My foolproof plan to save America from Trump & other bad outcomes

And you think this is a lot of Sabos. You ain't seen nothin yet!

I've said it many times lately and it bears repeating. In a country of 330 million, it absolutely boggles my mind that at this point in 2016 we're looking at an election of Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. How on earth is this possible? These candidates are beyond flawed, let alone qualified to lead our country.

Trump in particular leaves me utterly bumfoozled. I live in a county that in Tuesday's Republican primary easily nominated Trump, despite my family's best voting efforts. What that says to me is that the people of Gloucester -- and many other places around America -- who voted for him are angry, like bullies, identify with narcissists, don't give a whit about family values and think it's great to cheat on your wife and then dump her, are sexist, appreciate a businessman who is a complete failure over and over again with four bankruptcies to his name, appreciate racists like the KKK, like casinos and strip clubs and appreciate someone with absolutely zero qualifications for the job he is seeking.

We are headed for a train wreck. There's no other way of looking at it. Which is precisely why it's so important for Christians to keep our eyes on Jesus. We are not of this world. We are mere pilgrims and our goal is eternity. That said, it is vital in these times to be people of humility, compassion and love -- qualities that emulate our Savior, Jesus Christ, and are in such short supply of the men and women seeking higher office in this country.

I've come to the conclusion that to take this country back, I have to take matters into my own hands. It's time to get serious. I started doing some math this morning and I have a plan. So Sabo kids, all 14 of you, listen up. We have a duty to this country. It's restore America time. It's time to produce. Literally.

Here's the plan: We're going to become a super-duper voting bloc. If things go right, we could become the most powerful voting bloc in the country. Forget unions and special interests and all that jazz. The Sabo voting bloc is going to be a force to be reckoned with.

If each succeeding generation of Sabos steps up to the plate, we can turn this country around. The only question is if the Lord will return before then -- I'm all for it! -- or if we'll run out of time and the Trumpification and Clintonification of America will be entrenched.

The plan works like this: If each of our kids has 14 kids, then their kids have 14 kids and on down the line, do you realize that within six generations there could be 16 million of us? Yes, I said that correctly. Sixteen million Sabos ... that's more than the current populations of Kansas, Wyoming, both of the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Nebraska and Utah, with Delaware thrown in for good measure -- combined.

American maps could someday show a huge swath of the West, plus a little outpost on the East Coast,  that reads simply, "Sabo Territory." But there's the thing. With just a little bit of help, we could accelerate this process. For example, my man in Lebanon, Ore., Brian Murray and his lovely bride Tonia Murray, announced they are having twin boys. So cool! These are the 9th and 10th Murrays and as crazy as it sounds, this puts them on the same pace we were at their young age.

Brian, are you with me? Do you want to put American on the straight and narrow? Let's "Restore America!"

For every American, an epic road trip is a citizenship requirement

The amazing Vermilion Cliffs of Arizona. At 70 mph from the highway. Shot with an iPhone.

The quintessential American experience is the epic road trip. It's as simple as the fact that we are Americans. So we go places and do things, often on an epic scale. I would suggest that you are un-American if you don't. The epic road trip is in our blood. Our collective American DNA is that we are a nation of explorers. The New World. Jamestown. John Smith. The Mayflower. Lewis & Clark. The Oregon Trail. Apollo 11. (Going to the moon constitutes a most epic road trip. It would be hard to top that one.)

The epic road trip is a distinctly American rite of passage. It is a continuation of the historical narrative that establishes us as a people of varying backgrounds but who singularly refuse to be hemmed in by lines on a map, or distance, or barriers -- be they mountains, valleys, oceans, rivers, deserts or thin air, including the really, really thin air and rather expansive and even foreboding distances of outer space.

We all are descended from people who arrived here from somewhere else. Our ancestors were explorers and fortune hunters. They were the restless, the visionaries, the determined and the undaunted. If they determined a better life was to be found elsewhere, whether it was across an ocean, or a continent, or simply somewhere else, why they packed up and went.

