The House Built on Sand and the Light in the Darkness

As I got on the plane to my hometown in Oahu, Hawaii, I knew two things:

a) I didn't want to go.
b) It wasn't going to be a pleasant trip.

What tipped me off? Maybe it was the frantic 808 phone calls I had been getting every night begging me to "come home" and "fix it". You see, after my Dad chose his girlfriend, Haumea, and NOT my step-sister's mother (aka, Auntie Liz) as his power of attorney, all hell had positively broken loose in The Big Brown House on the slopes of Diamond Head.

Haumea was on a rampaging power-trip, Dad was still getting shocked on a regular basis by his internal fibulator/pace maker (meaning his heart--and his life--was still in grave danger), Auntie Liz was outraged that she was not, in fact, his "chosen one", and both Auntie and Kea were both finding out for the first time the earth-shattering fact that Dad did love Haumea and that he'd been lying to both of them for the better part of their lives.

How I was supposed to fix all this, I didn't know.

But here I was, on a plane headed to my homeland, wondering what the hell I was doing.

"I'll just try to get some good quality time in with my dad," I said mock-soothingly to myself.

And beside that, I wanted to talk to him about his faith. After all, last time I had been there he made a small ambiguous declaration of faith, so I thought I might attempt to "water the seed" so to speak, as well as check to make sure no weeds had been growing up and trying to choke it.

I thought about all that lay before me, and I put my head in my hands.

"Lord," I prayed, "make me Your light in the darkness I am about to face. Lord, as your word says I should be, let me be a light in the darkness." I settled in for take-off.

Fast forward to Hawaii. Almost right away it became clear to me that I was absolutely right to not want to come here. The entire house was a bickering tense vindictive mess, and Dad was so irritated by everybody's arguing, he was snapping at people and hiding in his room the majority of the time (so much for my "quality time"). Not to mention the fact that, in the rare times he did emerge for any length of time, his sudden sickness had made him bitter, argumentative, and completely turned off to any talk of his faith whatsoever (so much for "watering the seed"). Haumea was rampaging as reported, poisoning Dad against all of us to prevent her failures as a competent and caring power of attorney from being relayed to him with any credibility. Auntie Liz was a devastated, disbelieving wreck, and Kea was coming almost completely unglued at the injustice of it all.

And here I was, listening to every story, mediating between parties, trying to relay compassion, trying to sift through the fact and fiction, trying to open eyes and change hearts--tugged on from all directions and watching pieces of myself drift away as I melded slowly into the house and it's vacuum of drama and destruction. I started to recognize myself...not the "me" of the present who had grown and matured in a Christian faith and a loving marriage, but the old me that lived and breathed this house. Angry, resentful, frustrated, isolated, and utterly hopeless feeling. I couldn't help them. I couldn't make them see no matter how hard I tried. I was a failure.

I would like to say that it was at this point that I took a step back and had a reality check, but it just wouldn't be true.

The truth is, I had a breakdown. I crawled up into my self pity and cried for two hours.

When I emerged, I saw my husband laying next to me. He was so refreshing--like an oxygen tank just laying there next to me when I was gasping for air. "Now there's something to be thankful for," I said to myself. It was cooler--the tradewinds had picked up--and the world had dimmed in the failing sun. I sat up slightly, leaning on my elbows, and looked out at the view before me.

I had seen it at least a thousand times. I had awoken to it every morning when I lived briefly on this floor in my childhood. I had looked out on it awkwardly with a high school boyfriend and endured an even more awkward kiss (one of only two consentual kisses I shared with anyone besides my husband). I had stared out smiling into it while music from the nearby open-air concert hall wafted up and melted into my family's laughing voices and the billowing smoke of the barbecuing hibachi. I have seen it through blurred tears of desperate pain as well as overflowing joy. I renewed my vows before this view, made love under it's stars, and had looked deep into it's dark night and twinkling city lights as I prayed to the God I did not yet know to make the crashing of my body to the beckoning pavement below as painless as possible.

I turned from it and looked up instead at the rough and naked beams that held up the patio cover I was now laying under, following their steady line to the edge of the house where they disappeared behind a redwood window frame.

