Altadena, California — January 2025
The house was filled with noise.
Phones screamed with emergency alerts. Wind battered the walls. Somewhere beyond the windows, flames were racing downhill toward Altadena. Inside, the Maljanian family moved in every direction at once.
Avi’s mother darted from room to room, clutching old photographs to her chest, her voice breaking as she cried, “My babies… my babies.” His sister threw clothes into a suitcase, stopping every few seconds, unsure what mattered most when everything might be lost. His 88-year-old grandfather stood in his room, stunned, trying to understand how a lifetime of familiarity could unravel in minutes.
This was the family home—the only one Avi had ever really known. The place where he grew up. Memories lived in every corner.
In the middle of the chaos, Avi and his father were locked in.
“I kind of kicked into gear,” Avi remembers. “I wasn’t really worried about myself until afterward.”
While panic rippled through the house, Avi gathered what training had taught him to gather: food, spare batteries, emergency supplies. He helped his grandfather pack clothes and a few treasured photos of his late grandmother.
They evacuated in three cars, inching through gridlocked streets under collapsing power lines and violent winds. Visibility vanished in smoke and ash.
Formation Before the Fire
Avi’s steadiness did not appear out of thin air in the midst of the crisis. It had been developed and ingrained in him over time. Now 21 years-old and an upperclassman at Hillsdale College, Avi is a Freedom Rangeman, Trail Life USA’s highest rank. Long before the fire of 2025, he had already been equipped to respond when everything goes wrong.
Trail Life had given him skills and experience—but even more importantly, it had trained his mindset.
“Emergency preparedness and first aid were probably two of the most impactful badges I earned,” Avi explains. “You’re taught to come up with a plan both beforehand and on the fly.”
In earning this badge, he had developed an evacuation plan and rehearsed it with his family long before disaster ever struck.
“But because of the specific situation we were in—where the fire was coming from and all—I actually had to modify the plan in the moment,” he says. “Thankfully, even that wasn’t a total surprise. We’re taught to expect things like that.”
Trail Life also shaped him in quieter, more personal ways. Early on, leaders noticed habits and attitudes that needed correction. Instead of public shaming or dismissal, they pulled him aside—firmly, respectfully, and with genuine care.
“They told me what I was doing well,” Avi remembers, “and what I needed to change. And they made it clear they believed I could do better. I don’t think I’d ever had men, besides my own father, pull me aside and speak into my life like that before.”
He listened.
That moment marked a shift. Avi learned that real strength begins with humility—with the ability to receive correction without defensiveness. Years later, he would describe humility as the most important trait in a leader.
That lesson would matter more than any badge.
“He Didn’t Tell Me to Go Back—He Asked”
Hours after evacuating, Avi learned the house was still standing—but not safe. His father returned briefly to assess the damage. Flames still licked nearby properties. The neighborhood looked unrecognizable.
“He didn’t tell me to return,” Avi explains. “But he asked if I was willing.”
Avi said yes.
He wasn’t thrill seeking or trying to impress anyone. Something deeper compelled him—honor for his father, love for the home that raised him, responsibility to neighbors, and trust that his life ultimately rested in God’s hands.
“I was more of a grunt,” Avi says with a small laugh. “My father was the commander of the house, as he ought to be. I was just following his lead.”
When Avi returned to the neighborhood, his father was already there.
The Fire and the Man with the Hose
What they saw hardly resembled the place where Avi had grown up.
Homes smoldered into rubble. Ash drifted through the air like snow. Gas lines burned in open jets of flame. Out of sixteen houses on their block, only two still stood.
Fire hydrants were dry. Fire trucks were nowhere to be seen. For the moment, they were on their own.
Father and son got to work.
They rolled a small generator out of the garage, hooked it to a sump pump, lowered it into the pool, and attached a garden hose. Pool water became their lifeline. Together they moved from one flare-up to the next, dousing embers before they could catch, watching fence lines, scanning for anything that might threaten the remaining homes.
When flames crept along a neighbor’s fence, they called out and recruited whoever was nearby. Buckets. Shovels. Water. Whatever worked.
It was during those hours that Avi learned a sobering detail: a man in the neighborhood had been found dead, a garden hose still clutched in his hands.
“My firefighter friend told me that while I was there,” Avi recalls. “At the time, I didn’t really think much of it. Later, I realized—that’s insane.”
As evening approached, the situation shifted. Avi’s parents needed to leave—to care for his grandfather and sister, to charge phones, to move valuables somewhere safe. Curfews were tightening. Checkpoints were going up. If they drove away, there was no guarantee they would be allowed back in.
They didn’t leave easily.
They weighed the risks. They talked it through. They prayed. And then they did what families sometimes must do in crisis—divide, trusting God to hold what they could not.
So Avi stayed.
When the car disappeared down the street and night settled over the block, the weight of what remained sharpened.
He took a deep breath and tried to think of what he needed to do next.
“Then it crossed my mind: hey, I am a little unnerved right now because everything that's going on around me. I should recite a Bible verse.”
