A former member of Light of Life's Board of Directors, Leo Salgado joined the Mission's senior staff in 2007 as the Director of Administration.
He brings over 15 years of business experience, a broad academic background and multi-cultural experiences living and traveling throughout Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States. Additionally, Leo serves on the board of the Beaver County Pregnancy Center and as a deacon at his local Reformed Presbyterian Church.
Why We Believe in Transformation
by Leo Salgado May 13 , 2008
At Light of Life, we’re wrestling with the idea that we should focus on organizational transformation.
Transformation is only important if we believe in the process of time. When we take time into consideration, life is about seed, death, birth, growth and fruit; it’s about reproduction. If this is true, then transforma-tion is organic. Think of the person in Psalm 1 who bears fruit in due season. Remember also how Jesus taught that people would know us by our fruit.
At Light of Life, we believe in transformation because we’re about reproduction.
What’s important about this organic reproduction process is that we never really know how fruitful we are until the end.
Think about trees. How do we value a tree? The answer may seem easy at first. The most valuable tree is one that produces fruit abundantly year after year for decades.
But what if a tree produces well for a few years and then stops? We might think it a less productive tree. However, if much of the tree’s seed took root in good soil during its producing years, then, in a way, it will continue producing offspring long after it was cut down.
This is really our hope at Light of Life—and exactly what’s been happening. We might have had good years and bad years, but many men and women who passed through our doors have allowed our seed to grow in them. They in turn have sewn, bearing fruit in other people.
Over the years, we have planted in a large field. The seed that died in many of our clients has come alive again, grown, and is now bearing much fruit for the Kingdom of God.
Transformation takes time. It’s the process of life. This is why we believe in organizational transformation.
Here's to those who have gone before us
by Leo Salgado April 4 , 2008
I’ve belonged to many organizations in my life, and there hasn’t been any better than the U.S. Marine Corps. They have many ways of building unity and “esprit de corps,” or spirit for the Corps. One such tradition is their “Mess Night.”
Only for the brotherhood, a “Mess Night” consists of getting dressed
up and enjoying a time of eating and drinking, all following a set etiquette, full of tradition. When I participated in this most memorable event, the Mess Night president gave the final toast of the evening, and invited
us all to stand up and raise our glasses “to those who have gone
before us!”
I thought it will be fitting to use the same type of toast to celebrate those who are leaving us at Light of Life. My invitation is that we all take a minute and toast their significant contribution to the cause of Christ.
This toast is praise and prayer. It’s praising God for all those whom He has sent to serve Him at Light of Life. Each one of them, in their own way, contributed to the success at Light of Life. And it’s a prayer asking God to bless them as they continue their journey in life.
Here’s, then, to these soldiers of the cross at Light of Life who have gone before us!
Here is to Nancy and Maurice, Mike and Dean, and most importantly Duane. And here’s to all those who served at Light of Life since we began our ministry. And also to all Board Members and donors who have faithfully supported us over the years.
Everyone whom God sent to serve Him at the front lines of this spiritual war made it possible for us to continue Christ’s ministry here—to the poor, addicted, abused and needy.
Let’s salute their contributions and remember their obedient service, in Jesus’ name.
What We Learned from these Human Souls in Crisis
by Leo Salgado March 3 , 2008
At Light of Life, it’s so easy to well up with overwhelming sadness while seeing the homeless go through their crises or catastrophe. At that point, we might not care what brought about their crisis. Their situation speaks to us with such clarity that it leaves us to wonder how all human souls relate to one another.
We of course have the luxury of disengaging from our view of the homeless at any time. We can turn around, do an about-face, and continue our life; perhaps thanking God we’re miles away from our crises—praying that it will never happen to us.
But for the homeless, their crisis remains whether we’re observing or not. Their crisis is real. Afterwards, when some of these homeless persons recover and return to their community, we hear about their experience. We get to hear how they strove, overcoming and carrying their soul “over the abyss of material obstacles and logical contradictions.”
Through their accounts, we learn about the power and ability of their soul to bear pain. It seems that the soul’s ability to suffer “is the achievement of the soul which anchors, so to speak, the bridges through time, fear and courage.”
We can learn a lot about the human soul in these accounts. We learn that they need other souls standing alongside to help them. Although their struggle with their own soul required all the courage and fear they could master, the help of other souls relieved some of their burdens.
Other souls counterbalanced their own soul’s ability to suffer, helping them endure their crisis. “Souls joining together relieve the excess pressure of the world.” Without this excess pressure, they gained enough ground to overcome their crisis.
Regardless of what those who preach egoism tell us, we need each other in this life. In fact, it’s hard to define who we are without remembering that we’re made in part to be one with others.
