Bill Stonebraker's Testimony, cont.

Bill met his wife, Danita, back around that time. He worked in a surfboard shop, and like most boys his age, enjoyed flirting with the girls. Danita called him one day, for her friend. When Bill asked what she was doing that night, she told him that a few gals were coming to her house. So Bill grabbed some buddies and some beers and headed over.

SOMETHING ABOUT DANITA

Danita was 13 years old at the time; Bill was 17. She and her friends were not into the drinking scene, but there was something about her that Bill liked. “At the time, I was consumed with being ‘cool.’ If other kids weren’t cool, they were out of it and you had nothing to do with them. [Since I’ve become a Christian, I’ve learned there’s none cool, no not one – see Romans 3:10.] But there was something about Danita. When I met her, she was sassy, she was strong, but there was also something uncorrupted about her. There was an independence and naiveté about her. She hadn’t been around the block and it attracted me to her.”

Eventually Bill and Danita married, at the ripe old age of 20 and 16. They don’t recommend others marry so young, primarily because for the next seven years they almost destroyed each other. They did everything two people could possibly do to ruin a relationship.

In 1967, the couple moved with their family to Hawaii, where Bill began a surfboard making business. It quickly became very prosperous. Bill’s name became known in the islands. He worked on boards for a lot of the top surfers in Hawaii.

The Stonebrakers lived out on Oahu’s North Shore, along an eight-mile stretch of beach that has some of the best surfing in the world. It was Paradise for Bill. He owned a home, a business, property in the South Pacific – he had it made. If the surf was good, he would put a sign on the door of his shop that read, “Testing New Equipment,” and head out to the waves.

For a surfer, things couldn’t have been much better, and yet Bill was empty inside. There was a void in his life. He began trying to fill it with drugs: LSD, peyote, hash, marijuana, etc. He began to drink all the time. “If I were not a Christian now,” he states, “I’d probably be an alcoholic, possibly dead. My father died of alcoholism, as did my grandfather. The first guy I ever took a drink with died of alcohol poisoning when he was only in his 30’s.”

BROKEN TRUST

Gradually Bill began to explore Eastern mysticism. He became a vegetarian and got involved in Hatha Yoga. All this was in an attempt to move into a higher plane, to experience god. But he found it to be supremely selfish. As he got more involved spiritually, he became more and more self-centered and less involved with his wife and kids.

Eventually Bill got the point where he didn’t want his family. He felt that Danita had ruined his life. He blamed her for everything. He convinced himself that she was preventing him from being happy. He didn’t want his three children, either. He had decided that he was incapable of loving anyone. He broke the trust of his family over and over again.

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