A little moment

The eastern sky is brooding again, boiling with thick, heavy clouds in layers of blue and gray so deep they almost look black. But something disrupts the monologue, and sun spills gold from the west in a sudden flash of brilliance, silhouetting bright lime-green trees and gleaming tan houses against an apocalyptic backdrop of midnight violet.

I smell rain.

I pull open the glass, eager for a glimpse of the sun, shining from one mutinous break in the clouds to the west. The sky is playful aqua there, robin's egg blue, and the tips of the clouds shine white, pearl, soft gray.

The moment passes, and shadows descend like a huge, black crow lighting on a tree branch, slowly, softly, resolutely.

The trees turn from lime to deep emerald, and the rows of houses and rooftops begin to turn deep gray, one by one by one, until only a ribbon of pale, distant sky separates dark land from dark clouds.

I strain my eyes to the west.

Somewhere, against distant mountain slopes, the sun is dancing in the pines, lighting clouds in beautiful, dappled peach and eggshell white with misty edges.

A flock of crows flies westward, dodging power lines, calling back and forth with rough, throaty calls.

Perhaps they, too, miss the sun

Coincidence... or not?

I can still hear the drums outside my closed window, hollow and tinny, echoing from the street between whistle blasts. Boom! Boom! Whistle, whistle. Boom! Boom! Marching feet. I slid open the glass to hear better and was sorry I did. I can't see anything from my window, but I can hear the festival processional coming through the big street in front of my apartment, apparently blocking traffic.

A festival wouldn't ordinarily bother someone - unless, of course, you are a Christian in Japan. Japanese festivals are full of Buddhist and Shinto religious symbols, chants and activities. Even if they're couched in the guise of a harmless dance or cultural/historical event, don't be so quick to think all is well. So you've seen "Karate Kid II" - remember the Bon Dance they introduced so innocently? It's a festival and dance inviting the spirits of deceased ancestors back to their native homes so they can be worshipped.

I hear the drums again, coming back up the street.



Two weeks ago, in fact, a lady came to my door asking for money for the local Buddhist temple festival. This may indeed be it.

At any rate, I was unable to sleep last night because of strange noises in the floor above - under - both - I'm not exactly sure. Running feet - back and forth, back and forth, strange music, drum beats that made my floor vibrate - after 10 p.m. in a family apartment!! I turned on my lamp, read my Bible and prayed, and eventually the noises stopped.

Then early this morning my dreams turned from normal to creepy to demonic - a sure sign for me that something is afoot in the spiritual realm.

I am a child of God who is not welcome in Satan's kingdom.

And then, at 2 in the afternoon, a festival marching up my street.

"Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand agains the devil's schemes. FOR OUR STRUGGLE IS NOT AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD, BUT AGAINST THE RULERS, AGAINST THE AUTHORITIES, AGAINST THE POWERS OF THIS DARK WORLD AND AGAINST THE SPIRITUAL FORCES OF EVIL IN THE HEAVENLY REALMS. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand." - Ephesians 6:10-13.

Friends, our actions are NEVER neutral!

Our lives and the way we live them are always accepting someone and rejecting someone. Some choose to accept God and rejecting Satan; others choose to please people, please the crowd, accept the ways of Satan ("called the prince of this world") and reject God.

There is no such thing as an action with no consequence. Even to choose NOT to believe in anything is a choice, a statement, a coming to one side of a line drawn in the sand.

P.S. - Christ already won, He wins now, and He wins in the end. Not a bad record!

Summer at home

with long cloudy spaces and a few bright days jammed with flowers.

I look out on the trees clumped along the road, waving in the breeze, and I remember summer in my own hometown - before the introduction of college, jobs, faraway cities.

It was just the road and me then - a long, black curve of asphalt lined with Queen Anne's Lace and powder blue chickory blossoms, winding through the countryside, going nowhere important... except past my childhood friend's house, or to the old Tastee-Freez with creamy white ice cream, or over that small hill where I could see the whole line of Blue Ridge Mountains surrounded by green pasture like a wide picture postcard.

If I followed the road long enough I would see my high school, and expressionless cows blooming like black-and-white mushrooms in a green garden, then the old railroad tracks, and then vast stretches of national forest and Appalachia - complete with log cabins - in the general direction of my favorite camp sites. But if I turned off to the right I would see the small, white church where I asked to be baptized (I remember its green shag carpet well); around the bend stands the brown-roofed house on Crawford Drive where I spent ten years of my life.

The blue sky over the mountains, the peach glow of a clear sunset, the sunlight in the grass and heat in the morning, rest in the shade and tomatoes ripening on the vine, a long, winding, lonely country road...

