Chuck Allen Story - Divine Calling Chuck Allen: You know a lot of kids don't realize how difficult their life is until after they become adults and can step back and see. When I left Kansas City, I went to Manhattan, Kansas. It was such a different environment. You know the people in Manhattan and K-State were mostly friendly, they spoke to me, they asked me things about my life and I wasn't, I was no longer watching my back you know, I wasn't defensive about everything that I was doing or everything that I said and I didn't have to go around with a group of people with me. And so when I came back to Kansas City I didn't want to be back here. I didn't want to be back surrounded by all the bad things that were happening. As a matter of fact, I came back from K-State one Christmas break at a party here in Kansas City with some of my friends and ruckus broke out and somebody pulled out a gun and started firing. Everybody hit the floor and after I hit the floor I immediately stood back up and began shouting at all the people in that room asking, why am I back in the city, why am I here, what am I doing back in a place where death is always occurring, and it's all these fights and my friends were trying to pull me down to get down and take cover. And I was so upset at the things that were occurring in my city, my neighborhood that I didn't want to come back. You know I was I was working on my degree in graphic design and I needed a job and I had swore I'd never come back to Wyandotte County, but my stepfather worked for the county and he said I can get you a job, so he got me a job at the juvenile detention center in Wyandotte County. And when I came back I was not there for more than a couple of weeks before I knew I was supposed to be working with kids. And my heart started to change for the people when I realized that their circumstances are what put them in this position. The family dynamic, the neighborhood, the guns, the drugs, whatever it is, most of those kids in the juvenile detention center had parents who were either upstairs in the county jail or in another penal system, state penitentiary, federal penitentiary. And I knew that if we could put different people around them, if we could show them a different way, that their lives would be different. That was another thing that really changed my heart for this community. Teaching in Blue Valley, we had everything we needed. We had parents who would tell me if you if you ever need anything and they would say and I mean anything, you just let us know because they wanted their students to have whatever it took, whatever they, whatever they needed to be successful and so we had TV, phone, color printers, we had three computer labs in the middle school where I was teaching. And I decided I'm gonna go back to my old elementary school and show the teachers what I've become, because growing up in a family without a father and having people tell me what I should be doing and then telling them you're not my authority. Again, I got a lot of trouble. So I said let me go back and show the teachers. So I walk into the school and there's the small dimly lit hallways and I've ventured through the hallways to the library and see that the library is smaller than a normal sized classroom in the school where I was teaching. There were books on a cart, there was art supplies on a cart, and I realized how uneven the playing field was. I mean that, it really hit me about the difference in education and that played a key role to helping me understand that more needed to be done to help these students to understand they can achieve on a higher level but they need to have a vision of what that looks like. There was a professor from KU they found out about our ministry. She invited me to come up to KU and she had her PhD students come to this meeting and she wanted me to present what we were doing at the Urban Scholastic Center and our vision for the Urban Scholastic Center, and by that time it was all laid out. And we talked about the Entrepreneur Avenue, we talked about schools, we talked about a center whether it be libraries and arts and all these things, and the reason was because of the hopelessness that was in our community. And we wanted to raise this level of hope and help these students understand that they could achieve on a high level, that they had the ability to do this and I sat and spoke for probably 45 minutes to this group of PhD students about our goals, our dreams and I ended and as I ended my presentation they were all in silence just staring at me. And I turned to this professor and I said, so which one of them is gonna do this and she looked at me with a confused look on her face as she said, well you are. And even at that point after the Urban Scholastic Center had started for a couple of years and after the Lord had given me the vision, I still didn't feel like I was the one who was capable to achieve this and it went back to this mentality of poverty that I'm not supposed to be a PhD student, I'm not supposed to be on this level where I can organize this or develop this. I thought surely one of you really smart people are supposed to do this and I left that meeting and the Lord spoke to me so clearly and said, if you don't believe that I've called you to do this, and my power to do this through you then you might as well go somewhere and die. And it was after that point that I realized nothing can be accomplished without the power of God, because as soon as an individual determines exactly how it's gonna be done, the resources and he has all that figured out then it's all on his strength. But when God says I brought you to this point because you're willing to be used and you have to have faith, if not in yourself in my power to work through you to accomplish these things - we move forward.