It was complicated.
By this time, I was ready to get out of the relationship. Maybe part of me knew that I was just drifting and going through the motions. I had been threatening to break off the relationship for quite a while, but my companion always seemed to finagle me to stay a little longer.
Though we now lived in a house, I had to get out on my own. I moved out and rented a room. I got a job. It was exhilarating!
Then Tom asked me out.
I was expectant and hopeful; I was flattered and excited. My interest in him had grown over the months as our acquaintance deepened. When he found out I’d called it quits with the other guy, he was ready to step in.
It was a whirlwind romance . . . or maybe it was just the cup of psychedelic mushrooms we shared that first night, but we moved in together after our first date. Unlike anything else I’d known before, it was pretty obvious that this relationship was going to be a serious one.
Something odd happened within me, which I can’t quite explain: I decided that I wanted to be in a proper relationship with Tom when he proposed to me. Something inside me was yearning to find propriety, so I told Tom that I wanted to rent my own place. I moved into a house with a surfer friend name Loli.
I got more than I bargained for.
Loli was a brand-new, on-fire Christian, and she was excited about her newfound faith. She was up every morning at 5:00 A.M., reading her Bible; I only know this because I was up at 5:00 A.M. every morning heading out to find surf. She invited me to church, but I always brushed her off. I couldn’t, however, stop her words and her example from watering the spiritual seeds planted in my heart at Emmanuel Vacation Bible School so long ago.
Tom proposed to me on my birthday, which was Valentine’s Day. I burst into tears right there in the restaurant. We married on August 25, 1979, with a very fun, laid-back, island-style wedding, complete with ukuleles, volleyball, homemade lilikoi juice, a homemade wedding dress and an Aloha shirt I made from white satin for Tom. Our banquet feast was potluck with imu-style (baked in an underground oven) turkey.
The day was perfect and beautiful and 100 percent ours. But if a swell had come in, we probably would have postponed the whole thing to go surfing!
We were married in a ceremony right on the beach in Hanalei, by a chain-smoking Catholic priest. For the longest time, Tom’s mom insisted that we were not really married because the vows were not spoken in a sanctified church building. (We assured her that the priest told us that beach weddings were okay in Hawaii.) I remember that Loli read from 1 Corinthians 13, the Bible’s love chapter. I’d never heard it before, and I was surprised that words so beautiful were in the Bible.
Many people head to Hawaii for their honeymoon, but we went to New Jersey. We stayed with Tom’s folks in the house where Tom grew up, which was not my dream honeymoon suite.
When we returned to Kauai, we spent six weeks in Moloaa in a beautiful house near the beach, house-sitting for friends. This became the real honeymoon, but it almost became a very short marriage. While lighting the gas pilot, Tom was blown across the kitchen with his hair in flames!
When the honeymoon was over, we moved into our new home: a VW van.
It’s okay to roll your eyes (I can’t see you). I wanted to be your typical new bride who can hardly wait to color coordinate her new nest and try out recipes on her husband. But the truth was that I really wanted to surf.
We both worked at the same hotel, and we were on the same schedule. We were saving money by living in the van; and when we had days off, we would cruise the North Shore looking for uncrowded waves. The problem was that our hale on wheels—our van—kept breaking down. Every time the mechanic, Ross, would fix it, something else would go wrong. It was as if the thing was cursed!
Looking back on it now, I think that maybe the van was actually blessed. I don’t know if God would actually go so far as to mess with the mechanics of a Volkswagen van, but I think He did! What felt like a real pain for Tom and me led us to Christ.
Three unlikely characters, all surfers, were instrumental in drawing both Tom and me to the place where God wanted us. The three of them shared a house in Wailua on the east side of Kauai.
One of the guys, nicknamed “Creature” because of his car, “The Creature Mobile” (an old clunker he’d covered with plastic figurines held on by super-glue), had the wild distinction of being tossed in the loony bin for one drug-addled adventure. In his confused mind, he became so convinced that he was John the Baptist that he marched into a church service and took over the microphone, trying to get disciples. (He jokes around that he got no disciples at the church service, but he made lots of them in the mental ward.)
Creature had first migrated to Santa Cruz, California, where he quickly became a fixture in the local surf community. At that time, he had become friends with Michel Junod, one of the three roommates, and a highly respected (to this day) surfboard shaper and surfer, and on occasion, successful competitor. The two of them eventually drifted to Oahu’s North Shore where they spent several seasons riding the massive tubes of the Banzai Pipeline and other daredevil big-wave spots before moving into a place together on Kauai.
The third roommate was Mark Nakatsukasa, a reed-thin wanderer who had traveled in his VW bus through Mexico and Central America, questing for perfect, undiscovered waves. This adventure refined his car repair skills. Whenever our van broke down (all of the time), we would sit around on the lawn exchanging surf stories with Mark as he worked on our bus. We all shared the same free-spirited view of life. What Tom and I didn’t know was that Mark was going through a turbulent internal revolution.
The carefree Mark we thought we knew was a façade. He was secretly wrestling with a deep emptiness he’d tried to fill with waves, adventure and drugs. Nothing kept away the oppressive despair that weighed down on him day after day; and not one of us knew that he was quietly contemplating suicide.
