Parachute students bring firepower to Lighthouse Christian Academy’s 7th straight soccer win

It really came as no surprise that it was LCA’s Japanese students who finally picked the lock to the Santa Clarita Valley International’s defense Thursday to spark a win at Westwood Recreational Center.

Shun Fukushigi — who plays the type of soccer they play in Heaven – laser-directed a corner to countryman Akihiro Oku, who headered into the net, breaking a defensive deadlock that had lasted half an hour.

SCVi is a new charter school with a new soccer program, so it’s understandable that their team was in bit of a disarray at the first meetup with our Santa Monica Christian school. Lighthouse Christian Academy — undefeated this season at seven games — expected to steamroll again Thursday but they hit roadblocks.

SCVi Coach Ken Erenberg had his troops dig in trenches and hold off an onslaught of blistering fire.

“We did a few little changes. This is a first year team,” Erenberg said. “Unfortunately, we look like a first-year program. I couldn’t be more proud for the first 30 minutes being scoreless. I’m like wow, these guys are great. I have a new goal keeper, and he was unbelievable. I think he made 20 saves. I was proud of the way our team played.”

But once Shun and Aki worked their magic, the goals started flowing. The final scoreline — 8-1 — doesn’t do justice to the real story of what happened on the pitch. The Stallions were like a totally different team, more organized and determined, than the away game. Read the rest: foreign high school students in Santa Monica bring success to soccer team.

He was once starving in Africa

Once he was starving. Yesterday he was feasting.

Moses Bowen, adopted by missionaries when he was a starving newborn, dined on four sumptuous goals in the first half of Lighthouse Christian Academy’s soccer victory over Highland Hall Waldorf School.

When the tsunami of blue jerseys was over, LCA closed its sixth-straight win — an undefeated season so far — with a resounding 5-0.

Coach Jack Mefford actually took Moses off the field at half to release pressure on Highland Hall.

Four goals.

In soccer, scoring three is an extraordinary feat known as a hat trick. Four is unheard of.

And there’s one more troubling fact — troubling for the competitors in the league.

Moses is a freshman.

Yes, that means he’ll be making defenders’ knees tremble for three more years.

In the Bible, Moses opened the Red Sea. Yesterday, he opened the path among defenders.

His friends call him Mosie, a name rhyme with his twin brother Josie (Joshua).

When they were born, their mother died, and their father couldn’t take care of them — or any other relative.

They were starving on a diet of rice with no milk. Such is poverty in The Gambia of West Africa.

Ralph and Brenda Bowen, now on staff at Lighthouse schools, were missionaries at the time battling big spiders and crippling malaria while bringing the Good News to the huddling masses.

They were already into their third church plant, this time in Senegal. The Gambia was the former stomping grounds.

So when the Bowens heard the case of some unwanted boys who were going to die, their hearts rent and their legs running. They drove across international borders and adopted the twins. Brenda Bowen painstakingly nursed them to health.

Well, they’re healthy now.

While Josie was blunting opponents attacks on defense, Mosie was up front sharpening his knives. Read the rest of African student at West Los Angeles Christian school.

Behind the dark lyrics lurks hope in NF’s hip hop

Admittedly, NF’s hip-hop is “dark and moody.” Don’t look for a Sunday schoolish happy-ever-after in his music, though he is a Christian.

Nathan Feuerstein’s rage emanates from the festering wounds of a broken home. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mom struggled with opioid addiction.

As a kid, NF didn’t understand why Mom missed events — even his graduation. One of her boyfriends physically abused him and delighted in striking terror in his two sisters. In high school, NF cut all communication with her because he felt strange and uncomfortable when the court ordered a social worker to monitor his conversations with her.

When he was 18, he received a heart-rending call. His grandmother said Mom had overdosed.

His soul-wrenching dirge “Why would you leave us?” was born of that personal apocalypse. It is a bone-chilling confessional that leaves no skeleton in the closet. Its unfiltered pathos is making people cry across the nation.

