opened fire, wounding two and killing Philip Crouse, 24, and Tiffany Johnson, 26. Twelve hours later he killed two teenage girls at New Life Church in Colorado Springs before being shot by an armed volunteer security guard. Murray then killed himself.

Crouse and Johnson embodied Youth With a Mission's edgy approach. Crouch was a former skinhead who hoped to reach angry teens; Johnson had started a skateboarding ministry to help alienated youths.

Many YWAMers point out that Murray was the sort of person they would want to help. "That's what makes the issue with Matthew so painful," said Jeremy Pyhala, 33, a Colorado Springs staffer. "We look at him with potential."

Its the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Today the festivities celebrating Jesus' Birth continued. This is the staff of Good Shepherd Nursery School. Lucy and I joined them for their annual Christmas Luncheon at China Sun Buffet. It was very good. Both the fellowship and the food were superb.


Getting together this month is part of the celebration. We are very blessed. The LORD has be so good to us!

A blessed Christmas to you and your kin!

Verizon Fios

What a time to be alive! The technology is incredible!

Yesterday, Bill, a Verizon technician, came and installed the new fiber optic system here at the house. It was fun working with him and learning.

We are in the 21st Century and we are seeing things that the New York World's Fair told us would happen- simply mind boggling!

Thanks Bill- you did a great job!