Time stops along such a curve of pavement; white and gold daisies are neither snobs of century or of person. Daisies do not care if you are eight or 80, or even whether you see them. They will bloom quietly along the roadside, where God scatters their seed, summer after summer in forgotten places.

The road stretched out in the other direction eventually runs into a bigger road, and then a bigger one, until it merges with the interstate, from which you can spend two pleasant hours until the big trucks of Richmond try to wrestle you into the shoulder... you will find signs for a Richmond International Airport, a plane that will take you to Newark, N.J. and then on to Tokyo, then a small plane bound for northern Japan, then a bus, and another bus, and finally a quiet street like mine today, intermittently dark and light as big clouds roll by, smelling of ramen and the last of summer grass. The wind smells of fall.

Far from home but full of memories.

But I would be wrong if I thought those summer days in Virginia would stay the same. My friends have grown up and married, moved away. Someone with a pickup truck lives in my old house, and the roses I planted are in disrepair. Someone I've never met pastors the little white church (which recently acquired a steeple), and few of the teachers left at my high school would know or even recognize me.

Even the last vestige of my childhood memories, the old elementary school building which had been there for decades, joined its predecessors in a pile of rubble next to a huge, new, gleaming brick elementary school. The playground, the cafeteria, the gym echoing of squeaky gym shoes - gone.

There are more malls and fewer farms, more strangers and fewer friends.

What job would a girl with an English degree have there?

The likes of small towns were not made for journalism and big plans.

Instead I am here, watching Japan's short, strange summer unfold, sitting as close to the window as possible to soak up every bit of sun even as I work.

This is God's season, God's time.

Jesus gave up a lot more than a summer when He left Nazareth, feeling perhaps a little torn as I do - He gave up His life.

What if He had stayed there, raised a family, lived the good life with his friends?

Where would we be?

Not here, not saved, not living changed lives.

And what if Paul had lingered in Tarsus, or Abram in Haran, or Ruth in Moab?

There are those who God calls to stay in their hometowns and work for Him, and those He calls to leave - some for a short time, some for a lifetime. But we are all called to make ourselves available to His kingdom - no questions asked.

And sometimes that call leaves us feeling a little far away from everything we know, are familiar with, understand, remember.

But the day will come when summer in north Japan will go on without me, and I will get off the interstate at a little no-name exit in the Shenandoah Valley.

I will see new buildings and old ones, strange cars and familiar hillsides. I will drive through the roads I once knew like my own breath and savor the colors of a Virginia summer.

Maybe it will be less spectacular than I remember. Maybe more.

But two things will almost certainly remain unchanged: wild flowers along the roadside, blooming in delicious, delirious obscurity; and Tastee-Freez ice cream, the best in the world. My favorite has raspberry sauce.

Stop in sometime and see for yourself - my treat.

Sapporo music show!

Kegani

The wonders of communication

Communication is an incredible thing.

The Heartlanders team was in Okinawa for a team retreat last month - eating REAL American food for the first time in months, enjoying the warm wind (and warm rain), watching morning break across the ocean and silhouette slender palm trees against the sky.

We met new team members and team members who have been around for years. We prayed. We talked strategy. We sang hymns.

And on the way home, God gave me a breakthrough.

I was riding in the front of a taxi-van which hauled seven of us (plus our luggage) from the hotel to the airport in Naha, Okinawa's capital, about an hour away. As we loaded everything in to the van, I noticed our driver - a little old man who appeared to be in his late 60s or 70s... pleasant face, gray hair, cute fishing hat.

I have a soft spot for older people, especially older Japanese, so my interest was peaked immediately. And that cute fishing hat... That did it for me. I had to talk to him.

"Good morning," I said to him in Japanese as he swung our suitcases into the back of the van.

"Good morning," he replied with a big smile.

"Do you speak English?" I asked hesitantly in Japanese.

He laughed and waved his hand back and forth. "No, no. Not at all." He paused, loaded some more suitcases, then tipped his hat back and said, "You speak good Japanese. Where are you from?"

Aha! He WAS friendly. And he wanted to talk to me, too!

I sat in the seat behind him as our taxi-van caravan took off, watching the fields of skinny sugar cane and summer blue sky slide past the windows. I asked him about the sugar cane fields, Okinawa food, where he was from and what things he liked.

And he answered me in fast, gutteral Japanese with a strange, slurred Okinawan accent, beaming all the while.

He told me the Japanese names of the flowers as we passed by, what to call palm trees, how to say "hello" and "thank you" in strange Okinawa language. We listened to part of a baseball game on the radio.

"Do you like baseball?" I asked him.