Who are we that God called us to do this work?
by Leo Salgado February 8 , 2008
But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?
And God said, “I will be with you.” (Exodus 3:11-12)
At Light of Life, we know that God called us as “baptized Samaritans” to do His work among the poor, addicted, abused, and needy.
But what does it mean to be called by God?
God calls us, just as He called Moses. And if Moses had to ask, “Who am I,” then we have even more reason to ask that question. After all, we’re not being asked to do anything as daunting as Moses. But God still answers us in the same way: “I will be with you.”
Does God answer that question?
He does. Who are we? We’re men and women whom God is with. God has covenanted to stand with us in our confrontation with the world. So, we’re Yahweh’s men and women. That’s who we are.
Because God called us, God is with us. Should this make a difference?
It does — it has to. For starters, we belong to the future, not the past. Like Jesus, we’re not motivated by fear, self-interest or pity to work with the homeless. No, our reasons have to do with the future — the future that Jesus has already redeemed for the homeless as well as the rest of us. We are, as Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy puts it, “visible, yet unpredictable; unforeseen, yet foretold.”
We have no qualms about letting the Spirit shine through us. We seek transparency and visibility. We let people see us just the way we are. We’re not afraid to be human with all our weaknesses and ugliness. Yet our results are always unpredictably greater than we or anyone hopes for. It always surprises us. They’re unforeseen.
We work knowing we’re continually producing these kinds of results because we’re Yahweh’s people. That has been foretold. Yahweh’s people have an advocate in Jesus, “Who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us.”
As long as we’re Yahweh’s people, we hope in doing mighty good works among the homeless.
True Soldiers of the Cross
by Leo Salgado January 25, 2008
As I get to know the work of Light of Life more deeply, I’m continually impressed by the wisdom its staff members have acquired over the years. No doubt that wisdom has come from God. Now this wisdom is theirs, and they use it well. And my bet is that you won’t find this wisdom in secular sociological, psychological or counseling texts.
From what I’ve gathered so far, this wisdom comes out of their experiences, wrestling with their real world and cries to God for help . . . as they seek to help the abused, addicted, poor and needy.
What’s important is that they (at one time or another) responded to God in spite of knowing that God was going to change them. They committed to doing God’s work with such difficult people whose burdens had gotten them thrown out of all their other social relations.
I’m sure there were times that many of the staff had to ask each other why they had committed themselves to such difficult and seemingly futile work. After all, their work has been extremely difficult. They’ve jeopardized their financial future and, in some cases, even their families. It has been a costly commitment!
But they responded to God’s calling and believed that creating a “corporate community of named individuals is more sacred and deserving of concern and obligation than are the paradoxes and anxieties surrounding the dark nights and moments of individual souls alienated and estranged from their fellowmen.”
They believe in personal sacrifice, worship, devotion and exuberance. They risk their inner peace to help those outside reach a better tomorrow. These are true soldiers of the cross.
And God has blessed them over the years.
What a Piece of Work We Are
by Leo Salgado January 15, 2008
No doubt there is something intrinsically wrong with humankind. In my life, I’ve known too many men and women who created their own tragic ends.
In fact, we’re each prone to making tragic ends to our lives. We’ve seen this tendency throughout history. Shakespeare’s said it right:
“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?” (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 1)
But do we agree with Shakespeare about human nature? “That there is ultimately nothing higher in human life than to enjoy the empty, self-deceiving exercise of egotism, followed by death,” as Hamlet might be going on to suggest in this wonderful passage.
We seem to know God at our core. We know we belong to Him because He created us in His image. But how easily we get lost as we follow the direction of our own heart! How far we travel away from Him and suffer the consequences!
On the other hand, what great potential we have! We have the potential to lose ourselves in selflessness. We can subdue our egotism and balance it with love, faith and hope that only come from our champion Jesus Christ.
At Light of Life, it’s hard to forget the reality of our human condition, but it’s equally hard to ignore our potential in Christ.
By grace through faith, men and women—this quintessence of dust—are able to turn from their egotism and find their God-created self. It is in this self that they find unity with God and unity with the rest of humanity. And in their unity now restored, at least in part, the homeless become what God created them for: nobility, as they become princes and princesses of the Most High God, Our Lord.
It’s a marvel to see God work this way through people.
In Love with Jesus
by Leo Salgado January 2, 2008
Over the years, I’ve gotten to know Jesus the person. It’s been hard for me to know Him personally because I’ve been interested mostly in what He said.
There are of course no other words like Jesus’ words. He speaks with authority because He knows His world. After all, He created it. He ordered it into existence—all of it, including humankind.
