For many of the "Baby Boomer" generation the onset of summer brings with it warm memories. There's something about the rising temperatures and the lengthened evenings that bring to mind those slow summer days, the freedom of baggy trunks and barefeet. To many it brings to mind a trip to the beach with surfboards snuggly tied to the station wagon's roof, the Beach Boys on the radio, windows rolled down, hair blowing in the breeze.

Though it was primarily a Southern California phenomenon, surfing seemed to epitomize the dreams of the entire nation in the mid-sixties. It was a dream lifestyle that Rick Irons made into reality. A product of the early Southern California surfing craze, Irons was one of the premier riders of the early sixties, winning the first ever U.S. Invitational Surfing Championships at Oceanside, CA in 1964. Following his success in competitive surfing he went on to become one of the nation's leading surfboard "shapers." But from the top of the surfing world he found an emptiness and vacuum in his life that only Jesus Christ was able to fill.

Today, Irons is an Associate Pastor at the North Shore Christian Fellowship in Hawai'i offering that same hope to fellow surfers and to his community that he found in having a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. His life story has been made into a full-length movie titled "Shout for Joy." At 40, he no longer surfs competitively, but actively tutors his son, Ricky, and continues to "shape" surfboards for various manufacturers on the islands in his spare time. Harvest Magazine was able to put together this interview via telephone conversations and contributions from free-lance writer Bill Kenom.

Harvest Magazine (HM):
Rick, tell us a little about the movie based on your life. What was your involvement in its making?

Rick:
It’s by Gospel Films out of Muskegon, Michigan. They wanted to do a film on surfing, so they contacted me through different people to get my testimony. So I sent them a cassette tape telling them how I came to know the Lord. They came over and decided they wanted to base the film on the surfing community and what the Lord was doing there. So they just went for it, wrote a script, and made it into a full dramatic type of movie. We had very little to do with the actual planning of the film itself. It was difficult for them to do it, a tremendous struggle. I believe there are tremendous strongholds of the devil in surfing; because it is a sport of very beautiful appearance, it takes people and actually destroys their lives. The film really presents the way surfing can start out beautifully, then turn ugly; almost like a tract I saw that said, "I loved surfing with my whole heart, but it never loved me back."

Unless the Lord gets in the middle of a surfer’s life, it’s very unlikely he’s going to get stabilized, have a family that truly has a future, or really be able to enjoy the surfing aspect of his life. The things Alma (his wife) and I went through are real common to people in the surfing community. The film, called "Shout for Joy," will be distributed throughout the U.S. and outside the country to some extent, so I really believe it will be used to help point people like us toward Jesus.

HM:
Rick, can you take us back aways and tell us how you became involved with surfing and what your family background was like?

Rick:
Well, I have a real surfin’ family. I have six brothers who all surf. There’s seven of us in all and it’s a real surfin’ mania family. My older brother started surfin’ back in the mid-fifties. I was the next in age under him so I would bug him to take me to the beach. He finally got me a surfboard and I started surfin’ in about ‘56 or ‘57. It was just kind of a magic thing back then because there weren’t many surfers and if you saw a surfer on the road you wanted to pull over and say "What’s goin’ on? Where’s the surf?"

HM:
What about your son Ricky? At 17 he’s already won the Hawai’i State Championships for his age group and it looks like he’s going to be a good surfer to follow in his dad’s footsteps. What’s your relationship with him like?

Rick:
He’s a fine son, as well as a growing Christian. The Lord has given us opportunities to share with the "Shout for Joy" film and he has been a real blessing when we have shared with younger groups. The kids respect me as an older surfer and shaper but can relate to my son as a young surfer living on the North Shore of O’ahu and trying to lead a Christian life. They need such encouragement to realize it is so worth it to follow Jesus, and that they will never regret being a man of God.

HM:
Is Ricky starting to tackle larger waves now?

Rick:
Well, he started surfin’ Rocky Point when he was about four years old. I used to take him out and surf, so he has a lot of experience, and he just gradually increases to the size that he enjoys. He’s getting up to six to eight feet where he can enjoy it and do real well. But he has a lot of respect for the ocean, which is real healthy, and I think he’ll be able to ride bigger waves as he grows physically and gains experience.