They had been secured by the bare hands of my much younger father--a father who smiled often and lifted heavy loads with ease, who did not yet know that his heart would betray him a few weeks before his 75th birthday. This house was held up by the beams he lifted--the framework of a house and household of his own unique design--not just the house itself, but the workings within it.

Though I had never been ignorant of my father's true nature--good and bad--I realized that I had never really seen the whole picture. This trip, this low point, helped me to see with much deeper clarity what he truly was.

The light had come to the darkness.

The man with the God complex who had manipulated the lives of so many people--foremost among them, my family and I--for his selfishness and arrogance, was dying. And now the people who had worshipped him and lived in his tiny universe all these years found themselves facing the mortality of their finite god.

He built a house that he treated like a commune. He built a family he treated like a kingdom. He built people out of insecure and un-self-respecting children and forbade them to grow out of his control. Beam by beam, lie by lie, he built his universe on the hills. All our lives were shaped by and within his tremulous and imperfect design. He had turned away from what God deemed "good" and decided his own creation would be better.

But it wasn't.

He had built it all--every last redwood beam, every last concept and ideal, every last person and personality--on the sand.

"...and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall." Matt. 7:27

He was dying.

One man's dreams. One man's desires. One man's sin. Grain upon grain upon grain of shifting, sinking, formless sand. And now the ultimate wave had come. Mortality. It was crashing against the house with strength that could no longer be ignored

It was then that I realized what was really going on: It was all finally coming to an end--all of it--and I, having made myself apart of it again, was going down with the ship.

* * *

I can't explain it. Why it's so hard to let go of something like that house. I never knew true happiness because of it. Though it was warm and familiar and home, it never brought me comfort. I was loved, albeit incompletely, by a group of people who had stumbled into parenthood through a series of mistakes and momentum-propelled actionless "decisions". They loved us and we loved them, but they were impossible to respect, impossible to depend on, impossible to trust. They put their trust in us, their children. We were the fruit of their patchwork-kingdom, the beautiful prizes that made it possible for them to validate their botched lives, the innocent inductees into their unhappy commune whom they all hoped would have a better life than they had.

But then a funny thing happened when I did get a better life: They wanted me back. No one to depend on, no one to validate them, no one to hang their hope on. It wasn't enough that we went on to be better people without them. They wanted that better life for themselves. They wanted me to show them how. "Fix it," they asked, and I was doing my best.

But I cannot help them.

I cannot help them.

They serve a different god. And it was my God that delivered me. He brought me safely out of Egypt--out of the House destined to fall. He had made me the light through Him, and though I was dangerously close to being swallowed up by the darkness again, he had shined the light for me in my weakness and shown me what I was becoming too blind and overwhelmed to see:

I cannot help them.

They serve a different god.

The House is built on sand, "and great was it's fall."

"My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus' blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest 'frain,
But wholly lean on Jesus' name.
On Christ the Solid Rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
all other ground is sinking sand."

I looked at the man beside me, my beautiful, perfect husband, a representative of the new life God gave me away from this place. I looked at the house around me, built by a stubborn and godless man around the broken lives of his naive and trusting believers. I looked out on that all to familiar view once more--the practically screaming and waving proof of the majesty and beauty and perfection of the One True God right under their noses--and, it was then--right then and there, that I said goodbye to that house. Not just goodbye for the moment, not just for that trip in particular, but goodbye forever.

Not that I will not visit it, not that I will not love and still try to shine a light on the True God for the people that live hopelessly within it. Not that I will not continue to try. But I will never be a part of it again. I will never include myself in it's fate again. I will not be afraid to accept my better life--the life even the House wanted for me in spite of itself--the new life God gave me in His kingdom.

It's sad that it will take my father's death for the people I love to have a chance at life. It is sad that my father may not find The True Life before he leaves this mist--that he may live not just his life on earth, but eternity in agonizing separation from God.

I cannot help him. I cannot fix it.

But God can.

And just maybe--when the wreckage of this house has long been swept out to sea--there will be darkness complete enough for the light to matter. And maybe--just maybe--they will find it in time to truly Live.