I like to pack up and went. I always have, from the time I was a little shaver and summers and Christmas vacation were typically reserved for road trips. In the grand scheme of things, my roots are traced back to people of European stock who at some point packed up and went on a road trip -- ocean trip? -- to America. I have no desire as they did to leave the homeland. Rather, I long to see the homeland. As much of it as I can.

What triggered all this musing about the great American experience of the epic road trip is a song. I happened upon it the other day and a memory flooded back in my mind of one of the many epic road trips I have had the privilege of taking. The song is by U2, titled "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." It was released in 1987, the year I graduated from Bend High School.

The summer following my graduation, my good friend, Chris Hamilton, asked if I'd take a little road trip with him. Chris was a talented bicyclist and my memory is that he was going to compete in a bike race in Mammoth Lakes, Calif. I think it was late June, maybe early July, when we road tripped in epic fashion. Chris, our mutual friend Dean Dilday, another bicyclist who was a couple or few years younger than us, and I set out from Bend, Ore., to  drive 570 miles or so to Mammoth Lakes. I believe we were driving Chris' Toyota pickup that had a canopy on it. Now mind you, this is approaching 30 years ago so I may be fuzzy on a few things. But not everything.

We listened to a lot of U2 on that trip. The Joshua Tree, which I still consider the quintessential U2 album, was released that year and by the time the summer rolled around I had the songs memorized. Those songs are indelibly impressed in my mind. As is the road trip.

One thing I'll never forget is stepping out the door for my first run in Mammoth Lakes. At the time I was a couple of months away from heading to the University of Portland on a track scholarship. In Bend, I trained at an altitude approaching 4,000 feet, where the thin air deprived my lungs of oxygen but helped give me a competitive advantage when I raced at lower altitudes. I was fast and fit. Or so I thought.

I was wholly unprepared for what I was to encounter in Mammoth Lakes. Sitting near 8,000 feet of elevation where the air is so thin that simply getting out of bed gets you winded, when I was on that inaugural run I sincerely believed my lungs had somehow caught fire. Surely I was self-combusting, which meant death by oxygen-deprivation was imminent. Yet I somehow cheated death that day, probably because I slowed way down. But the epicness of any American road trip is directly proportional to how close you came to some sort of permanent and premature demise. The fact that I nearly died of oxygen deprivation on a mountain in California that sits not all that far from Death Valley counts for max points in the epic road trip scoring chart.

Yet there are two things from that road trip that I am forever grateful to have experienced. A premature death due to oxygen deprivation not being one of them. They both occurred on the trip home. We left Mammoth Lakes after the racing and bolted for Bend. Somewhere along the way, whether it was still in northeastern California or southeastern Oregon I can't recall, we stopped at a turnout or rest area amid the sagebrush and occasional juniper tree of the American West's Great Basin. It's a place that I like to say is a chlorophyll-free zone, emptied of most anything of a green, leafy nature and populated by the muted tones of plants and trees that have mastered the art of surviving in forbidding climates where water is often merely a mirage.

Exhausted, we bedded down for the night in the cool, open air. Above us, unfolding across the unfettered horizon, was the Milky Way in all of its astounding glory. The stars at home in their extraterrestrial glory spilled across the inky sky, lighting it up. I have never forgotten the glory of it all.

The second thing I have not forgotten occurred the next day. As we made a beeline for home across the emptied out landscape, we made a spur of the moment decision. The "spur of the moment decision" is an absolute requirement of any epic road trip. An epic road trip that lacks the suspended judgment and inadvisability of a "spur of the moment decision" is simply a road trip. It's just going from Point A to Point B. There's nothing too epic about that.

