"Saving" money and a young crush crushed

Since we didn’t have much money, my father was always interested in doing anything to save as much as we could. No one in YWAM gets paid. In fact, everyone pays fees. There was a property up the mountain or mauka as they say in Hawaii. They used the property as a farm and a center for training. Some people had built some semi-permanent coverings out of wood frames and plastic on wooden platforms with tents inside to live in. My dad thought that was a great money-saving idea.

The farm was a fascinating place to play. Some of the lava up there was broken up into huge, steep hillsides of very sharp rocks. Of course boys like a good challenge so one time we decided to try to run down those hillsides. I still bear scars from those very sharp rocks cutting into me as gravity took control and sent me sprawling.

Strong gusts of wind would sweep through the farm, ripping pieces of the plastic off the frames but my father was undaunted. One night we had a strong storm with torrential rain. My sister, Joy woke up and started yelling about something next to her bed. We went in to find a huge bulge of plastic hanging down filled with water. We tried to lift it to drain it out but it was way too heavy. Eventually we had to settle for poking holes in it, flooding all our stuff. We moved back the to the Kona-Kai apartments.

There was a single-mom YWAM family named the Jones living in the apartments. There were three kids. Vicky was Joy’s age, Cheryl was Samuel’s age and Eric was just younger than me. My father reached out to them and we used to get together for “family times”. This was a time for a spiritual message and some prayer. I had a crush on Vicky.

One day during family time my father was giving some great spiritual lesson while I was doodling in my notebook. I was writing “I love Vicky”. I had to go to the bathroom so I flipped my notebook over face down but left it open to the page on which I was doodling. When I came back the notebook was flipped doodle-page up! Cheryl was sitting next to me so I assumed she had done it. I don’t know if anyone else saw it but I.WAS.MORTIFIED. For the rest of the lesson I devised a scheme in my mind to shift the blame.

As soon as the lesson was over I was going to ask Cheryl, “Did you write this?” When she said no, I was going to say, “It must have been somebody at school. I left my notebook on the playground and one of the boys must have written it in there”. I played the conversation over and over in my mind, making sure I was going to get the words right and say it casually enough to make it seem true. I didn’t get much out of the lesson that day. 

The lesson ended, I approached Cheryl, I asked her if she had written it. She said, “No, you did”. And that was the end of that. I’m glad I didn’t get to lie that day, even if it was my intention. Eventually my crush dissipated and life moved on.