Christmas, Part 3: Also New Year's.

Caroline and I decided to start off our Christmas Day with an English-language service at an international Lutheran church in Tokyo. Christmas being a weekday, the service was very sparsely attended. Upon our entry, we were welcomed by an American woman who handed us our worship materials. I couldn't help but notice that despite being obviously non-Japanese, she had a Japanese last name.

"Welcome!" she said. "Are you visiting, or do you live in Tokyo, or...?"

"We'll be in Tokyo for another few weeks," explained Caroline, "but then we're going to move to Kumamoto--"

"Are you J-3s?" she asked, beaming. We smiled and nodded sheepishly as she then proceeded to explain that she was a former J-3 herself. She arrived in the '80s, and then got married and never left. (Not to scare my mom, but this happens a lot, apparently.) After the service and some intergenerational J-3 conversation and bonding, we got Christmas cheeseburgers at MOS Burger, a restaurant that bills itself as a fresher alternative to McDonald's or Burger King. And by Christmas cheeseburgers, I mean we got cheeseburgers on Christmas Day. Nothing else was Christmassy about that day; the restaurant was eerily quiet despite being packed with office workers in suits. (Caroline pretty much summed it up in her own blog entry about the holiday: "By the way, Merry Christmas!")

Before dropping by a theater in Shinjuku to see The Hobbit, we stopped in the bustling Koreatown district of Shin-Ōkubo near Tokyo Lutheran Church for some shopping, street food, and coffee. Well, for me not so much shopping as watching Caroline be adorable as she fangirled over her favorite Korean drama stars. I don't really get celebrity worship (I don't even know these guys!), but it's still quite entertaining to see Caroline get so excited to see a desk calendar featuring her favorite Korean celebrity.

Hotteok.
Photo by Fooding Around.

And then there was what we've come to call the Hotteok Incident of 2012. Hotteok, for those not fortunate enough to have tried it, is a Korean street food that I can only describe as what would happen if an English muffin and a baklava had a beautiful pancake baby. It's a fried, honey-filled hotcake with cinnamon, peanuts, and other amazingness. Pure food bliss. You can also get them filled with cheese or anko (sweet red bean paste), but why move away from perfection?

Anyway, Caroline and I were leaning on the rail on the curb, happily eating our piping-hot hotteok, when I get down to the bottom of the hotteok where all the honey pools, and, if you're not careful, explodes all over you. I was trying my best to keep the honey in the little paper envelope the hotteok comes in, but the dough of this particular hotteok was so chewy that I couldn't bite it off from the rest. Spitting it back out was probably an option, but by then it was too late. I was hunched over, laughing through my hotteok at the honey that proceeded to spill all over my hair, my coat, and my pants especially. I still had hotteok in my mouth, so I couldn't explain to the very confused Caroline just what was going on. When she figured out I was actually fine and just having some hotteok troubles, she started laughing hysterically. (It was okay; I was laughing, too.) I finally managed to rip the hotteok out of my mouth (with Caroline's help), and then noticed a little kid on the sidewalk staring at me open-mouthed. I think he thought I was actually in distress and Caroline (still paralyzed with laughter) was being a terrible friend.

Of course, by then I was a mess. There was honey all over my face and hands. I was considering buying a water bottle from a vending machine and just stepping into an alley to pour it all over myself, but thankfully Tokyo Lutheran was less than a block away. I hid behind a pillar while Caroline called Erik. "Are you in the church right now?" she asked him. "We had a bit of an accident..."

It's nice to be friends with the pastor! Erik let us in the back entrance of the church, and we rushed down the hall to the bathroom, where I spent the next half hour rinsing off my face and hands and splashing water all over my clothes. I don't even know how honey got in some of the places it did (on the back of my collar?!). "We're gonna laugh about this so hard later," I said as I stood bent down, washing my hair in the tiny sink.

We warmed up (and I dried off) at Snow Cup, our favorite Koreatown coffee place, whose rainbow-pastel decor perfectly matches its sugary drink and food offerings. Then it was off to Middle Earth for a few hours. (Each of the future Hobbit movies will be released around Christmastime each year that we're here. This is definitely going to be a J-3 tradition.) After the thoroughly enjoyable movie we briefly visited a used bookstore, then grabbed some filled crepes (another favorite street food) to consume on our way home for the night, declaring the whole way that it had been an excellent Christmas.