HM:
Having a surfing father must have helped him in terms of getting to know the ocean.

Rick:
I’ve spent a lot of time with him, although before we became Christians, as he grew up to be about eight or nine years old he really rejected what I was doing as a surfer and the whole thing. He stopped surfin’, and I knew it was because there was a real breakdown in our relationship even at that young age. It’s neat that since the Lord has come into our lives, there’s been a real healing there, where he just really enjoys it like I did when I started.

HM:
In 1977 following your success in surfing and your subsequent marriage to Alma you became a born-again Christian. How did that happen?

Rick:
I think my hunger for truth in life actually began with surfing. It was a beautiful lifestyle and stuff, and as I began to really pursue it I left a lot of the traditional values I grew up with as a young man. Going into surfing I had a lot of people who would touch my life and begin to tell me different things about God and different spiritual things. When I went to the University of Hawai’i I had a minor in philosophy, and so I got the full-on existential down-the-tube-blues by the time I graduated, because existentialism is so depressing. I found myself getting into cultic and occultic things when I came out of college because I had rejected my traditional values. A blending of Eastern religions, mysticism and cosmic consciousness just seemed to parallel the aesthetics of my lifestyle; just enjoying life and going with the flow. My wife and I and even my son were initiated into transcendental meditation, and got into the process of "cleaning up our lives." But there was still a nagging emptiness inside.

HM:
Why do you feel people our age looked first to Eastern religions almost across the board for a way into spiritual enlightenment?

Rick:
I grew up in the church, and as I got older I saw a lack of reality in the older people who were professing the faith. I saw no power. There was a confession of God at church, but no reality of God in their daily lives. It just seemed like a big sham. Then during the sixties people started to speak out about alternative philosophies as part of new lifestyle. For surfers, if you couldn’t incorporate it into your lifestyle it wasn’t worth much. Personally, I never considered the faith to be something that was a way of life, but rather something you did to complement your life; a little topping on the pie, but not the whole pie.

HM:
So at what time did you decide to make a commitment to Christ?

Rick:
Well, I was into this cult called Unity, which is a metaphysical Christian faith thing that seemed to complement my philosophy background and my Christian upbringing. There really was a draw to the person of Jesus Christ, real particularly to Jesus. I began to think He was my "master" because I was really off into Eastern thought. I couldn’t relate to Ramakrishna or Vivakananda or any of these other characters, even though I enjoyed talking about them and enjoyed reading about their lives. I was still rejecting the Gospel on an intellectual basis, but I was drawn in my heart to the person of Jesus Christ. One night I found myself getting up out of bed and going over and knocking on someone’s door to ask them how to get Jesus into my life. I actually went to this guy’s house twice, but he wasn’t home either time. So on the third night I just said, "Hey, I know , there’s another Christian down the street." So I went to Steve Walden’s house and basically said to him, "How then must I be saved?" It was interesting. He was in shock!

HM:
I can imagine.

Rick:
I said the sinner’s prayer with him at that time which basically goes: "Lord I’m sorry for my sin, and I accept your sacrifice for me on the cross, and please come and live inside me and make yourself real to me." I thought I had figured out who Jesus Christ was, so I asked Him in MY understanding of who I thought He was.

And nothing happened. In fact the next three weeks were some of the worst weeks in my life. I went home and started to read my Bible, but I still wanted Him to get in my box, rather than me to accept Him as He was for me to get in line with Him. So about three weeks later one of the Christians in our community came over and said, "Hey, how are you doin’?" because he’d heard I’d been over, and the Christians had been praying for me for years. I said, "Well, I’m still doing my transcendental meditation, and not much is happening."

He said, "You know you’ve really messed around in the cults and occult and that’s the spirit of antichrist." He said the Holy Spirit could give me discernment between true and lying spirits, and wanted to know if he could pray with me so I would know the Spirit of the Lord from this spirit that had been deceiving me in the past.