We stopped at Fort Rock, an extraordinary natural feature that juts 200 feet above the barren, foreboding Oregon High Desert. It's like a mirage, an ancient fort with rocky palisades stretching high above landscape. It was well out of our way, but well worth the stop. We killed an afternoon there, three teenage boys who, for at least this one time, were wise beyond their years. We climbed over the rocky walls -- Dean pretty much won the climbing competition as he shinnied up the walls -- and gawked at the views. It is a place very few have seen and experienced, which makes it all the better. On the epic road trip point scale, we scored a big, fat cha-ching. Link: Fort Rock

As the memories of my epic summer of 1987 road trip flooded back to me, spurred by the chords and lyrics of that iconic U2 anthem, I thought how fitting it all remains. I haven't found everything. I haven't seen everything. I'm not done making epic road trips. I'm an American after all.

What I Learned About Buying Local In A Third World Country

Local charcoal sellers. Just not the right ones.

I've traveled to Haiti twice on short-term missions trips, part of a Christian non-profit organization working to establish post-secondary, Bible-based computer training schools. Each time I traveled with a friend from America to the north coast city of Cap-Haitien, home to more than 300,000 people.

Just a two-hour flight from the American wealth and comfort of Ft. Lauderdale or Miami, Fla., flying into Cap-Haitian is akin to dropping off the end of the world. The poverty is mind-blowing, the city nothing short of an intense experience of sights, sounds and smells.

From the sky as you descend the horizon is filled with thin columns of smoke rising from the countryside that's home to innumerable crude, tin-roof homes. Alongside the airport runway is a collection of wrecked, inoperable airplanes. It's not exactly the type of welcome you'd expect from the Cap-Haitien Chamber of Commerce. When you step out of the plane, you're hit with a blast of heat and humidity and you have to get used to sweating because you've pretty much left air conditioning behind.

Everywhere you go in the city you'll find the charm of colorful French colonial architecture reminiscent of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Yet the streets are often lined with garbage and everywhere is the pervasive aroma of smoke -- fire is used to cook food in homes and along the streets and burn trash in smoldering heaps -- mixed with the combination of rotting refuse and sewage. And always the streets are filled with people. Extraordinary amounts of people clogging the sidewalks and spilling into the road. It's a very young collection of people -- 55 percent of the population is under the age of 25 -- and a very poor collection of people where 80 percent of them live in poverty and more than half live in abject poverty.

Vendors line the streets and jam the alleys, selling all manner of clothes, shoes, food, medicines, household cleaning products, soaps, shampoos and everything else. It's like a roofless Wal-Mart Supercenter -- Haitian-style -- everywhere you go. And they sell charcoal. Lots of charcoal.

Haiti has largely been stripped of its trees, hacked down and burned to charcoal that fuels the fires used to cook the food that attempts rather futilely to feed the 10 million Haitians. It's an environmental disaster, but in a country where electricity is basically a luxury -- a very undependable one at that -- fire and the charcoal to produce those flames is absolutely essential.

Largely like fuel in America, charcoal is a commodity that is central to the local economy. There are  fuel stations, but supply can be sketchy, it's almost a luxury in the impoverished nation and you have to get used to seeing guards armed with automatic rifles and shotguns guarding the pumps against thieves.

Each time I've been to Haiti I've had the privilege of being hosted by the same friend, a dear Haitian man who is kind, generous, gracious and everything you'd want in a host. I've stayed with local families and experienced first-hand Haitian life in what I'd call a middle-class setting. Check out this video I shot and edited: Life in Haiti

On my last trip to Haiti, one afternoon the house we were staying at on the edge of the city was short of charcoal. So my friend offered to go buy some. I figured it was a short trip into the city to one of the ubiquitous roadside purveyors to secure a big bag of charcoal. I was wrong. As we journeyed ever farther into the Haitian countryside to find the right charcoal, I learned three things about what it means to truly buy local. And I think the lessons I learned on that day apply to the American ideal of buying local.