If Mandisa tells listeners “you’re an overcomer,” NF reassures them if they haven’t found victory in Christ. He splatters ghouls into his lyrics, and the fiendish formula is resonating with millennials nationwide who want to know if there’s a viable alternative to suicide.

“I grew up feeling like pills were more important than I was,” NF says in a YouTube video. “I’m not past that. Some people pretend to be out of that place. Or they assume that’s what ‘Christian’ means. It means that we’re all great and everything’s perfect. That’s not what it is.”

NF was born in Gladwin, Michigan, in 1991. Rap was his escape, first listening to it, then writing it. His high school teachers mocked his musical inspirations.

His early flounderings seemed to confirm the admonitions to get a real job. He drove an old Volvo that overheated so much he changed his schedule to drive at night. Between concerts, he worked as an electrician to pay bills.

But in October of 2017, NF silenced his detractors and left behind hardships when his third album, Perception, unexpectedly ranked #1 on Billboard 200. At the time, Forbes Magazine expressed shock that a virtual unknown had nudged Tom Petty’s greatest hits album off the top perch.

NF is a street poet who lashes out stinging rhymes with 220-volt intensity. He’s drawn comparisons to Dr. Dre and fellow Michigan native Eminem, but his lyrics are devoid of curse words, misogyny, crime and utter despair.

While he sounds the depths of pain, he points to God. Read the rest of NF Christian hip hop artist.

Freedom from meth

Not even jail was as hard as rehab at the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center in Pasadena, according to Dominique Perry.

To be sure, during his lock-up he faced simmering racial tension and even violence. But he had a lot of free time and made hairbrushes out of soap bars and toothbrushes that he could sell to buy Cokes and chips.

In the rehab, he thought they overloaded him with rules and endless meetings. They raided his room based on “stupid suspicions.” Once, Dominique got raided for an electric toothbrush with attachments that someone thought could be used as a weapon.

“In jail it’s all about survival of the fittest, the bigger guy getting on the little guy. But all you have to do is listen to the guard. You can sleep all day,” Dominique said. “But in rehab you have to wake up early. Two cursings is a kick out. You have to go to three meetings a day. It gets you out of your comfort zone.”

Despite seething under the regimen, Dominique, now 26, graduated after eight months at the rehab center in July 2017, He had kicked meth, is serving the Lord and got a job as a dispatcher for a security company.

He’s come a long way since his early days in Pacoima, a poor, mostly African American neighborhood of Los Angeles. His father left the household when he was a tyke. In high school, he started smoking weed, skipping class and trying to be cool.

“I always said we never needed dad. My mom always gave us everything. She was full of love,” Dominique said. “But maybe I needed him.”

He was good at football and was offered several scholarships for community colleges. But with his mind clouded by drugs, he never accepted one.

“I was picking and cocky. I was ignorant. I wasn’t really thinking,” he said. “I didn’t go to any of them. I just stayed home and started smoking more weed. I started deviating and falling into gangs.”

In Catholic middle school, he was taunted by the Boys from the Projects, a Latino gang. Dominique is half Mexican and half African American, but he looks more African American. So the Boys from the Projects started throwing rocks at him during PE.

The nuns were afraid themselves, he said, so he took matters into his own hands. He was already getting big, bigger than his taunters, so he beat them and chased them off.

“I felt powerful,” he said. “That day I went to the barber shop and told my story. Some bloods were there. There was a guy there with new shoes, and he said, ‘You wanna go get them?’ That was the worst mistake of my life. I wanted to feel protected and I wanted to claim something that people would recognize that I could strike fear.”

He was jumped the next day by six gang members. Seeing the bruises afterward, his mom cried and took him to the ER. He lied and said he fell down.

“Joining the gang opened the door of sin. I was constantly trying to prove myself. It led to worse and worse things – shootings and drugs and violence. I started losing control of my own personal life. I lost track of going to school. I lost track of my family. I thought what I was doing was more important.”

He got arrested for showing off some brass knuckles in high school. Later he was nabbed for wearing red gang gear and throwing signs. When the cops grabbed him, he also had Ecstasy pills and marijuana, when it was illegal in California.

