I am 74 years of age. That statistic means different things to different people. For me, being alive for 7 decades means I've lived long enough for 3 lifetimes. I published my first book at the vigorous age of 32. It was as if a spigot had been opened, and other books came pouring out ever since. People sometimes ask me why I wrote the books I've written. The truth is that I wrote them not out of any strategy but simply because they said, "Write me."
So it is now. I'm at the age when I can do things in life simply because they say, "Do me." With the perspective of age I've come to realize that, in their own unique way, each experience has been an attempt to work out some complex, hidden theme. Now I know how growing up on Oahu shaped me as perhaps no other experience in my life.
Once I put high school behind me, I got on with the business of real life -- college, seminary, doctorate, teaching, writing, marriage, children, grandchildren, farming, sports, missionary trips. Yet without exception, every one of these tasks was the aggregate of the umpteen experiences I had between the ages of 1 and 19. So allow me to share a few things that being born and raised in the Paradise of the Pacific has taught me. I am not so bold as to suggest that these lessons will be of very much help to you during your own journey through life. What I do suggest, however, is that we indeed come to exist in communion with the Holy, and that through this communion we can know with humility that in the end all things point to God.
1. Thinking. One thing I learned in Hawaii was that I had a brain. This may seem obvious, but I didn't grow up doing much thinking. But the seeds of cogitation were planted in Kailua. When my 5th grade teacher opened class one day with, "Cómo está usted?", I knew immediately that there was something special about foreign languages. When I took basic theology from James Cook at the International Baptist Church in Honolulu at the age of 16, I realized that my capacity for thinking systematically about my Christian faith was a gift from God. The most common response to all my writings is not that I've said anything particularly profound or new. It is that I write about the kinds of things people are thinking about but are perhaps afraid to talk about. It takes courage to be different, but sadly our culture discourages thinking. To dare to be oneself means that we risk being seen as eccentrics or mavericks. But if we dare to grow, we have to dare to think.
So we arrive at a paradox regarding freedom and thinking. We're free to think anything we want. But we're not free to impose our thoughts on others. My goal as a teacher has always been to produce independent thinkers -- people who think for themselves without rejecting all conventional wisdom and dismissing all societal norms. It was in Hawaii that I first heard it said, "Once a mind is truly stretched, it never returns to its former dimension." Mine certainly hasn't.
Coming up in Part 2: "Learning."