What I Learned, By Laura, Age 25⅓.

Originally presented on May 17, 2015 at my home church following my return from Japan.

As many of you know, from November 1, 2012 until April 1, 2015, I was in Japan working as a missionary and English teacher for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on what is called the "J-3 Program." "J-3" means "Japan - 3 years," though the actual time spent working in Japan is closer to two-and-a-half.

Japan isn't usually the first country to come to mind when one thinks of a "mission field," and indeed, the main reason I went with the Lutheran church instead of the Presbyterian one is because the PC(USA) doesn't really have a major presence in Japan. Actually, you could say that there isn't really a strong "church" presence in Japan at all; less than 1% of the population professes to be Christian, and though the majority religions are Buddhism and indigenous Shinto, Japan is so secular now that most "worship" comes in the form of occasionally praying at a shrine for good luck on something.

J-3s are usually young adults a few years out of college, and they're assigned to either teach English at a student center and a Lutheran girls' dormitory in Tokyo; or they're assigned to teach English at a Lutheran junior-and-senior high school in the southern city of Kumamoto. After a 2½-month orientation in Tokyo, two other J-3s my age, Caroline and Morgan, and I were together all sent to Kumamoto. Kumamoto, the capital city of Kumamoto Prefecture, has about the population of San Francisco and the land area of Bakersfield. It was neither too big nor too small, and had lots of history and culture, as well as my favorite, a castle.

I was assigned to Luther Junior and Senior High School, two schools on the sprawling Luther Gakuin (or Academy) campus on the north side of the city that also includes a college and a kindergarten. The vast majority of my students were the equivalent of tenth-graders, though I also taught the Special Advanced English Course track eleventh- and twelfth-graders, as well as a couple rowdy classes of eighth-graders in the junior high.

On Sunday mornings I attended Kuwamizu Lutheran Church, a twenty-minute streetcar or a thirty-minute bicycle ride from my apartment. I "helped"--and mind, "helped" is in heavy quotation marks--with their elementary Sunday School, sang in choir, and held an English Bible study once a month, where I'm pretty sure learned a lot more from my pastor and from members of my church than I ever taught.

Sunday evenings found me together with the whole Kumamoto Lutheran missionary crew, long-termers and short-termers, at Kumamoto Lutheran Church for the weekly International English Service. I helped with the English Sunday School twice a month while Caroline led a Bible study, and during the service I did everything from leading worship to playing piano to sitting at the laptop to advance the PowerPoint.

You know, it's funny--you think you're going out to do God's work, and God ends up working on you, instead. Looking back on two-and-a-half years in Japan, all I can tell you for sure is that I learned a lot. And so, I've decided to title my presentation "What I Learned, By Laura, Age 25⅓."

May contain jellyfish.

During my time as a J-3 I learned lots of little things like that 400 grams of cooked macaroni is a heck of a lot more than it looks uncooked, or that you may not always be able to identify everything in your otherwise delicious lunch box, and that's OK, or how much Japanese church ladies love to play dress-up with you. Lots of good, small lessons like these that make for funny anecdotes to share at parties. Ask me sometime about how I accidentally locked myself out of my apartment building at 6am the morning we left Tokyo for Kumamoto and how my longsuffering boss had to climb a fence for me to let me back in. (I'm eternally indebted to him now, by the way.) But for this presentation, I'd like to focus on five specific "big" lessons that I learned in Japan:

1. Being a missionary does not automatically make you a better, holier person.


2. Our most important citizenship is of the Kingdom of God.


3. Listen and obey even when you don't understand.


4. God's work doesn't depend on you.


5. Compassion is realism.

None of these are anything new to most people here, I'm sure, but they're the ones that have stuck the most, so please bear with me as I expound on them.

1. Being a missionary does not automatically make you a better, holier person.
First, let me get this out of the way if anyone's wondering: no, being a missionary does not automatically make you a better, holier person. It actually does the exact opposite. Never in my life have I felt weaker and more despicable than when I became a missionary.

One last bike cruise around Kumamoto.

Being a missionary sure looks holy, though; I did have to forgo things. Of course, I had to leave my homeland, where things were familiar and I was literate, and become an outsider. I also wasn't allowed to have a car, so the only ways I could get anywhere were to walk, ride my bicycle, take public transit, or bum a ride off someone. It seems like a simpler, more spiritual way to live, and I wish I could say that freed from the burden of a motor vehicle I learned to live at peace without one. But many days I sorely missed not having to put on a full-body plastic suit to go anywhere in the rain, or having a vehicle that doesn't tip over when you try to put too many groceries in it.