Mark had encountered some committed Christian men who had, for some annoying reason, decided to make Mark, Creature and Michel the subject of their prayers. This group of guys referred to the three surfing roommates as “Mission Impossible”: impossible for man, but possible for God.
Mark got riled up about being witnessed to, so one day he picked up a Bible in order to find ammo within its pages to disprove its message. As with many others who have begun this way, the end result was quite different from the original goal. It wasn’t long before Michel and Creature’s faith also erupted, and the three new believers in our world turned everything upside down.
Ross, the one who usually helped us fix our van, was at his wit’s end and turned us and our broken van over to Mark. Eventually, Mark invited us to park our van in his driveway so he could repair it, since we had no work for two weeks and practically lived there anyway.
We’d been living in the van for four months, and it was nice to have a real house to retreat to. The three guys had a lot of tracts and comics with a Christian message lying around. At first I was put off, but eventually I picked up a booklet. I was fascinated that Jesus had fulfilled over 300 prophecies about His life and His purpose to bring us into a right relationship with His Father.
Creature, Michel and Mark were all fired up about their new relationship with Jesus. I don’t remember feeling offended at all. Creature laughingly says that he “hammered” on us for weeks in his hyper-excitable manner that many today would back away from. The guys’ enthusiasm caught my attention. Their passion was like listening to guys who had the ultimate surf stoke. Tom thought they were crazy—“bonzai” for Jesus.
Something deep within me was responding to what they were talking about. I was awakening to truth I couldn’t turn away from.
When Tom and I first started hanging around Mark’s house, the guys were constantly playing a Frank Zappa album that had notorious lyrics. Apparently, they didn’t see the conflict between what was blaring out of their speakers and the new life they were proclaiming . . . but I did. And I said something about it
.
“If you guys are supposed to be Christians, why do you listen to this?” I was genuinely asking because I thought it mattered. I guess it made sense to them, too, because the next thing I knew there was a whole new collection of albums being played. (Mark went so far as to break the offending records so he wouldn’t be tempted to play them.) Most of the music they replaced was by young Christian artists. Keith Green replaced Frank Zappa.
To have music that revolved around God and His Word deepened my passion for music, which was already strong and has been passed on to my own kids today. This experience brought me to the most important decision of my life. I prayed to God for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I now believed that He had paid for my sins when He died on the cross and rose from the dead; that He had conquered death and He would return for me someday to live with Him forever.
I remember to this day where I was when I gave my life to Christ. I was standing next to our white VW van in Mark’s driveway. It was the beginning of a relationship with the God who had been courting me my entire life.
Tom and I began to go to home Bible studies in Kalaheo. The first was at the home of a local surf shop owner, Tim Huggins, whose shop also served as a small Christian bookstore. These Bible studies were aimed at people like us and were a far cry from the typical church.
At this point in my spiritual life I still had a lot of growing to do. The only thing I knew was “Jesus loves me, this I know.” As far as the Bible was concerned, there was no reason that I would read that book. It probably came from my environment growing up, but at the time, the Bible seemed to me to be the last book on earth I wanted to read.
It took six months of being a Christian before I realized that I needed to get to know God better by reading His Word. So I went to the Christian bookstore Lihue Surf and Bible and bought a Bible for myself.
Tom, because of the devoutness of his parents, and his time in parochial school, had a familiarity with the Bible and a concept of salvation through Christ. He even considered himself a “Christian.” But it was the day when he stood in the surfboard shaping room with Rick Irons, asking about why Rick drew those little fishes, that Tom understood that living Christianity is a relationship with Christ and not intellectually subscribing to a set of beliefs. It wasn’t just knowledge; it was a relationship.
Yes, he stood by me and affirmed my decision to say yes to Christ, but it wasn’t until after we’d been going to Bible studies that he reached his choice to walk away from selfishness and toward God’s unconditional love.
At the end of one meeting, something the speaker said hit Tom hard. (Tom says, “God busted me.”) All of a sudden, he broke down, the emotional response of surrendering his life to Christ. He knew that now, after sitting at the doorstep for so long, he truly was starting a new life in Christ.
Tom followed up his decision by getting baptized in the hot tub after Bible study. Even though almost all churches in Hawaii use the warm tropical Pacific, Tom felt that he wanted to show his faith immediately by being baptized that very same night.
As Tom and I awakened to our new life, we realized with joy that the network of Christian surfers was much deeper and more widespread than we had ever known. It turned out that there were a lot of other young people who were just like us and had become believers; they were people looking for love, purpose and vision in their lives. Few of us had family nearby, but in Jesus we now had a family of brothers and sisters to share our lives with.
It was also a struggle at times to get my independent mind into an understanding of the Christian life. I remember the first time I ever attended a Sunday morning service after getting saved. The pastor teaching it said that Christians shouldn’t smoke pot. I didn’t want to be told what to do!
In essence, I still wanted to be in charge of my life. It was fine to invite Jesus to come sit on the couch in my heart, but He’d better not start moving furniture around or poking into those dark corners. It took a while for the Holy Spirit to transform my life. It was a struggle because I had spent so many years doing whatever I wanted without answering to anyone. I had to come to grips with the fact that not only was Jesus my Savior, but He was also my Lord.