"Not really," he replied. "How about you?"

"I love baseball," I said. "And I really love soccer."

"Is that right..." He watched the road a while. "So what do you do in Japan?"

"I teach in English and Bible in Sapporo," I said.

"Really! You're a missionary?" he asked.

"Yes. I came to Sapporo last August."

We talked about Sapporo ramen and the long winter, the feet and feet of snow that fell every year.

So the two of us talked almost the whole way to Naha - a little brown-haired missionary daughter sleeping in my lap, the driver (hard of hearing) tilting his head to hear my broken Japanese.

It wasn't until we were zooming through the narrow, crowded streets of Naha that I realized what a miracle had just happened.

He hollered something in Japanese over the noise of traffic.

"He says people aren't allowed to ride bicycles in town because the streets are so narrow," I told the others in the van.

I asked him another question, and he was listening so hard that he had to tap his brakes to slow down in the traffic flow.

"Oh, sorry - I'm dangerous," I joked in Japanese.

He roared with laughter - face crinkled in a big smile, watching the other cars in the rearview mirror.

Wait a second - what just happened?

Did I just have an hour conversation (and tell a joke) to old Okinawan man - all in Japanese?

Did he really just tell me something about bicycles and crowded streets and I UNDERSTOOD?

Did he actually UNDERSTAND what I said and laugh?

It was like a gigantic neon sign suddenly burst into brilliant, gaudy light overhead: Jenny, this is COMMUNICATION!

I could almost hear the Hallelujah chorus showering down in our little taxi-van as I took it all in.

I just COMMUNICATED with someone.

I just carried on an entire CONVERSATION with someone. Not an, "Excuse me, where's the bathroom?" question or even the typical, "I'm from America. Nice to meet you," thing.

No, this was a conversation - a giving and taking of information, a blending of lives at tiny, interconnecting points.

And the miracle - IT WAS NOT BECAUSE OF MY JAPANESE!!!

I've been in Japan a year, but believe me - years of Japanese could not prepare me to talk for an hour with an Okinawan man.

No, it wasn't my SKILL but my TOOLS! I didn't even realize it, but being in Japan has taught me how to say some basic things: "Could you say that again, please?" or "I don't understand this word. What does it mean?" or "I don't know what that means. Does it mean...?" or "Could you repeat that slowly?"

I've learned how to ask questions a different way when I come to a roadblock.

I've learned how to DESCRIBE what I mean if I can't think of the word.

I've learned to locate the problem words and go around them.

In short, I've learned to communicate. I can't translate. I speak many grammatically correct sentences. I could NEVER write a paper in Japanese.

But God has taught me, without me even realizing it, to communicate.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS???!!!

IT MEANS I'M NOT ALONE!

It means I can erase the invisible lines that separate me from other people!

It means means I can share questions, joys, pain, faith, funny things, strange things, ANYTHING with a person, even a stranger, if they're willing to talk to me!

It means I have my life back!

It means I have a connection to other living human beings, a connection to lives beyond my own!

For almost a year I have lived in Japan feeling lonely and isolated, trapped behind a massive language barrier like jail bars. And God has been slowly handing me the keys. Keys to freedom. Keys to my old talkative self. Keys to let people know that I'm more than a friendly American - I'm a CHRISTIAN.

I said good-bye to the taxi-van driver at the airport as we loaded suitcases out onto the hot sidewalk.

He shook my hand with his worn, calloused hand, and said, "Thank you," several times in Okinawa slang and then Japanese (just to make sure I understood).

I thanked him back and told him to take care.

"I had fun," I told him. "Thank you."

"Me, too," he said. "See you later."

He waved to me from the taxi-van as the caravan pulled away, probably headed off to pick up more people.

I waved to him until the van was gone.

See you later. No, I probably won't see him again. I don't know his name, his email address. I couldn't even pick his face out of a crowd now.

But the miracle is still there.

When I met friendly Japanese strangers back in Sapporo, I chatted with them and listened to their lives.

When I gave a fragile old lady my bus seat, I let her know that I was a Christian.

I sit here even now, amazed.

Thank you, little Okinawan man, for showing me the gift of conversation.

Thank you, God, for working as you so often do - in tiny, undiscovered ways that suddenly pop out in stark relief one day (to our great surprise!) Thank you for the spoken language, the sharing of words and blending of lives, the intersection of thought between two people.

Use our mouths, God - whether we speak English or Japanese, like a translator or in broken syllables, to declare your praise to a lost world.

Make us like Moses - whose "slow" speech set a nation free.

Set this nation free, God.

Set Japan free.

Let your people go.

World Cup Party!