It turns out, blessedly, that this is a good thing. Coming face-to-face with my weaknesses and pettiness forced me to realize just how weak and petty I am… and how much of a sinner in need of grace I am… and how amazing God is for having the grace to love me, whiny wretch that I often am. It's hard to explain, but it's a rare job that can leave you in tears at your breakfast table over how tired you are and how much work you have and remain the most fulfilling job you've ever had. It was by the grace of God that I can look back at everything, everything over the past 30 months and rejoice in it all.

2. Our most important citizenship is of the Kingdom of God.
Now of course, I'm a citizen of the United States. I was born here and raised here and speak and read the local language. I never realized how much I took these things for granted until I went to Japan.

In Japan, I rather stood out in a crowd. I could never hide the fact that I was different from the vast majority of the people around me, and in Japan, that automatically labels me a foreigner. Back in high school and college I often felt like an outsider because I generally hung out with nerds and geeks, but I didn't know what being an outsider truly meant until going to a restaurant in Kumamoto and watching the wait staff have a minor panic attack upon my entrance.

Eventually, our grocery store, post office, convenience store, and favorite restaurants got used to their new foreign customers, and relaxed when they found out we could conduct our business fairly well in Japanese. Many staff members were downright friendly, going out of their way to help us when we couldn't quite articulate what we needed or weren't sure how to go about doing something. But we'd step into a new restaurant and the cycle would start all over again: the look of terror on the staff's faces and the hesitating inquiry into whether we could speak Japanese. The worst places were when we were actively avoided.

There was only one kind of place in Japan that I never felt that kind of alienation, and that was the churches. Every church we went to welcomed us with open arms. No one panicked about us not being able to speak Japanese; in fact, some members were eager to share their small knowledge of English just to help us feel at home. A grad student and her family at my church in Tokyo, now dear friends of mine, welcomed me into their home on multiple occasions and made sure I had a family to spend my first Christmas in Japan with. At Kuwamizu, my assigned church in Kumamoto, I learned even more about hospitality from my pastor. Pastor Sumimoto and his family took care of me in myriad ways when I was in Kumamoto, heading up the J-3 Care Committee tasked with helping to keep us sane, and in one final act of generosity the night before I left Kumamoto to come back to America, bringing his family minivan around to the J-3 apartments to pick up a box full of things we couldn't take with us to sell at the annual church charity sale.

The language and culture barrier didn't stop at the church door, of course; in two-and-a-half years of Japanese sermons I never came across one I could understand fully that wasn't the children's sermon, and there were many times I wasn't sure what to do or where I was supposed to go for a church event. But none of this ever made me feel truly like an outsider, and I'm pretty sure that's because we were, as the song goes, "one in the Spirit." There's something about this faith of ours, the "Body of Christ" that joins people from places oceans apart and makes us all family. It was a blessing to experience that firsthand in Japan.

3. Listen and obey even when you don't understand.
I'm gonna be honest. Even after studying Japanese for six years, there was a lot of stuff I didn't understand. Everything from restaurant menus to kitchen appliances to street signs always carried an element of mystery. Now, I don't like not understanding things. This is part of the reason I studied Japan and Japanese for so long: when I took a spring break trip to Japan with my high school travel club back in my senior year, I got so interested in understanding Japanese culture that I pretty much majored in it in college, knowing that one day I wanted to go back for a longer period of time.

It was a little disappointing to see how little Japanese I could really use after six years in the classroom, but it forced me to do something I need to do but hate doing: trust. Say yes to requests I don't fully understand. Get on a bus with members of my church to climb a mountain I'd never heard of. Go to a church lady's house one Saturday because she mentioned something about Japanese culture and tea and invited you.

Incidentally, the name for Jesus in Japanese is Iesu, which is identical to the Japanese transliteration of the English word "yes." As the months went by in Japan, I found myself more and more willing to say "iesu" to "Iesu." It's scary going sometimes, especially now when I'm back in the States trying to figure out my next move in life. But now I can remember my 29 months in Japan and know that Jesus was there with me the whole time.