1) It's about relationship: Buying charcoal in Haiti should be easy. It's everywhere in the city. Buying charcoal from vendors lining the streets is as simple as buying food in America, whether it's a grocery store, restaurant or convenience store. If you have even a little bit of money you won't go hungry in America -- although you very likely won't be eating nutritious food. But on this particular day we were on a mission. We were going hard-core local charcoal buying.

We traveled probably an hour-and-a-half or more deep into the Haitian countryside for our charcoal. I was seeing signs for the Dominican Republic, that's how far we went. It's like driving 90 minutes to a 7-Eleven for a hot dog and passing dozens of 7-Elevens along the way. We drove past charcoal sellers at road junctions, past them in the town of Limonade, past them in no-man's land on the highway. Somewhere just west of the Dominican Republic we stopped on the road. Down a long driveway I saw a cinder block house with a tin roof, pretty much like a thousand other cinder block houses with a tin roof we passed on the drive.

Our host made a quick phone call. Down the driveway came some women and young kids trundling charcoal crammed into bags like you'd find at Home Depot loaded with 50 lbs. of grass seed. In went two and then three bags of charcoal, along with ants and other bugs on the bags. There were exchanges of warm greetings, the exchange of Haitian money and then the women and kids peered into the SUV I was riding in, apparently awed and humored by the sight of a couple of white guys -- me and my American friend I was traveling with.

After some more small talk we headed back to our home in Cap-Haitien. Past the women and children washing clothes in the muddy river, over the speed bumps that appeared out of nowhere in the road, past the droves of people waiting for rides along the road, past the myriad charcoal sellers, past the naked man with no legs next to an overturned wheelchair. (We passed him both ways. The first time I asked if we should stop and help him. No response. On the way back again I inquired about him and my host gave us the indication the man was crazy and we continued on. Some things from Haiti you never forget. And will never understand.)

I never got the full story of why we went so far for our charcoal. I can only surmise that it was extremely high-quality charcoal sold by people very dear to our host. Or maybe it was just your average charcoal sold by people very dear to our host. Whatever the case, it was very important to him that we get that charcoal from those people. It was about the relationship and about how much it meant to that family. Our trip probably meant they'd eat fairly well for a while. In a world of Amazon and Jet.com and Wal-Mart, there's a lot to be said for supporting the local economy. Whether it's the family-run business in your town or in the Haitian outback.

2) It's about determination. As you read in the previous paragraphs, our charcoal-buying venture was quite the journey. It took determination. It took resolve. Obviously it cost extra. But the final result is that our host was happy, an entire family supplying the charcoal was happy and the people we delivered the charcoal to were happy. Everybody wins. That's the way it should be, even if it requires a little more time, effort and money.

3) It's about the trickle-down effect. A family way out in the Haitian countryside suddenly had money. The kids we saw were literally dressed in rags. They were dirty. The house was primitive. But that family suddenly had an infusion of cash. They could buy food from someone out there in similar circumstances. Or catch a ride from one of the "tap-tap" drivers passing by on the highway looking for customers. Or buy a shirt for a kid. Or whatever. The point is that in a place of desperation there was a glimmer of hope. Things got a little better. I wrote before that some things in Haiti you never forget. One thing I'll never forget is being hot, sweaty and confused, but pulling away from a house in the middle-of-nowhere Haiti and waving to a group of smiling and laughing women and children. With an SUV full of charcoal.

The Dad Handbook: Are We Sabotaging Our Families?

Kids these days have no idea how real the struggle used to be.

Recently while surfing the internet, er rather while (cough, cough) "working" quite vigorously doing "research" for my job, I came across a fascinating manual. It was a World War II manual developed in 1944 by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services -- the precursor to the CIA. The manual is a guide for Allied spies and members of resistance groups on how to sabotage the Axis war effort from within.

It's an intriguing read and I found page 28 particularly interesting. It's a section titled "General Interference with Organizations and Production" and outlines basically how workers friendly to the Allied war effort can ensure that nothing gets done at Axis plants and manufacturing facilities producing materials for the war effort.