Tom and I spent the early months of our marriage surfing the island in our VW van, going to Bible studies, hanging out with fellow surfers who, like us, had encountered Christ, and attending church every Sunday at Garden Island Christian Fellowship in Hanalei.
New swells were on the horizon. . . . Michel spent time as a missionary in South America before moving back to Santa Cruz, California, where he shapes beautiful custom boards. He is an icon in the surfboard-making industry, yet he gives all the glory to Christ.
Creature became a founding pastor of a church, Kauai Christian Fellowship, on the south side of the island, known for its cutting-edge youth ministry and music.
Mark Nakatsukasa spent a number of years with YWAM (Youth With A Mission) as head of the School of Biblical Studies before moving to Thailand, where he currently runs an orphanage founded after the 2005 tsunami in an area that is predominantly Muslim.
Little did Tom and I know that God had prepared a path for us that would eventually walk us through loss and heartbreak to properly position us to become another voice to the world, declaring His love and salvation.
CHAPTER
7
Raising Christian
Kids on Kauai
As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.
JOSHUA 24:15, NASB
I was seven months pregnant when I finally had to face the fact that I’d have to quit surfing. I could no longer pull it off in spite of using a longer board and even stuffing my bathing suit with foam to keep from falling off my growing belly while paddling.
I had always said that I would never have kids. I thought they would only get in the way of my surfing.
Love changed my mind.
Early in my pregnancy, the county condemned our illegal 12-by-12-foot shack that we called home. We didn’t want to go back to living in our van, not with a baby on the way, so we had to find another house quickly. As the days passed, I felt frustration that my husband wasn’t taking care of his pregnant wife by knocking down every door, beating every bush and doing whatever he could to find us a new place to live.
God had been working on me, so I decided I’d try a different approach from meekly ragging on him—which hadn’t really worked anyhow. Instead of bugging Tom to find us a house, I decided to bug God.
At this stage of my Christian walk, I was still learning to pray—I was growing in my prayer life and learning to really talk to God and ask for His help. I was actually learning to let Him take over situations instead of making things worse by worrying about them.
As Tom and I immersed ourselves in the Bible, and as we watched other couples our age start families, it became clear to me that children are a good gift direct from God, especially when I read Scripture like “Children are a gift from the LORD; they are a reward from him” (Ps. 127:3, NLT).
So I prayed and asked God to help find us a new home.
No sooner had I finished asking God to help us than my husband came bursting through the door with great news. There was a place to rent in Hanalei, right near the beach, and within a short walk to one of our favorite surf spots. It even had indoor toilets! I looked upward and gave thanks, marveling at such a quick answer to my prayer.
“I called the landlord, and it’s ours!” Tom said.
Prayer works—our family has witnessed it. God hears the cries of our heart and works so that His mighty hand is revealed—which makes us praise Him even more.
I am reminded of the time when Tom fell off of a roof. The hotel where Tom worked was undergoing another makeover, and Tom’s friend got him work as a roofer. They were replacing old wooden shakes on a two-story house when Tom slipped and slid over the edge. He had the presence of mind to push away from the edge to avoid spearing himself on what was below, but he still landed hard on the hedge.
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br /> The hospital determined that he had a broken pelvis and decided to Medevac him to Oahu, a 100-mile flight that is usually choppy and rough at the best of times. Our church immediately went to prayer, along with many of our friends at other churches around the island.
In mid flight, Tom said he felt the pain replaced by a warm sensation. When he arrived at the Oahu hospital, a puzzled doctor who was examining new X-rays of his pelvis told him that somehow the bones had reset themselves. Tom points to the fervent prayers that had been offered up for him.
Two years into our marriage, Tom and I welcomed our little baby, Noah, into the world. I think what surprised me about having a child was the incredible, immense love I felt for this captivating little person on first sight. I didn’t expect it, but this explosive love appeared in full force the moment Noah was put in my arms.
When Noah was about three years old, the hotel where both Tom and I worked closed down for a few months for refurbishment. It was tight money-wise, but we made it work. However, when our hotel finally reopened, four out of eight of the banquet waitresses were pregnant. I was one of them. Apparently, we had too much time on our hands during furlough.
The only dip in the road to my second pregnancy was that because we weren’t working during the hotel refurbishment, we had no health insurance when Timmy was born. To save the hospital expense, we decided to try a home birth with a midwife and doctor standing by. After a quick labor, our second son, Timmy, was born; but because he was suffering from jaundice, we ended up in the hospital anyway.
I remembered thinking that maybe I should only have one child because I could never have enough love for two. Then, when my second son, Timmy, arrived, I found that God had enlarged my heart with the capacity to love them both with equal intensity. (Although I do have to admit that being enraptured with our newborn, Timmy, we accidentally left Noah at Sunday School. When we got home, Tom said, “Where’s Noah?” Embarrassed, we raced back to church. As for Noah, he was busy playing and never even missed us.)
Raising A Soul Surfer Page 8