In a significant way, then, to know His words is to know Him. When we love Him, we love His word. But I think we can also know Him as a person. Once we begin doing that, we find that the Jesus of the Gospels had no real precedent in history.
He is a unique person in all of our history. He combines in perfect balance the four attributes we intuitively love most about a person: “He displays strength, order, compassion and understanding in perfect equation.”
He is the embodiment of wholeness. “He himself represents that state of totality to which all human beings can aspire. This was why His ‘first commandment’ to His followers was that they must love God with the same equation of attributes: with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength.”
What’s most incredible about Jesus is what happened at His death. “Although the dark power may have managed to kill Him in His earthly outward state, this is not His true identity, which lies in the fact that He is so completely at one with the Self: that totality which is eternal and which cannot be destroyed.”
At Light of Life, Jesus is our champion. He is the person we want to follow, admire and aspire to be like. But most importantly, we know He is the way, the truth and the life. And we know that no one can approach God unless we participate in His death and resurrection.
Success Relying in This Power
by Leo Salgado December, 2007
People in need have choices. Reputable studies tell about people around the world who, after experiencing disintegration, transformed their lives by relying on ideas and events.
The power of these ideas and events has no geographical or religious boundaries. For instance, Buddhists have withdrawn from the brutal outside world full of confusion and suffering to their inner eye and have found integration, peace and love. They’ve found order in nonresistance and non-fighting.
Taoists have withdrawn from their competing and destructive desires to become whole and content in self-effacement and namelessness. They’ve become as the hub of a wheel: “motionless . . . an effortless center of non-activity on which all things turn . . . They’ve become winners by doing nothing. They’ve become good at subtracting day by day.”
Jews have relied on Abraham and historical promises to find shalom. They’ve found that in their hour of desperation, they can trust the God who created the world, and are thus able to unite all their divided loyalties. They’ve found peace in becoming a helpless and weak refugee in the hands of God.
We at Light of Life rely on the sacrifice of the only person—Jesus—who makes complete sense of life and gives it meaning. We’ve seen what Jesus’ death and resurrection does to those who participate in them. They’ve become inspired as they invest in the future, because Jesus has opened up to them the power that survives death.
By participating in His sacrificial death and resurrection, all those who come to Light of Life for help see the power that makes them able to begin each day anew like a newborn child. Jesus has redeemed mere birth for them by revealing it as the fruit of their death.
This power can be given by no other idea, religion or event. And it’s for this reason we want to invest so much to help Pittsburgh’s homeless, abused, addicted and poor.
One Unexpected Kindness Transforms a Life
by Leo Salgado October 23, 2007
Most people hold their lives together by sheer willpower. Suppressing the truth, they do everything possible to keep their lives together without God. And most of them do that very well, or so it seems from a distance.
But for others, there comes a time when his or her experiences turn to increasingly “painful conflicts of their egos-values-groups with one another. These conflicts rob the individual of his peace of mind, elementary comfort, and happiness.”
“The person’s unity increasingly deteriorates. He turns into a self-contradictory, confused, and frustrated ‘sick soul.’ Now deeply depressed, now irritated, he experiences life as increasingly painful and meaningless. Escape from such an inner anarchy becomes an overpowering urge and commanding necessity.”
This is how the notable Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, in his book The Ways and Power of Love, describes those who later on their lives became examples of selfless love. They were completely transformed.
But this is also an accurate description of some of our homeless. How many homeless in the Pittsburgh area will turn out to be champions of love?
We at Light of Life know it takes the Spirit’s intervention and our help to answer that question.
Sorokin’s extensive study of the ways and power of love found out that there were several human habits that precipitate this type of transformation. One of them is an “unexpected kindness or unmerited love towards the future convert, especially when he had reason to expect hate, anger, retaliation, and the like on the part of the other party.”
As difficult as this is, we at Light of Life are determined to show more unexpected kindness and unmerited love towards the homeless every day to see what happens.
How Is a Person's "Torn to Pieces Hood"
Ever Unified?
by Leo Salgado September 26, 2007
I know the homeless only from a distance. But what I perceive right away is their loneliness. There they are by themselves—defeated by the brokenness of their situation.
Entrapped in themselves, they’ve become isolated—occupying a tiny space in God’s world. They’ve abandoned the crusades they belonged to; the groups or teams they’ve worked with or played with; and their ideas, hobbies, friends, and acquaintances they loved and were tight with.
Now, outside of everything they were, they are helpless to keep their souls together.
And they need their soul whole. It’s their power to fight their way through difficult situations. For to “survive and to permeate different phases, different aggregate statuses, different blends, childhood, work, play, politics, momentary sensations, and long-time sufferings is the essential quality of the human soul.”
