Volume 28, No. 38
October 12, 2003

Building Anxiety

   “There’s no place like home”, they say.  Well, there’s certainly no place like this home!  

   In San Jose, California, the Winchester Mystery House defies logic. It has 160 rooms, staircases that go nowhere except the ceiling, windows in the floor, dozens of fake doors and shadowy, secret passageways.  But despite the mansion’s mammoth size, it had only one guilt-ridden resident, a rich, eccentric recluse who stood only four-foot-ten and kept her face veiled, except in the presence of one trusted servant.

   Sarah Winchester inherited $20 million from her husband William who died of tuberculosis at age 44.  Grief-stricken over his death, and the earlier loss of their baby girl, Sarah reportedly sought out a psychic.  The medium supposedly told her the deaths were caused by the spirits of all the people killed by the Winchester rifle, which had won the west and made a fortune for her husband’s family.  According to legend, Sarah was told that as long as she kept building on a house, she’d be safe and perhaps live forever.

   So in 1884, the unhappy hermit bought an eight-room farmhouse and started building.  She sketched her wishes on napkins and tablecloths then gave them to her 20 carpenters who worked in shifts around the clock for 38 years.  At a total cost of $5 million, Sarah had them build a mishmash of towers and turrets, porches, balconies, 40 bedrooms and a grand ballroom big enough for a hundred couples, even though she never entertained.

   There was even a seance room where she consulted the “good” spirits each night of her life.  Though the room had only one way in, there were three exits so she could elude the evil beings who might try to harm her.  Each evening, she took a different route to the room, dodging in and out of doors, windows and staircases.

   Directly in front of the sprawling house, Sarah placed a stone statue of a native American, which was ironic because, most of all, she dreaded the spirits of the Indians killed by the Winchester rifle.  That terror kept her engaged in compulsive construction every single day until her death on September 5, 1922. At age 82, Sarah Winchester finally gave the slip to her ghosts and her guilt.
 
  As much as the anxious widow, many of us try to lighten the weight of our fears and personal faults with busyness — even busyness in the church.  With no plan or purpose, we patch together a life that leads nowhere, like Sarah’s dead-end doors and stairways.  It’s a bleak life of loneliness and isolation in which we’re scared to let people see us as we are.  Rather than risk the hurt of a failed relationship, we spend our time trying to elude any commitment to God or the people He places in our path.  

   Few of us worry as much as Sarah about evil spirits, but we’re often just as consumed by grief and guilt.  Grief over people, plans or opportunities lost.  Guilt over persistent sin or things left undone.  So we fill the void by taking matters into our own hands.  We’re determined to numb the pain with constant activity, or cancel out the shame and eternal blame by doing good.  But, through it all, we’re haunted by the fear that if we stop, falter or fail, we’ll be lost.      

   If you, like Sarah, were to place a symbol of your greatest fear, right in front of your house, what would it be?  A clock?   A coffin?  Regardless, you can’t ward off disappointment and death through any make-work project of your own design. Deliverance is found only through accepting the all-important work Jesus did on the Cross. “God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him.  This is real love.  Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins...  Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear.” (1 Jo. 4:9, 18)

   So stop building. The mansion built by your Father is already ready.  You will live forever.  And there really is no place like home.

By Rick Gamble, published in Cross Current, the weekly newsletter of the Followers of Christ congregation in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  Reprint at will in not-for-profit publications.  To subscribe, contact sgamble@bfree.on.ca