His third arrest was for meth.

“I used to look down on crackheads,” Dominique said. “But some females introduced me to it. I started to think it was cool because I wanted to be a player. I was young and reckless. I wanted to stay up all night and party, and meth was a booster. They persuaded me to smoke it, and I accepted. There was a rush in my body, and then I started smoking it more and more.” Read the rest of freedom from meth.

She taught my dad, now me, in Independent Study Program at Los Angeles Christian school

By Tailoni Jenkins, LCA sophomore –

Mrs. Payton has been a teacher at the Lighthouse for 27 years. In fact the first class she ever taught was my dad’s 4th grade class.

I’m a second generation Payton pupil, and she still looks as young as she did in my dad’s day.

Mrs. Payton has been the teacher for the “Pace” Program at our Santa Monica Christian high school for 4 years. Through booklets, this Independent Studies Program allows students to finish their school work “at their own pace.”

They progressively work their way through the course material on an individual basis. They are not expected to keep up with the teacher (or be held back by the teacher). It’s not only good for at risk students; it helps geniuses to get through faster than a plodding class.

The booklets give explanatory material and then asks questions to check for reading comprehension. At the end, the student takes a test. It’s been good for a lot of kids who don’t flourish in a traditional setting.

“Mrs.Payton lets us have fun while she makes sure that we get our work done,” freshman Josie Bowen said.

Mrs.Payton not only teaches Pace but she also mentors many of us students.

“Mrs.Payton speaks words of wisdom and the truth,” Josie said. Read the rest about Independent Study Program Los Angeles Christian school.

She brought and got happiness at Santa Monica Christian school

Senior Petrina Gratton is a honor-roll tri-athlete at the Lighthouse Christian Academy. She participates in soccer, volleyball and swimming. She says her favorite sport is volleyball, and that makes sense because she was the captain!

She is graduating this year as a 16-year-old senior.

“I will miss all of my friends and all the goof goobers I have to interact with everyday,” she says.

Trina’s favorite thing about the our Santa Monica Christian school is “how the teachers actually put in effort to try and talk to you and get to know you a little because most bigger schools tend to not really build relationships with the students. I appreciate all the sacrifices they have made for me, as well as the whole school, because they really work together to try to make this place the best it can be.”

Trina says that Lighthouse has helped her reconnect with her faith and helped her figure out some of her passions.

“They have helped me discover more about my faith as well as my interest in film because if I didn’t go to LCA I don’t think I’d realize how much of a passion I have for filmmaking,” she said. “So there’s a shoutout to Mr. (Jack) Mefford for being the best film teacher ever!!” Read the rest of Santa Monica Christian school senior reminisces on wonderful experiences.

A hero lost in heroin got saved by Jesus

Carlton Edwards ran and shot so well in Vietnam that he earned the Army’s Bronze Star Medal. But recognition for his heroics could not assuage the stress of war, so when buddies introduced him to heroin outside of Saigon in 1972, he readily indulged.

Carlton grew up in Mt. Vernon, New York, with six other family members in a three-room apartment governed by an alcoholic father. He was drafted out of high school in 1969 and served four years in Vietnam but never got busted for drug use.

“I was a very functional addict,” he said. “I used two or three times a day. It was to help me deal with the pressures of the war. It gave you comfort, totally relaxation, almost sleep, but you were aware of the things around you. It took you out of the reality of the pain you’re going through. It was sedative.”

Stationed in Germany years later, Carlton hung with the Army’s bad boys, the guys who had killed and strutted around flaunting their toughness. But a little guy named Morphus kept harassing him, popping up behind him to remind him, “God loves you.”

Carlton thought he was way beyond God’s ability to forgive, with all the terrible things he had done. Plus, “this God thing didn’t go with being in military and hanging with the tough crowd,” he said. So Carlton asked the annoying Morphus what he wanted – hoping he would leave him alone.

Morphus told Carlton that if he attended his Bible study the next day at noon, he wouldn’t pester him again. Read the rest of Vietnam vet freed from heroin.