“‘How about Psalm 23,’ I thought. That’s one of the easiest ones, right? But then, to my absolute horror, I realized I had forgotten Psalm 23. ‘I'm a terrible Christian,’ I thought to myself. ‘I am forgetting the the verses and the lessons of my childhood.’”
Though Avi’s memory may have failed him in the midst of stress, the truth of Psalm 23 remained. His Good Shepherd was with him, even there in the chaos and darkness. Avi’s instinct—to run to His heavenly Father for comfort and strength, even when words fail—is exactly the kind of response reverence for God produces. That kind of reverence steadies and grounds a man. It gives him courage.
“We need to have the knowledge that someone else is governing our life. Someone else has us in His hands. He is protecting us from everything that will harm us. But also, he's not holding back. Sometimes we need to grow through difficulty and grow through pain and suffering.”
When Things Go Wrong
This wasn’t Avi’s first moment when everything unraveled.
Years earlier, while completing his Freedom Award project, he had planned meticulously—only to watch it derail when a water line burst beneath the worksite, flooding everything.
“I did my due diligence and had really done everything I could to prevent it,” he remembers. “But it still happened.”
So he adapted. He reorganized the project on the fly. He leaned on the wisdom of his Troop leaders. He led through uncertainty.
That experience mattered now.
Because in fire, as in life, preparation never guarantees smooth outcomes. It equips you to respond faithfully when plans collapse.
The Snap of the Key
Later that night, alone, Avi stepped outside and locked the front door behind him.
The lock wouldn’t budge.
“I tried turning it harder,” he recalls. “And the key just snapped off in the lock.”
The metal broke. His finger split open. Blood poured. Bone was visible. His first aid gear sat just inside the locked door—while fire and chaos lingered in the street behind him.
Phone reception was spotty. First responders were overwhelmed. No help was coming.
“I stayed calm,” Avi says. “I remembered we had hidden an emergency key outside.”
He found it. He got inside. He treated the wound. He tended burns he’d picked up fighting the fire.
Training mattered here—not just the practical skills, but the ability to stay mentally steady.
“One of the things about first aid that might not be super obvious,” he says, “is preparing for situations that mess with your mind.”
The House Still Stands
Eventually, the fires moved on.
Gas lines were shut off. Patrols increased. The smoke thinned. And against the odds, the Maljanian home remained standing.
But survival did not mean normalcy.
Ash and soot coated the interior. The air was unsafe. Utilities were unreliable. Nearly every home around them was gone.
The family left again.
Weeks turned into months. Repairs crawled forward. Life was lived out of borrowed spaces and temporary arrangements. What had been saved in a night of fire required a long season of patience.
When I spoke with Avi in January 2026, a whole year after the fire, he told me they just were finally moving back into the house.
Reverence, Formed for Life
Today, Avi studies political economy and military history at Hillsdale College. He hopes to serve in a military-adjacent role. When asked if he had anything to share with Trailmen that look up to him as a Freedom Rangeman, he said:
“The Freedom Award isn’t the most important part,” he says. “The most important part is the Worthy Life Award.”
Why?
“Because it teaches you how to apply God’s Word to any situation. And it reminds you that you represent the Lord 24/7.”
That’s the attitude of a man whose actions and thoughts are all in submission to God. That’s the kind of reverence out of which true strength emerges.
The Kind of Men the Next 250 Years Will Require
When we think of virtues that our founding generation possessed and we have lost, it is difficult to think of anything more applicable than reverence. What does it even mean? It’s not mere posturing. It’s just acknowledging authority. It’s certainly not self-deprecation or weakness. Rather, reverence comes from an understanding of who God is and who you are in relation to Him. It is the strength to act with courage while remaining submitted—to God, to rightful authority, and to the responsibility entrusted to you.
Two hundred fifty years ago, George Washington knelt in the snow at Valley Forge, shouldering a burden no man could carry alone. His reverence steadied him. It taught him when to act—and when to yield. I wrote an article about that a couple weeks ago, which you can read here [insert link].
In young men like Avi, we see that same kind of reverence. When you speak to Avi, you cannot help but notice that he bears himself with a certain sense of confidence. Not arrogance, not brashness. It’s clear that he sees himself as a son of the most high God, and that impacts how he interacts with family members, how he understands authority, calling, and even dating relationships. When he found himself alone, scared, and in the midst of a fiery trial (literally!), he showed his true colors by turning to God in prayer. That’s what Washington did at Valley Forge. That’s where confident, strong men receive their steadiness and courage. Any other source is just a counterfeit.
If our nation is to flourish for another 250 years, it will be because boys are formed into men like this—men who neither hide from duty nor chase glory; men anchored in reverence.
Sometimes, that looks like a general kneeling in the snow.
And sometimes, it looks like a young man striving to pray the words of Psalm 23 in the midst of ashes and smoke as he defends his family’s home, because he knows he’s but clay in His Father’s hands, and that there is no other source of strength and purpose besides Him.
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