- Hey everybody, Pastor Steven Anderson here
from Faith Forward Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona
with part four of my life story.
So toward the end of sixth grade,
my family went back to Citadel Baptist Church.
And so I was gonna go to that Christian school
in seventh grade.
Well, during this time it had gone
from being Citadel Baptist School,
which was for church members only,
to being Citadel Christian School,
open to the general public.
Well, the school was located in South Sacramento.
It was a super ghetto, derelict part of town.
And so all kinds of really bad kids came into the school.
And many of them had literally been expelled
from public school.
And that's why they were being put in this Christian school.
But the church was struggling.
They needed the money.
So they just kind of opened it up to these kids,
which really kind of defeats the whole purpose
of the Christian school.
Parents are probably putting their kids there
because they want to keep them away from that element.
And the worst element was right there.
I probably should have just told this
to my parents right away, but I felt bad.
They were spending a bunch of money to send me there.
I'm trying to just go with the flow.
And it ended up being a nightmare of a year.
I'm not gonna go into detail in this video
just because I've already talked about this in my sermons.
And so I don't want to repeat things here
that I've already preached about,
but it was just a really bad atmosphere.
And there's one good thing I want to talk about though,
positive thing about seventh grade,
was that it was very academically rigorous.
So my teacher, Mrs. Khan was not playing games at all.
And I'm just going to give you one example
of how hard this year was academically.
She was teaching us the history of science.
And so we were learning about all the major scientific
discoveries from the 1600s to present day.
And there was this chart that just listed
like so many discoveries and who discovered them,
what they discovered, it was a long list.
I don't remember how many things were on the list,
but it was pretty long.
And so when it came time to be tested on this,
we basically just had to reproduce this chart
from memory, the whole chart.
So she basically just gave us the year
and we have all this long list of years.
And we have to say who made the discovery
and what they discovered.
I mean, we're talking 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s.
And so virtually everybody failed this test.
I got a 43% on the test.
And so I thought, well, surely it's gonna be graded
on a curve or something like that.
But no, she shows up the next day and it's the wrath of Khan.
I mean, she was mad and talking about how pathetic
our performance on this test was.
And she said, I'm not grading on a curve.
This is not gonna go away.
In fact, I'm gonna make you take the same test again
a week from now.
And she said, this is what's gonna happen.
We're gonna take your new score and your old score
and average it, and that's your final score.
And there's gonna be no more second chances, no mercy.
Well, I'd gotten a 43, so I'm thinking to myself,
okay, even if I get 100, then the best I can hope for
is like a 71, a 72, you know, when all's said and done.
And at this school, because the academics were strict,
you know, 71 wasn't even a C minus.
It was 71 was actually a D, if you can believe that,
because they had kind of shifted things a little bit.
If you were in the low 90s, it was already a B.
You know, it wasn't the normal grading scale.
So man, that's what I did.
I memorized the chart, I came back, I got 100,
and then my final score was like 71 or whatever.
And you know, virtually everybody else did the same thing
because we had to, we had no choice.
And that was just kind of one example.
You know, the whole semester or the whole year was like that.
And so it was good because we learned a ton.
We had to work really hard academically.
And then after that, the whole rest of my school career
just felt easy after that.
It was all downhill because I learned so much in seventh grade
that it was all downhill from there.
Another funny thing that happened
when I was in seventh grade was I joined the junior varsity
basketball team, JV basketball.
Because the way that it worked was like seventh to 12th grade
was all together.
So even though I was in seventh grade,
I was able to get on the lower end basketball team.
Well, here's the thing.
I wasn't very good at basketball, but I was enthusiastic about it.
I really wanted to do my best and excel at it.
So I showed up for the practice.
One of the things I remembered about the first day of practice
was just going in the bathroom and puking,
and literally just several guys all just being lined up
puking into sinks and toilets.
Because we were doing wind sprints,
and we just weren't in shape for it.
So everybody's puking their guts out.
I mean, it's just really intense.
So I went to all these practices,
and I'm trying to get better at playing basketball,
and I was kind of excited about the idea
of being on a sports team and stuff like that.
So the very first game of the season comes around,
and I did not get put in at all.
I'm just on the bench the whole game.
Second game, toward the end of the game,
I finally get put in, and I played for, I don't know,
60 seconds or something.
But it was like, hey, I got put in.
I got to play a little bit or whatever.
Well then, right at this exact time, my mom got a job.
Up to this point, she'd always been a stay-at-home
wife and mother, but there was a financial recession
at the time, and so my parents needed the money.
She went out and got a job at JCPenney,
and I ended up having to quit the team
because I couldn't make it to the practices.
Scheduling didn't work, so that was my only time
in my entire school career that I was on a sports team,
and I played for about 60 seconds,
and it was a very short-lived career.