There's a number of articles out in the cybersphere on how page 28 of the "General Interference with Organizations and Production" speaks quite accurately to problems encountered in the workplace with employees who are expert at making sure nothing gets done. After studying page 28 closely, I came to a rather sobering revelation.

I'm nothing more than a member of the resistance -- a spy as it were! -- who is effectively limiting the effectiveness of the well-oiled Sabo Family machine. I assure you it is unintentional. I also assure you that I am not alone in the world of Dadness in adhering unwittingly to insurrectionist behavior. Let's inspect page 28 of the manual on a point-by-point basis as proof.

1) "Insist on doing everything through `channels.' Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions."

--I pronounce myself guilty. Let me give you an example. Take lawn mowing. Every self-respecting Dad lawn mowing expert knows that it's not just a job. It's an art form of the highest calling. There are procedures, there are lists, there are unwritten rules of lawn mowing. There are NO shortcuts in lawn mowing. The air pressure of each tire must be expertly calibrated, oil level gauged, gas checked, blade inspected for sharpness and the lawn physically walked and inspected almost on a blade by blade level to ensure there are no foreign objects, toys, rodent-like creatures such as squirrels and even small children in the way that could obstruct the precision lawn mowing effort. And under no circumstances can the lawn mowing lines be anything but perfectly straight.

So what happens when I turn over the lawn mowing to a teenage son, a literal "passing of the key" ceremony that is akin to lighting the torch at the Olympics? Why, he hops on the riding mower and mows the lawn 37 minutes and 48.3 seconds faster than my personal record. Did he check the gas, tire pressure, oil level, blade thickness and sharpness and walk the lawn looking for impediments like squirrels, small children and the like? No! He just got on the lawn mower and started mowing! It's utter insanity! What is the world coming to?

2) "Make `speeches,'  talk as frequently as possible and at great length, illustrate your `points' by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate 'patriotic' comments.


--The older I get, the more my kids hear the ol' "You have it so easy these days, I mean back when I was a kid" speech. It's true though! When I was a kid I really did have to walk 5 miles uphill through a cemetery in driving snowstorms just to get to school. Not only that, if I wanted to communicate with my friends, I couldn't just text, or Snapchat, or Facebook message, or Tweet, or whatever. I either had to actually remember his phone number or look it up in a "phone book" and physically dial his number on a rotary dial phone, or send a smoke signal, or physically get on my bike and physically ride it uphill for 5 miles through a blizzard to his house and wait out the snowstorm playing Space Invaders or watching Star Wars on a VCR. That's the American way I tell you! Things were so much better back then! This country -- can we pause for a moment and all sing "God Bless America" right now? -- was built on the backs of kids who knew their friends' phone numbers and have calluses on their fingers from dialing rotary dial phones and rode their bikes through blizzards to see them. And know the words to "God Bless America."

3) "When possible, refer all matters to committees, for `further study and consideration.' Attempt to make the committees as large as possible -- never less than five."


--Let me break this down quite simply for you. Say one my 20 14 kids asks me if they can do something like go hang out with a friend or see a movie. My default answer is, "Let me think about it." Which basically means that they can kiss that idea goodbye because when a thought enters my brain, there's a very high probability it will "get lost in the shuffle" and will be stranded somewhere in my gray matter for the rest of my life. And there's no getting that thought back. That baby is gone, gone, gone. The other default answer is, "Let me talk to Mama about it." That's also the kiss of death because it would require me not only to remember the request, but to actually have an actual conversation with my wife about it, which would require me to speak in complete sentences and be able to voice intelligent, coherent arguments of why I think this particular request may be a bad idea even though there's very likely absolutely nothing wrong with it and it's something as simple as, "Dad, can I play video games?" At a last resort, I can go with #2 and start in on the "You have it so easy these days, I mean back when I was a kid" speech.


4) "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible."