How is a person’s “torn-to-pieces-hood” ever unified?
It’s difficult to help people with a fragmented soul, but Light of Life in Christ’s name offers them a helping hand. We offer them a portal to unify their soul again. We invite them to join our group, for them to unite themselves to Christ, and for them to belong to the Holy Spirit’s crusade in history. As they join back into humanity, they have access to the powerful forces which are hope, faith and love.
With these forces in their soul, they are ready to hear their name called. Light of Life’s intension is to call them by name to responsibility again as people with worth and integrity.
We know that “as long as a man remains able to hear his name called out with the full vigor of his first day, he has not disintegrated into a bundle of contradictions. For when the name is called for the right thing at the right moment, a man’s mind lights up, his legs move, his heart beats, his whole being is hot through with new life in every direction.”
Where You Can Experience a Good Story
by Leo Salgado September 7, 2007
I love a good story.
There seems to be only a few types of stories that engross us and leave us with a lasting impression. It’s as if we recognize in these few types of stories the main story of our reality in a God-created world, where humankind rebels and Christ restores us.
One of these types of stories can be described as a rebirth story. In Christopher Booker’s extraordinary book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories, he describes how in the rebirth story:
We are looking from the inside at what happens to someone when he becomes possessed by the dark part of himself.
We see him passing into the grip of an egocentric obsession, which renders him both unable to feel for others outside himself and also blind to the realty of what is happening to him. As he sinks ever further into the darkness, however, he does not, like the tragic hero, just plunge on to final destruction.
What marks out the Rebirth plot is the way we see the central figure eventually frozen in his dark and lonely state with seemingly no hope of escape. And it is here, as light stealing in on the darkness, that the vision appears which inspires the stirring back to life, centered on a particular redeeming figure: invariably, where the story has a hero, a Young woman or a Child.
Can you remember a story you’ve heard or read that sounded like a rebirth story? One popular example is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. My favorite rebirth story is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Well, here at Light of Life, we live in this type of story. Every time one of our graduate clients tells their story, I’m deeply moved. It’s after all the work of our particular redeemer figure—Jesus Christ.
In these rebirth stories, although for the most part troubling to our soul, they always have a happy ending. At Light of Life, we rejoice at these happy endings.
What's God Looking for at Light of Life?
by Leo Salgado September 4, 2007
Some men brought Him a paralytic, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, "Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven." (Matthew 9:2)
Reading through the Gospel of Matthew, I was struck by the idea that it wasn’t so much the faith of the paralytic that influenced Jesus’ decision to forgive the man’s sins. Instead, Jesus responded to the faith of those who did whatever they could to get their friend in front of Jesus. Jesus was impressed by their faith.
Does our collective faith, then, help those who come asking for our help at Light of Life? Without a doubt. We can attest that for many who have gone through Light of Life, God has forgiven their sins and restored their lives. For some, God healed broken hearts, and for others, He softened their hard hearts. For still others, He gave back their dignity. And to those who responded to Him, He gave them life.
Many whose lives Jesus touched still praise His name because of what they found at Light of Life.
But it took the faith of those at Light of Life who did whatever it took to get these people in front of Jesus. The faith of donors, supervisors, case managers, development staff, support managers and community volunteers helped get these people in front of Jesus.
There is another dimension to the faith of the men that brought the paralytic before Jesus. It was the strength of their faith. They knew for certain that Jesus was going to take care of their friend, so they overcame every obstacle to get him in front of Jesus.
What about us? How strong is our faith as we seek to help those who come today for help? How many more can we carry to Christ?
What Do We Offer at Light of Life? by Leo Salgado 8/10/2007
“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:39)
What Light of Life Rescue Mission offers is a bright future. By future, we don’t mean the continuation of our past life into a tomorrow. There’s no future in that. We’re not about sustaining more of the same old habits and routines—in action or thought—even if they’re somehow cleaned up, improved or renewed.
Instead, by future we mean robust health, abundant life, “novelty, surprise; it means outgrowing past habits and attainments.” It requires reviving what we almost lost.
We know that the only way we get this future is through Jesus Christ. History proves it. It’s only the Christian spirit that has given us a real future.
For “at the center of the Christian creed is faith in death and resurrection. Christians believe in an end of the world—not just once, but again and again. This and this alone is the power which enables us to die to our old habits and ideals, get out of our old ruts, leave our dead selves behind, and take the first step into a genuine future. That is why Christianity and the future are synonymous.”
But I don’t mean that we offer a bright future just to those who come looking for help. To offer help in creating someone’s future, the organization is also pursuing the creation of its own future.