So anyway, after that I went to eighth grade
at Victory Christian, 'cause I told my parents,
I'm like, yeah, I don't think I should go back
to this school another year.
I kind of just mildly told them about,
eh, this school's not really very good.
So they put me in Victory Christian School,
and when I started going there in eighth grade,
it was just like paradise, it was like a breath of fresh air
because of the school I was coming from.
It was just so nice to go to Victory.
And the other cool thing was at the beginning of every year,
we would go to camp for three or four days.
So you'd go to class for a couple days,
then you'd go on this camp trip for like three or four days
where you know you're sleeping in cabins
and you're doing activities, playing outside, swimming,
you're listening to a lot of preaching and chapel
and eating communal meals and stuff.
So it's just a great way to like make new friends
and start off the year on a positive note
and everything like that.
So I really enjoyed going to school there
for eighth grade, ninth grade.
It was pretty good.
By the time I got to 10th grade,
I got a little disillusioned
with some things about the school.
But eighth and ninth grade, I was pretty happy there.
One of the things about this though
was that the school was very far from our house
because Citadel had been pretty close to our house
whereas this school was quite a ways away,
like more than a half hour away.
So I ended up having to carpool with this other girl.
And the way that this worked was
that because of her mom's work schedule,
we didn't get picked up from school each day
until 5.15 PM.
So the school day was supposed to be like,
something like eight to three,
but I would end up being gone from my house.
I think I'd leave my house around like 6.45 every morning
to get there.
And then, 'cause I'd have to go to her house
and then her mom would take me
the rest of the way to the school.
And then we would give them gas money or whatever.
And then her mom wouldn't pick us up until 5.15 p.m.
So I was literally gone from my house every day
from like 6.45 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.
So when school would end at three o'clock,
I would just be there for another two hours and 15 minutes.
Which for me, I didn't mind, it was cool.
I enjoyed it 'cause there were about four or five other kids
whose parents were the same way,
like they worked and couldn't get there.
So it was just like five or six of us
would just kinda hang out for two, two and a half hours.
So it was pretty good.
Well, the main story of this episode I wanna tell
is the beginning of 10th grade,
and it's about a guy named Fred, okay.
So this new kid shows up at the beginning of 10th grade
and his name's Fred, and he was just kind of a really,
just a dorky kid, you know, it can be an awkward stage.
And so this kid was just kinda nerdy, just kinda dweeby,
didn't really, you know, have social skills,
I guess you could say.
Just to give you one example,
he showed up to school one day,
like within the first few weeks of school,
wearing a tie, which was kinda weird,
like nobody's wearing a tie,
like everybody's showing up in like a t-shirt or something,
you know, it was very casual.
He shows up in a shirt and tie,
but the tie had a rubber ducky on it.
I mean, think about it, we're 15 years old.
Imagine a 15-year-old boy, like showing up to school,
wearing a tie with a rubber ducky on it.
You know, it was pretty rough.
So anyway, this kid, he's a nice guy, you know,
there's no issue with the guy,
but he was just, you know, not very cool.
So he shows up one day
and he's got invitations to his birthday party.
And these were very childish invitations,
like they're clearly made by his mom, goofy invitations.
So I'm standing in the lobby of the school
with two other kids and he walks up
and he hands all of us an invitation.
I'm like, oh, cool, thank you.
You know, I'm looking at the invitation.
You know, oh, thanks, thanks Fred.
You know, I was always nice to him.
I never had any issue with him.
And again, school had just started like two weeks ago.
And so as soon as Fred walks away,
the other two kids that I was with,
they just start tearing up the invitations and saying,
I'm not gonna go to this stupid party.
This is dumb.
Fred's such a geek or whatever.
And it kind of just made me feel bad.
I felt sad that they were tearing up the invitation
'cause he was real nice, came up and friendly, invites us.
And then they're just, as soon as he's gone,
they start talking bad about him
and tearing up the invitation.
It kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
So I just said, well, I'm going.
I said, I'm going to this party, I'll be there.
So they're just kind of like, eh, whatever.
So around this time,
my dad had just gotten a Xerox machine for no reason.
It was just a friend of his was getting rid of it.
And he's just like, sure, I'll take it.
And he put it in the living room of our house,
which kind of just, it didn't really make sense.
Like in the living room of our house,
there's like a sofa and a piano and a Xerox machine.
And we didn't really need a Xerox machine.
Why did we have this Xerox machine in our living room?
I don't know.
But we thought it was super cool 'cause we're kids, right?
So we, you know, we're playing with it.
We loved it.
We thought it was super fun to have a Xerox machine.
Well, here's the thing.
We just got in the Xerox machine
and my best friend at the time was named Matt.
And so Matt came over to my house after school that day
and I said to Matt, I said,
"Hey, what if we took this invitation to Fred's party?
