Reflections on a year (and some) in Japan.

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?)

"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).

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?

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...)

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)