The Lighthouse

As a kid, my interests were diverse and usually involved a ball, although not always. Shooting hoops with my brother in the backyard, racing down the sidewalk on roller skates with my little sister, and galloping uphill on my steed (which looked uncannily like a secondhand stingray bike) were among my favorite pursuits. Life was fun and safe, and my most pressing questions were, "Why do we have to wait until next week to go camping at the lake when summer vacation starts today?" and "Who wants to go outside and play tether ball with me?"

The questions became a little more complex by the time I reached college, and sometimes I was the one who was supposed to come up with the answers. A track coach with an aversion to losing demanded, "Why not take steroids and be strong enough to compete while injured?" "Is it fair," he pondered, "if there are ten racers on the starting line and nine of them use performance-enhancing drugs and one does not?" And exasperated with my continued stubbornness, "When are you going to grow up and realize that the world is not black and white but gray?"

I wasn't philosophically savvy enough to paint the world any particular color, but after a year of debate with this coach my surroundings did appear sadly drab. By this time, I questioned the meaning of running and the meaning of life, and all seemed vanity in a major Ecclesiastes way. My response was to rashly jettison all athletic pursuits from my life, which left me off-balance and without direction.

In this condition, I began working for a businesswoman on the island of Kauai. She was a person who professed faith in God, and I figured that would probably be okay with me--at least she wouldn't be trying to slip vials of illicit pills into my gym bag.

What I didn't expect was that her faith would be demonstrated more by her actions, day in and day out, than by her words. Gathering her employees together each morning to pray would have seemed pretentious to me if she hadn't lived out the rest of her day in a consistent, righteous manner with joy evident in her step and kind words on her lips. If she went to church one day a week and lived the other six bent on monetary gain and callously lording her position of authority over the rest of us, I would have been less than impressed.

But because she had disciplined herself for the purpose of godliness, and because she walked in a manner worthy of her calling, I saw the relevance of her faith to her life and I saw that her world clearly was not gray nor black and white, but richly colorful.

How apt that the establishment in which I worked for this woman was called the Lighthouse; it was a beacon of light when my world had turned murky, and it set my life on the course it is on today.