--I have mastered this. It's an art form. I can totally be "Mr. Irrelevant." Wait a minute, that didn't come out right. I meant to write, I can totally be "Mr. Irrelevant Information." That sounds better. I think. Anyway, what I mean to say -- hold on, out of the corner of my eye I spotted a cell phone charger that's still plugged in and is drawing juice even though there is no cell phone attached to it and I need to get to the bottom of this crime against humanity before our electrical bill spikes and I have to take a second job and an entire iceberg in Antarctica melts because we're using so much power that's generated by a coal-fired plant -- is that all dads know that being a "Dad" carries with it a great burden and requires a sharpness of mind and acuity of dexterous task completion that's bordering on complete and utter impossibility. Basically it's a miracle us Dads get anything done. Wait a minute, that didn't come out right. I meant to say -- sorry, just a minute, but someone left the jar of crunchy peanut butter on the counter and I need to interrogate every kid in this house and possibly waterboard some of them in the bathtub to find out who committed this atrocity -- that it's a miracle Dads are able to accomplish so much. (That sounds so much better!) They get it done despite all the chaos around them -- like jars of crunchy peanut butter that were left unattended on the counter and a cell phone charging cord left plugged in with no cell phone attached to it. Don't kids know these days that seal levels are rising because they are leaving cell phone cords plugged in for no apparent reason? It's outrageous!

Coming tomorrow: Breaking down the final 4 points of page 28 of the  "General Interference with Organizations and Production" manual.

A Transformational Thanksgiving in Nigeria

It is the wee hours of Thanksgiving in America, but here at 7:30 a.m. Jos, Nigeria, I am chugging a bottle of “F.A.M. Vita” vanilla yoghurt in a dark guest house room without power. The pervasive, acrid smell of campfire smoke – people still cook with fire here and you can drive down the street and see garbage burning – lingers with me, as always. Outside my open window I can hear the noise of the bustling city: cars and three-wheel motorized buggies zipping down the street, horns honking, people talking and someone on an air horn announcing something. I am thankful.

I am here on a mission trip with the Transformational Education Network. I have traveled with our CEO, Joe Gallop, who presented at a symposium yesterday and discussed technology and transformational education. More than 100 educators and students attended and both Joe and I are very pleased with how things went. The Lord truly blessed it and I met a young man with a communications degree who I hope will help me with gathering photos, video and stories from here in Jos at the school we partner with, E.I.C.T. that I can use in my TEN3 communications.
 
Today we will be attending a workshop where Joe will speak on “Essential Values in Transformational Education.” It’s the first of a two-day workshop and we are looking forward to seeing what the Lord will do today. Yesterday went very well and we were able to connect with a number of educators interested in the Transformational Education Network curriculum and our method of education. One of the things that appears to be coming out of this trip is forming a network of schools – private, government and others – that can act as a forum and exchange of information, ideas and solutions to help achieve transformational education. Our role will be as facilitators and advisors and we will be working on how best to accomplish this exchange of information.

Tomorrow I will be traveling several hours with an American missionary named Eric Black to his post in Billiri in Gombe State. I should say that Lord willing, I will go. I have to check with the SIM security director to discuss whether I should go due to concerns about safety in that area. I think everything will be fine and it will be good to travel with Eric, meet his family and learn about the education center he is operating in Billiri.

After I return, probably on Monday, Joe and I will be traveling to the communities of Zonkwa, Kwoi and Kubacha (I think I got those right) southwest of Jos in the neighboring state of Kaduna to explore the potential for launching TEN3 computer training outreach programs. We also were invited by one of the educators at the symposium to visit her private secondary school here in Jos, so it looks like we will be heading over there as well.

As for my general experience here in Nigeria, I have to say I have met some wonderful people. They are universally friendly to me, greeting me with big grins. Whenever we exchange greetings people often reply with “Welcome sir. Thank you sir. Welcome sir.” It makes me smile. The traffic is crazy, the police are everywhere and they carry AK-47s. It’s the dry season here on the Nigerian Plateau so it’s dusty, hot during the day in the 80s (I’m not complaining!) and cool in the night down to the 50s.