At this point I was ready for anything. I really was thinking that Jesus wasn’t real either ‘cause I had asked Him into my life. So I said, "I don’t care. Sure, pray for me." It was three o’clock in the afternoon, broad daylight. I had never prayed publicly, just meditated and that, so I was just standing by my washing machine beside my house and six or seven other Christians were walking by and they came over to this Tom who was talking with me, and they all got around me and laid hands on me and prayed for me.

I had to be pretty weak at this point to do anything as radical as this ‘cause I was just thinking, "God I’ve had it, I’ve really come to the end." So they prayed for me. It was just neat, and I was very open. I prayed with them: "If you’re real, Lord, please help me." Afterwards I thanked them for praying for me and they left.

That night I put my kids to bed, there in our house at Rocky Point. I was walking down the hallway about six hours later that evening, and as I walked I felt, the only way I can explain it, was love just flooded my entire self, and I felt a weight being lifted off of me that I had known from since my first memories as a child.

At that point I knew and felt Jesus Christ was the Son of the Living God. I was overwhelmed with what happened, because I wasn’t praying. I wasn’t even thinking too much about it or anything; God just came into my life and saved my soul God began to perform miracles in our lives right away.

My wife had been really grieved because her father died about four months earlier and she had been crying every day since. Right after the Lord came into my life I asked Him to take away the pain and help her.

That night I didn’t tell Alma I’d prayed for her because we’d been at odds. The next morning when she woke up she told me that as she was sleeping she felt her father had come to her and told her it was all right now, that I could take care of her now, and it took the grief completely out of her life.

From that day on there was no more grieving or bereavement. It so blew my mind because I knew only God could have done that, only God could have answered that simple prayer I prayed.

HM:
I guess that kind of experience could really tend to change a guy’s outlook on life.

Rick:
I felt tremendously forgiven. There was such a freeing inside of me when Jesus saved me. I could really forgive my wife and I wanted her to forgive me because I knew I had sinned against her and had been so selfish for so many years and had led her down a path that on the surface was maybe OK, but it was really leading to an empty life.

We really didn’t have much of a relationship after 12 years of being married. She kind of lived her life, I lived mine. I wanted her to take care of herself because I didn’t know how to take care of her and didn’t want to.

So we lived separate lives under the same roof. Before my sins were forgiven I never really had compassion for anybody but myself. I felt guilty inside, and wanted so much to get rid of the things that seemed to contaminate all my relationships. But when Jesus came in He showed there had to be new ways of living we had to learn.

HM: So your family life has really taken on a new dimension?

Rick:
The thing that happened right from the beginning was the kids really lit up. I had tried to teach them about cosmic this and cosmic that and give them books about all this kind of stuff, and they never really responded. But the simple message of the Gospel and them seeing that I cared for them, because I really did begin to after God changed my heart, really got their attention. I used to actually use my kids as accessories in my life. I liked to look good walking down the beach with them, like a good father. The Lord turned the light on to show me how much I had used my own family, so I could repent from that and really begin to care for them as a father who knows what they need. There was a real response from them; there was reality coming into our life. It wasn’t like it happened overnight, but there was a real process of truth that worked into our lives.

HM:
Today you are the associate pastor of the North Shore Christian Fellowship. How has this changed your life?

Rick:
When I first became a Christian, I almost went away to Bible school. I was gonna be God’s great crusader.

But the Lord stopped me from leaving everything behind, because I had to work to provide for my family. He gave me Psalm 128 which says, "Blessed is the man who fears the Lord for He shall be happy and he shall eat the fruit of the labor of his hands, and his wife will be as a fruitful vine and his children like olive plants ‘round about his table."

I find, because the North Shore is a transient place, with a huge turnover of people, you deal with many people in short periods of time. I’m kind of excited as our body gets stabilized that there’s a real witness in the community, that we want our kids to grow up in a godly environment, and the lifestyle, blessed by God, can be really beautiful. I love to tell people about Jesus, but at the same time I see God’s concern is for us as a family, and the overflow from a right family standing is what we can do for the body (of Christ) and for the community.