Grace

Today was a long day. I just got off the bus, packed with tired businessmen and high school students, and walked past the ramen shop and hair salon, around the corner and up the hill to our apartment. The moon is fuzzy now, hidden behind thick clouds; microscopic snowflakes kissed my face like dewdrops.

Outside it looks like a lunar landscape - snow everywhere, in piles, drifts, covering everything in icy, caked white. You can't tell the sidewalk from the street or where curb starts and finishes. It's just one big, rough spread of white, flat and endless like a rippled hockey rink.

As I walked home, breath misting under frosty starlight, I couldn't help thinking how my life is like these streets - sometimes so shapeless, void, nebulous. I always thought in black and white and absolutes, but now I often have more questions than answers, more choices than I know how to make.

So many times I am stepping out, like tonight, on a thin layer of faith and praying that God will direct my path and make His will clear.

He does, He does... but sometimes not until I take the first step. And with that step comes faith, which Hebrews 11:6 says I must have to please Him.

I'm used to hearing God in the loud, the gripping, the fantastic. But here I feel often so lost in the quietness of His leading. Sometimes I don't know if I'm standing on sidewalk or street or parking lot, all buried beneath mounds of ice. I think if only I could just get down on my hands and knees and touch the ground with my open hands, put my ear to the earth and hear the faintest whisper, the tiniest sound - THEN I would know!

And the mystery of it all - it is only then that I do hear, can hear, with my face to the ground and my knees bent in humility (which also comes from Him)...

Today was such a day, tiring, over-scheduled, noisy. A Japanese lesson, a university party for part-time teachers, lesson planning, an English class (all of which, of course, are on the opposite sides of town!)

The highlight of it all: I left the university meeting late, dodged through the subway station and switched trains left and right, ran up the stairs and down snowy streets for the Katsuis' house (still decorated with Christmas lights).

I burst in at 8:00, way behind schedule, with their dinner half-eaten and two new people - a Christian friend of the mother, Noriko, and the friend's daughter - who I had never met. My salad was waiting for me on the table.

Could it get any worse?

But God, God, in His grace...

I scarfed down salad and rice as they finished dessert, feeling helpless inside (not sure how to teach!), and then eight-year-old Tochinori ran to the cabinet and started rummaging through papers.

He said something in Japanese and dropped a little hand-drawn British flag next to my rice plate.

In a flash I remembered - he had drawn it for me last week, painstakingly, with blue and red markers - and I had forgotten it. But he hadn't! He was beaming.

Then he and Yui, the friend's seven-year-old daughter, who smiled shyly at me from beneath black pigtails, ran back to his room and returned with a string of paper flags from around the world.

"It's present," he said, dropping it proudly next to my plate, still beaming. Yui handed me three sheets of stationary paper, echoing his words with another beautiful shy smile.

I don't know how it happened, but the next thing I knew everyone was sitting around the table with paper and pencil and the two English and Japanese children's Bibles open to the creation story.

"Light," they repeated, working hard on their l's and t's. "Day."

Tochi and Yui copied my pencil drawings of suns and stars and gripped their pencils hard as they wrote the English letters. Tochi crossed his d's out and redid them over and over again.

Then the door opened, and in came the father from work - eating rice and stew while he watched quietly, nodding.

My heart pounded as we continued - "Darkness. Earth. God."

The father nodded. And smiled.

He even answered one of the questions and, when we closed the Bibles, bowed deeply from his chair. "Thank you so much for coming."

The other heads turned toward me politely and bowed, too. For the first time all evening it was quiet. I was speechless.

An inexperienced, impatient American girl, teaching the Bible around a dining room table to a Buddhist family of four and two friends... How else but by God's grace? Were it up to me, I would have canned the whole idea long ago and moved to Guam.

That grace silenced my roiling thoughts as Noriko walked me (with snow blowing) back to the subway station, as I watched the tired businessmen slumped sleeping on the subway, and as I thought of Tochi's British flag tucked safely in my bag.

Barrenness and lostness, all around me, curves in the road I cannot see. The way is often not clear.

But on nights like tonight I am keenly aware that wherever I put my foot, He is there...

Perhaps before I sleep tonight I will put my face to the ground and listen for His voice.

Pray that the Katsuis will come to know God as the Creator of their lives, their salvation, and their hope. Pray that by this time next year the Buddhist altar and picture in their bathroom will be replaced with Bible verses and the cross of Christ. Pray that they, too, will know God's abundant grace.