"What if we just made our own invitation to the party
"and made the party sound way cooler
"and then get everybody to come?"
Because I'm like, I don't think it's cool
the way they're just tearing up the invitation
and nobody's gonna come.
I feel bad for this kid.
You know, don't we wanna have fun?
Don't we wanna go to a fun party?
Let's make it a fun party.
So Matt and I, we're sitting around talking about this
and you know, brainstorming.
And so we hop on the computer and we had a computer
and we had Adobe Illustrator,
which was back then it was kind of an expensive software,
but we had it on our computer.
And so we used Adobe Illustrator to make like
this really cool looking invitation for Fred's party.
And then we have, remember we have a Xerox machine
in the living room.
So we make this two sided invitation
and we just made it sound like it was just
the most awesome party in the world.
And it said on it, bring a gift for admission.
And it had all these just kind of wild claims on it
about different guest appearances that were,
I don't remember all the details,
but we made it just sound like it was just
the event of the year, you know, Fred's birthday party
and bring a gift for admission.
I remember it said, "No illegal substances."
And then on the back of the invitation,
we put a map to his house.
So we put the address, we put a map
of how to get to his house, and then at the top,
for some inexplicable reason,
we put a title across the top, "Map to Fred's Rave,"
you know, because that was something
that we had just seen on the news or something.
It was like some new kind of wild party or something,
you know, and it probably involved drugs,
so that's why we're like,
well, if we're gonna say that,
we have to say no illegal substances or whatever.
So we made this invitation,
and then we just started cranking out copies of it
from the copy machine so that we literally made
several hundred copies of this invitation.
So we go to our Christian school,
and we're given this invitation to everybody at the school,
but then we're given the invitation
to everybody outside the school.
So we went to our church youth groups,
we're giving it to everyone in our church youth groups,
we're giving it to other kids,
telling them to give it out in their youth group.
So it just kind of snowballed into this thing
where we literally put out several hundred invitations
to this kid's birthday party,
and nobody even knows who this kid even is.
They're just getting this Fred's birthday,
bring a gift for admission,
just making it sound super cool.
So anyhow, this gets back to Fred
a couple days before the party,
and more importantly, it gets back to Fred's mom.
Now Fred's mom had just been hired by the school
as some kind of a secretary, so she's a school employee.
So she confronts me at the school,
and she was like hyperventilating.
She's panicking like, "What have you done?
"Like, how many people did you invite to my house?
"Like, what's going on with this party?"
And so I'm trying to set her mind at ease.
I'm like, "Don't worry about it, it's gonna be fine."
She's like, her biggest concern was like,
"Sure, I don't think I'm gonna have enough food.
"How many people did you invite?"
And I didn't wanna tell her how many people I invited.
So I was like, "Don't worry about it."
I'm like, "We'll bring extra food.
"It's gonna be great, don't worry, it's fine."
So then we get called into the principal's office,
and the principal was really mad,
and he's chewing us out and telling us
that we shouldn't have done this,
and that this party sounds like it's gonna be sinful.
And I said, "What are you?"
I was like, "Whoa, buddy,
"there's nothing sinful about this party."
He's like, "Why does it say no illegal substances?
"That makes it sound like that's even on the table."
And I'm like, "Well, no, it's not on the table.
"That's why we put that there."
So he just said, "Well, I'm really worried about it."
And he said, "This is a staff member that's involved,
"and so this is the reputation of our school."
So he said, "We're gonna send chaperones
"from the school to the party
"to make sure everything's on the up and up."
And I said, "Great."
I said, "No problem."
I said, "That sounds great, send your chaperones."
He was trying to punish us somehow,
but he couldn't really punish us
'cause we hadn't really broken a rule.
I said to him, "Well, what rule did I break?"
He said, "Well, none."
"Okay, well then what are we talking about here?"
And so we ended up kinda coming up with a compromise
that they were just gonna send chaperones from the school
and make sure everything was fine.
So anyway, the day of the party,
the party was like the next day.
We show up at the party like,
Matt and I got there like two hours early
because we wanted to help a little bit and everything.
So we brought like an extra table,
we brought a bunch of food and drinks and stuff
'cause we were trying to help out.
When the party comes around,
literally over 150 people showed up to this party, okay.
So this is like a little three-bedroom,
two bath type house, small backyard.
And I kid you not, I mean, this place was with people.
I mean, the backyard is packed with people.
The living room, the family room,
just every part of it is packed with people.
And most of these people have no idea who Fred even is.
I mean, people are showing up like, who the heck is Fred?
But they're just there to be at this party
with other Christian kids.
And so the party was just massive.
And remember, we had said on the invitation,
bring a gift for admission.
And so Fred got so many gifts.
And the most popular gift that he got was either cash,
which was like a $5 bill or a $10 bill.