But that night was not so good for Caroline. It's rough to spend Christmas 5,000 kilometers away from home, and she was feeling it particularly badly. So she introduced me to the wonderful, fluffy, wish-fulfillment-fantasy world of Korean dramas. Up in her apartment we watched one of her favorites, a cute time-travel romance, until 3:30 in the morning. By then we were both about ready to fall asleep. But peacefully this time.

Morgan is a courageous woman.

A relatively uneventful week later was New Year's Eve, which Morgan, Caroline, and I wanted to go all-out for. We started with a coffee shop blogging session (the fruits of which you read last week), then after dropping our stuff back at our apartments, headed to the Akasaka district to go ice skating. Then it was off to T.G.I. Friday's for a traditional American dinner of onion rings and ridiculously gigantic hamburgers. I have no idea how one human can eat as much meat as what was on each of our plates. None of us finished, but we made a decent effort. We had to hang out at the restaurant for a while before we felt like we could actually get up and move.

We met up with one of the students from Hongo, a businessman, who took us to dessert and tea at a nearby restaurant and then Starbucks to wait for midnight. We were right near Meiji Shrine, a major Shintō shrine in Japan, but seeing as 3 million people visit it every New Year's holiday, we decided to beat the crowds and go to the nearby, less-well-known Tōgō Shrine to experience a real Japanese New Year.

Tōgō Shrine after midnight.

There were definitely fewer than 3 million people there, but it was still quite a lively place. A bonfire was burning near the front of the shrine, and starting at midnight (a few younger people counted down to midnight out loud!) the line processed all the way up to the hall where people offered coins and prayers, clapping and bowing. Cups of hot sweet sake were passed out, and people lined up on the other side of the courtyard to buy New Year's fortunes and good luck charms. Others stood around in the courtyard, laughing and chatting while sipping their sake and discussing their fortunes. (This YouTube video was taken by someone at a different shrine, but our experience was much like it.)

We parted ways with our host and made our way back home, where we gathered in Caroline's aprtment to enjoy some Italian champagne she'd bought earlier in the day. Opening it was a little harder than expected.

Ganbatte kudasai, do your best, Caroline!

But eventually she got it open and we were able to welcome 2013 with style.

Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu and Happy New Year from the 2012-2015 J-3s!

The next day was the annual New Year's service at my church, which I thoroughly enjoyed, although I was a bit startled at first: as soon as I walked in the door, I was asked, "Can you be the acolyte?" My pastor's wife explained the procedure to me in Japanese (which I then confirmed with my translator, just to be sure), and I was handed a white hip-length surplice and a candle lighter, and sent on my way down the aisle. I think I did all right--nothing caught on fire, at least (except the candles, of course). Though I may have extinguished the candle lighter too soon, oh well.

I usually only understand maybe three or four sentences out of my pastor's entire sermon, but for some reason that day I could understand more than usual. He preached on Luke 4:16-21, when Jesus reads the passage in Isaiah about proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor. Now, I understood maybe 10% of the sermon, so perhaps I'm misinterpreting it, but during the sermon I caught my pastor saying something about how the people listening to Jesus talk about fulfilling the prophecy about "proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor" must have had anxieties and heartaches of their own. And I realized: Jesus was there with them, boldly proclaiming that he was there to bind up the brokenhearted and free the captives. I felt like Jesus was right there with me, too.

2012 was a tough year for me. I experienced probably the lowest lows of my life, especially spiritually. I've become acutely more aware of the gap between what I've been taught and what I've experienced myself, and it's distressingly wide at times. Often I feel like I've been dropped back at Square One of my faith, unsure of whether or how to trust in God. Were I non-Christian, back at Tōgō Shrine I would have been buying every kind of charm and trinket to try to secure blessing for this year. I very much like to be in control of my surroundings, to understand everything that's going on. Caroline and Morgan can attest to how much I overthink things. It's my own mental version of a good-luck charm.

But that's not what God is. He's not a "God of the gaps," constantly displaced by our scientific knowledge or common sense, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against.* As Paul says in Colossians 1:16-17, all things were created by Him and for Him, and in Him all things hold together.

And yet even in this sureness of God's cosmic omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence, as a missionary I still sometimes feel like the blind leading the blind. (Didn't I just preach a sermon about Jesus' love a week previously?) Thankfully Jesus takes care of that, too--he did, after all, also come to recover the sight of the blind. I'll be holding His hand tightly this year as I head to Kumamoto to start my teaching work. May we all be filled with His hope and love in 2013.

*"If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Touchstone, 1997) 311.

Also, I couldn't fit this one in, but I kept thinking of it while writing the last part of this post:
"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men."
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (HarperCollins, 1974) 77.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Luke 4:18-19 (NIV)