From the Word

Having harbored a lifelong passion for fashion and music, Lachello (Chello) Armbrister was living his dream, studying at a top New York school and interning for some of fashion’s top companies. But Chello wasn’t trusting in God. “I just wanted to do my own thing,” he says.  It would take years of testing and calling before Chello would learn to let go of his own agenda and let God take the lead.

God’s pull on Chello’s life began when he happened upon a public health brochure that listed the symptoms of HIV/AIDS.  He had experienced two of these symptoms—night sweats and fever—about a week earlier. He was instantly and irrationally convinced that he was HIV-positive.

“Instead of going to the doctor, I dropped out of [school],” he says. “I felt like life had no purpose.” Chello fed this despair by dabbling with drugs and alcohol; eventually he considered suicide.

Instead, he picked up a Bible and opened it to Jeremiah 29:11—For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for wholeness and not evil. “I had run away from my Father and fallen into a deep ditch,” Chello says. “He dusted me off and He spoke to me: ‘I will never leave you and you have to trust Me.’”

Once Chello listened to God and obeyed, he was led to a gospel-centered church, where members of the congregation encouraged him to obey God’s frequent calls to proclaim the Word on the subway. His reaction was typical—“Lord, I’m not doing that! The last thing I’m going to do is be one of ‘those people’”—but God honored his obedience with two years of speaking on the subway “with grace, with power, with authority.”

When God prompted Chello to bring the gospel to Africa, he was much more eager to obey, but still had reservations. “I just wanted to go to Africa,” he says, “[but God] revealed to me, ‘I want you to go to Bible school.’ So I said, ‘on one condition: I want to go to a warm climate.’”

After Chello visited Moody for the first time during a Day One event, he finally faced up to his conviction about his HIV status and visited the doctor. “I finally found the peace to [go and] confirm that seven years of thinking I had HIV was simply a figment of my imagination,” he says. Chello sees God’s hand clearly even in this irrational obsession. “The Lord used the HIV thing to draw me closer to Him,” he says.

Chello’s quick acceptance to Moody’s Chicago campus removed all notions he had of putting any more conditions on God’s plan for his life.

To Life

Chello is now patiently and gratefully soaking up the knowledge Moody has to offer a missionary on his way to French-speaking Africa. “Every subject [I study at Moody] is a part of [my] preparation process,” he says, “[from] evangelistic messages and development and delivery of narrative messages [to] Biblical exposition. Hermeneutics is the art of interpreting Scripture so that you won’t mis-interpret it. God wants me to understand Scripture the way it’s supposed to be understood so I can teach it to the people that I come across.”

Moody has also allowed Chello the opportunity to travel to Tunisia during a Spring Break mission trip. Though he didn’t have the necessary funds just a week before the trip, he trusted that God would provide the means; He did.

“So, God had his way,” Chello says. “I’m looking forward to the next three years on campus to see what [else He] wants me to do. [He] is training me [here at Moody], so that one day I will be able to go to [Africa] and effectively teach the truths of the Bible to the local people over there.”