Today started off in my normal holiday routine. I wake up early to write for a few hours before my son and I watch "Star Trek, The Next Generation" and eat lunch. Then we figure out what to do from there.
Today the phone rang in the morning. A high school friend that I haven't seen since 1979 texted me. We've kept in touch over the years via e-mail and now facebook. He invited me via text to lunch with his mother at the Fisherman's Restaurant in San Clemente. I knew that he was in SoCal, so I seized the day and drove up to see them.
It was sunny, gorgeous, and the ocean waves curled perfectly for the surfers as I approached the restaurant on the pier. As I got to the restaurant I noticed a text telling me their exact location, so I found them immediately at a table looking over the beach. They'd been there for a bit and had crab that they were cracking. I gave my friend a big hug. Though it's been 33 years he still looks great! I shook his mom's wrist, since her hands had crab all over them. She gave me a big smile.
We had a lovely discussion about our current lives. We didn't reminisce, except for the short discussion about his high school love, and me being the only blond nerdy girl on campus. We actually really talked about how God has honed us through our painful life experiences. I learned so much about his childhood that I never had known.
He became the man of the house at 15 due to the abusive alcoholic father leaving. I told him that's one of the ways God honed you to become a great leader. He was the student body president of our high school two years before I was. Now he's about to publicly launch Warpshare, a company that he created with some new nerd friends to protect our freedom of Internet speech.
His mom had interesting stories about the challenges of being a Filipino principal in the Elk Grove Elementary School District in the 1970's. Elk Grove, CA was just rednecks back then. The high school football team was known as the meat and potato boys that lifted cattle for fun. Ethnic diversity wasn't even a phrase back then. She had many challenges from the parents---being an outsider and "ethnic."
The story that really stuck in my head was about one of her Japanese school teachers. There was a teacher's meeting after school. It happened to end early and this Japanese school teacher went to her car and found a Ku Klux Klan doll, the calling card of the KKK, on her windshield. She immediately got into her car and drove home. The janitor saw the KKK return about 5 minutes after the she left. The teacher certainly had God watching over her!
My friend's mom offered to transfer the Japanese teacher to another school for her safety, but the Japanese teacher refused to bow down to terror. She stayed on and taught the KKK's kids. That's how ethnic diversity happens in America---by ethnically diverse heroes and heroines standing their ground and turning the bad into the good. That's also how God hones us by giving us bad experiences, so that we can rise to the challenge, become stronger, have a broader perspective, and be a better light of God.
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