On the 4-hour plus drive Monday morning up to Jos from Abuja, where we landed Sunday evening and spent the night, we traveled through at least a half-dozen and probably closer to 10, military checkpoints. Soldiers with AK-47s manned the checkpoints, I’m assuming because the area has seen its share of Muslim-Christian conflict. Boko Haram, the Muslim terrorist group, operates in the area occasionally and more than 100 people were killed earlier this year when they set off bombs in the bustling outdoor market that’s several blocks from the compound where we are staying here in Jos. Mostly we were just waved through the checkpoints, though a few stopped us simply to chat, it seems. One engaged us in conversation and our driver, Audu, asked the soldier if he was born again. We talked about being born again, Jesus, salvation and he said he was born again. He was quite offended we didn’t have our Bibles with us in the car – they were in our luggage in the back. I’m glad he didn’t shoot us. (Just kidding!) At another checkpoint a soldier asked Joe and me where we were from. When he found out we were Americans he said he wants to go there someday. What he really wanted, though, was for us to bring him a white American wife. I told him I could see what I could do and maybe make that happen. He got a big grin and then reached in the car and we “pounded” fists. It’s the first time I’ve ever pounded fists with an AK-47-toting Nigerian soldier manning a highway checkpoint. I have to admit it was a pretty special moment.
I have many more stories to tell, but we’ll save those for other times. Blessings to you all this Thanksgiving.

Fighting Ebola Empty-Handed And A World Away

Imagine a world where you can't leave your house because death lurks outside the door. Imagine a world where the body of your neighbor rots in the stifling heat and gathers flies inside her door and no one comes to take it away for a proper burial because surely they would die as well. It's hard to imagine because we can't. It's virtually impossible for us in America to take our mind to a place where life is truly but a vapor, a visible wisp of matter that can be extinguished seemingly in an instant.

This is life across a wide swath of West Africa, where the ebola virus has brought death to the doors of thousands of families in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. We've all read or heard the reports of ebola through media, with the latest alarming news that more than 1 million people could be afflicted with the virus by early next year. My personal knowledge of ebola comes through Rev. Samuel Kargbo, a minister in Sierra Leone who we have been working with in TEN3 (I am communications manager for the Transformational Education Network, or TEN3) to establish one of our computer training outreach classes at his school. Those plans have been put on hold as the ebola crisis deepens in Sierra Leone.

Last week, I received an email from Rev. Kargbo, who thanked me for praying for him and his family. It is a very terrible thing to see neighbors around you dying from a disease, he wrote. So far, he has lost three close relatives who live nearby. There are many dead bodies lying in houses -- four, more or less, in some houses, he wrote.

Rev. Kargbo continues: "The sad thing that has happened is this: since as I told you last the government could not meet the needs of the affected cases, quarantined families, the wife of my relative who died yesterday, his 22-month-old daughter, and two ward children have left the house without being quarantined. Who knows what may happen to the people they come in contact with? We pray that they never contracted the virus, but if they did, then it is obvious they will definitely pass the virus to other people."

Rev. Kargbo describes how the surviving relatives scattered to different parts of the city and country the morning of Sept. 23. He also describes what has transpired over the past two weeks. "Five people have died in connection to the same first victim that died on Wednesday, September 10," he writes. "Two of the women are neighbors who took care of the corpse before burial. We called the 117 number that is given to us and the burial team's number but nobody came to bury the first corpse.

