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| Autumn ginkgo leaves through the window of a practice room at school. |
It's been one year and four weeks since I first stumbled into a tiny apartment in Tokyo, full of awe and wonder at Japan, hopes and dreams for the next 29 months, and fears about just what I was getting into. (The night before I left, I sat on the couch in my parents' house with a sudden case of the cold feet that brought me close to tears.
Moving across an ocean? Being a missionary? Who does that?)
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| "Squid guts." They were really salty. |
The second semester of the school year is well underway and I've been alternately too busy and too writer's-blocked to think of a good way to commemorate my one-year Japanniversary on my blog. I wanted it to be something deep and funny, something that would show my growth as a person or at least show off some of the weird/cool stuff I've eaten/done (in short: jellyfish, shark fin soup [both unknowingly at first], and something our hosts called "squid guts"; gone to a cat café, had a soda at a restaurant where there was a warm foot bath under the table, and caught sight of the emperor's motorcade as it passed through Kumamoto).
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This cat at the cat café just stood
here and stared at everyone like
this the whole time. |
But the truth is, God sent a very broken person to Japan that night in November 2012. I'd had a hard year and was full of doubts, insecurities, and anxieties accompanied by an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation that was really just self-importance. I was kind of hoping my service in Japan would fix some of those things and turn me into a confident, compassionate, generous, maybe even Christlike person. But looking back on the past twelve months, it seems that my time here has only highlighted my weaknesses.
It's a point I touched on
back in August, with English Summer Camp. I often wonder if I'm doing the whole "mission" thing right, with my stumbling attempts at explaining why the Bible is important to a student about to go abroad and my too-long morning chapel messages that make everyone late for first-hour class. Am I here because God wanted me to be here, or am I here because my Japanophile self wanted to be here?
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| Ginger ale and a foot soak. |
I ask God that question a lot, and I never seem to get a straight answer. Maybe it's a question it's useless to even be asking, like those "nonsense questions" C. S. Lewis talked about in
A Grief Observed.* (Been on a C. S. Lewis reading binge lately.) Last night was a good reminder that I'm just
grateful to be a J-3. It was Thanksgiving and I had delicious
nabemono, homemade hot-pot, with a long-term missionary in her cozy apartment while we just laughed and talked together.
I'm a J-3 who bumbles and flounders and hesitates in her attempts to walk with God, and as long as I'm here on Earth I don't think I can get much better than that. Thank God the God I serve can make something out of someone like me, even if I can't see it yet. (You
are working on me, right, God? ...Sorry! I'll get back to work...)
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Trick-or-treating around school with the junior high English
Speaking Society girls. They make my Wednesdays. |
*"Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask--half our great theological and metaphysical problems--are like that."
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, from the collection The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (HarperCollins, 2002) 685.
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
2 Corinthians 12:9b (NIV)