A lot of people's are probably like five bucks there,
happy birthday, Fred.
But then the other most popular gift was,
they brought him like Christian rock music CDs,
just popular Christian music from the time.
And I remember, I kid you not, at the end of the evening,
he had a stack of Christian CDs
that was at least two feet tall.
And I remember there were certain like,
kind of the hot Christian albums that had just come out.
He had duplicates.
So I remember there was one particular CD,
he had five copies of the same CD given to him,
just because he had just received so many CDs.
There's only so many, you know,
popular CDs that are out there,
especially amongst like, you know,
Christian rock and stuff like that.
So he had like, stack of CDs like this,
he got a few hundred dollars in cash.
Somebody gave him a bunch of $2 bills.
He got some rare coins.
The main thing I remember him getting though,
is just a lot of money and a lot of CDs.
I remember while he was opening his gifts,
we were sitting in the living room.
There's no place to sit in the living room.
So me and a few of my friends were literally
sitting under the kitchen table.
Like, because that was just the only floor space
that was left in the house.
So I think the party,
I want to say the party started at like 5 p.m.
or 6 or something like that.
So around like 8 or 9 p.m., she just kicks everyone out.
She's like, "This party's over, everybody's out."
150 plus teenagers.
So I want to say it was like maybe the party went on
from like 5 to 8 and then at 8 o'clock
because it felt early, her kicking us out.
So she kicks us all out, but then here's the thing,
everybody's in the front yard
because none of us have a car, none of us can drive.
I mean, there were some older kids that had licenses,
but we're 15, we're 14.
You know, we didn't have cars.
So we're all just in the front yard,
like 100 teens are in the front yard.
So then the police showed up
because the neighbors had showed up
because the party basically just continued
in the front yard because of the fact
that nobody has a ride.
And so we're all just hanging out
and having fun in the front yard.
Neighbors called the police, the police showed up.
But then it's like, everybody's just telling the police,
like, oh, well, we're waiting to get picked up.
You know, I had called my ride
and I was waiting to get picked up
just like everybody else.
I was like, what do you want us to do, officer?
Like, we, you know, called our ride.
We're 15, we're waiting to get picked up.
But at the end of the day,
even though Fred was nervous going into the party,
afterward he was super happy
because he ended up having, like,
the greatest birthday party of all time, huge turnout,
and he was just super happy to have, like,
hundreds of dollars cash.
And by the way, money was worth more back then in 1996
than it is now.
So, I mean, a few hundred bucks.
That was serious money back then.
And he's got all the CDs,
he got some other gifts and stuff.
So, at the end of it, he was really thankful.
At the end of it, his mom was happy and she was thanking me
and so she wasn't upset in the end.
So, fast forward, four or five years later,
I was newly married, and when I was newly married,
my wife and I would go out to dinner with my parents
every Friday night, pretty much,
and we would go eat at Chili's virtually every Friday night.
So we're in the waiting room for Chili's.
This is when I'm like 20 or something, you know,
maybe 19, 20, four or five years later,
and we run into Fred 'cause I haven't seen him
since 10th grade.
I never saw him again.
You know, we went to 10th grade together.
We never really became friends.
Even after the party, we still weren't really friends
or anything, you know, we went to school together.
I switched schools and went to a different school
for 11th grade.
Never saw Fred again until four or five years later.
I see Fred four or five years later,
and he was not nerdy at all.
Like, he just seemed like a totally cool,
well-adjusted, 20-year-old guy, just totally cool guy.
And he's got this beautiful girl with him,
and he's like, "Yeah, this is my fiance."
And I'm like, "Wow, Fred has really made it,"
because he went from being kind of this awkward guy
when he's 15, now he's like looking cool, beautiful wife.
And so we run into him in the lobby,
and he tells his fiance, he says,
"Hey honey, this is the guy that I told you
that threw me that party back in 10th grade."
So is this kind of funny because, you know,
I guess the way I kind of wanted to interpret that
was that kind of like maybe throwing him that party
maybe boosted his confidence a little bit,
or maybe helped him to become a little more social.
I don't know if it had anything to do with it.
He probably just grew up.
But you know, the way that I like to tell the story though
is that like, you know, that that party
was like a turning point for him.
So that he became more social and had more confidence
and well adjusted.
Anyway, it was just kind of a wild thing that happened.
Just from a silly idea of,
hey, let's all go to this guy's party
and let's have a good time.
Let's make it fun.
To where it just snowballed to where it's like,
hey, let's use the Xerox machine and make 400 invites.
Let's invite everybody.
We're just inviting the whole world.
150 plus people actually showed up.
It was pretty wild.
His mom had originally put out,
I think 20 invitations total.
So anyway, that's that.
God bless you.
I hope you enjoyed the story.
Have a great day.