"We (my wife and I) have discussed about how we could intervene but we could not because the lady had left the house this morning before we could send food stuff there. We have called her to come back to the house as soon as possible so that we could share from the little that we have. That is what the Bible says is true religion, taking care of the orphans and widows. As stated earlier, due to several factors, the citizens’ needs could not be adequately addressed in this crisis time, except friends and relatives step in to alleviate the suffering and deaths. One corpse that is said to have died four days before the burial team came to collect it and one infected person were collected three days ago close to our house. We do not want to do that but we have restricted the inflow of children into our compound to play. One way that we could be further involved in helping to save lives, especially lives of those relative who have left for the village, the wife and the baby is by assisting them with food items and restrict their movements for three weeks and see if they will report sick. If any one of them reports sick we will guide them going to the hospital for the test to find out if it is ebola. According to the teaching we receive, early detection and early treatment gives hope to the affected victim to survive."

He closes the email by saying he has temporarily closed his school for three weeks to assess the situation. At that point he will reassess the crisis and determine if the school should remain closed. So far, three of his students have fallen ill, Rev. Kargbo wrote. None of them have ebola, however.

I have asked him how I can help but the situation is so dire and chaotic in Sierra Leone that it doesn't appear there's anything I can do. Except pray. This week, my supporting agency for my mission work, Serving In Mission, has called for believers to have a week of prayer for the end of the ebola crisis in West Africa. Remember people such as Rev. Kargbo in your prayers. Remember the countries of West Africa. Remember Psalm 46:1: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble."

An American Journey: A Family's Trip Across The U.S.

                                         The Grand Canyon

Our summer road trip is in the bag.  Twenty-seven days, 8,100 miles, 18 states, one astonishing national park and a million memories. We traveled to Oregon and back in just under four weeks, one big family in one big van. At times our journey was a blur -- the 710-mile drive with just one stop on our last day from Franklin, Tenn. to home comes to mind -- and yet so many other times I wanted time to stop, the sun or moon to stand absolutely still in what seemed like a perfect moment. The few brief hours at the Grand Canyon come to mind. Plenty of other moments come to mind: An evening in the cool summer air of Kanab, Utah; the mind-boggling fireworks from a distant lightning storm lighting up the New Mexico sky; the view from Highway 89 where the Vermilion Cliffs jut up from Highway 89 in Arizona after we had touched the clouds on a 7,000-foot mountain pass.

                                          Kanab, Utah

The American West is absolutely alluring. The sky is so big and blue, the canyons are carved so deep into the earth and the mountains seem to kiss the sun. The landscape alternates between the staggeringly harsh and forbidding deserts and lovely and inviting river valleys. So many times I found myself thanking God for allowing me to take the trip and share it with my family. We enjoyed reunions with so many family members, friends and supporters of ours in our mission work with TEN3 (www.ten3.org) that were most often all too brief. We made new friends and acquaintances all across the country, often of people staggered by the amount of booths we took up at restaurants, or who we encountered during a picnic on the road, or at some other family excursion. Sometimes we spied them giggling as we spilled out of the van as they watched a seemingly endless supply of Sabo lads and lasses.

                                          On a farm near McMinnville, Ore.

Our great adventure has come to a close, but I am so thankful to God that He allowed us to enjoy this time as a family. We're at a point where our older kids are forging their own paths. We managed to enjoy parts of this trip with almost all of our kids and I'm very thankful for that. We'll tell the stories of our cross-country trip for years to come, sharing laughs about what happened when Seth hopped on the teeter-totter in Weatherford, Okla. Or how Gabe and Abram and their little brothers tried to catch steelhead salmon with their hands in a small tributary of the Clackamas River. We'll relive Judah's hurling incident in Dickson, Tenn., or chasing a bull down country roads in VanLeer, Tenn., or scrambling over the rocks atop the Grand Canyon cliffs. I can still picture the vineyards cascading down the cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge, the blueberries bigger than quarters in Grandma and Grandpa Young's back yard, and the sight of the range fire in the arid Eastern Oregon hills above Interstate 84 that had ranchers on ATVs herding their cattle to safe ground. And I'll always remember the countless smiles and laughter from a family having the time of its life.