4. God's work doesn't depend on you.
This was a harder one for me to learn. I tend to be a people-pleaser and hyper-responsible, so after my second stuttering, awkward attempt to explain to a student about to study abroad why we were giving her an English Bible and why the Bible is so important, I was feeling pretty down on myself as a missionary. The others had managed to have meaningful, spiritual conversations two weeks into Tokyo orientation; all I'd managed to do was spill spaghetti sauce on my Bible one night over dinner.

I was talking about my anxieties over my missionary abilities to Caroline one night as we walked back to the apartments, and I was going on about how every time a student asked about God or came to church I felt like I had a tiny baby bird in my hands and if I wasn't careful I'd crush it, when Caroline stopped me and told me straight-up: "Honey, it doesn't have a darned thing to do with you."

She was right, of course. I'm not a soul-saver. I'm a saved sinner who God allowed to go to Japan for some reason that's still not entirely clear to me. I gradually learned that the best way to go about my days was to pray, a lot. Whenever a student asked about God in their English journal, I learned to pray for God to give me the words to write and then write what was in my heart. I learned to stop writing tidy conversion stories for people in my head and to trust the Holy Spirit to work through or despite me. I learned to rejoice when my fellow J-3 wrote an amazing chapel speech full of love and truth that had clearly touched the hearts of both students and teachers, and when my Japanese partner teacher used her Bible for an example show-and-tell speech to tell the students about the love of God detailed therein, not take it as a personal failing that I hadn't. Whether or not I had an impact on their decision, a baptism of a student or a new member of church was always cause for celebration.

5. Compassion is realism.
By "compassion is realism" I mean that compassion is the truest, most Christian way of acknowledging the way the world is. Let me give you an example.

The view from Kumamoto Castle in March 2013.

One of my least favorite things about living in Japan was the air quality. The geography of Japan, as well as Korea, means that sandstorms from the Mongolian desert, mixed with industrial pollution and smog from the mostly coal-powered China, plus, according to newer reports, bacteria and viruses all blow directly over the islands every year, visibly. It's called "yellow sand," and some days it gets so bad that cities send out alerts warning people not to hang their laundry on the line, or not to let their asthmatic kids or elderly grandparents outside. The worst was the PM2.5, or particulate matter less than 2.5 micrograms in size. These particles are so small that they get past all the body's natural defenses against airborne pollutants and are linked to pretty much every neurological or respiratory ailment you can think of. The World Health Organization says that there's no "safe" level of PM2.5, but it's considered highly unsafe in concentrations above 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air--that's the point at which municipal governments start issuing alerts.

One morning in early March 2013, during the last few weeks of my Kumamoto orientation, I was walking down to the bank before my Japanese lesson and noticed my throat was getting a little scratchy. I didn't think much of it until I got to my lesson, when my teacher told me that the PM2.5 levels were at an all-time high, 70 micrograms per cubic meter. Twice the WHO limit.

I spent most of the rest of the day fretting about what it was doing to me. How many years did the PM2.5 shave off my life? Was I going to go home with some kind of horrible lung disease as a result of two years in Kumamoto? In the following months, I would check the prefectural government's PM2.5-monitoring website almost obsessively. I was always grumpy and irritable when the PM2.5 was up, trying to think of some strategy to keep myself safe from the toxic miasma outside. One night that December I stubbornly stayed at school until late in the evening, waiting for the PM2.5 levels to drop before I'd walk out the door. Instead, they only climbed, so at 8pm I gave up and rode home, only to have the levels drop soon thereafter.

PM2.5 brought out my worst self. I was always concerned about what effect it would have on me, forgetting that there were millions of other people who didn't have the luxury of working mostly indoors, who were much more vulnerable to the pollution. I myself had close friends that had asthma, or were pregnant. Did I give them as much thought as I gave myself? I'm ashamed to say no. No, I didn't. If, at a time the PM2.5 was high, the Spirit had told me to do something involving going outside, would I have done it? I don't know, but it's doubtful. My ability to be compassionate seemed to disappear in the smog.

Throughout my life, I came to realize, I'd subconsciously subscribed to the belief that doing the "right" thing would somehow lower chances of suffering. Who doesn't want suffering to be preventable, right? But this belief is not only faulty, it's harmful. By this logic, you could say that if someone is suffering, they somehow, directly or indirectly, brought it upon themselves. This renders compassion meaningless.

Had the millions of people affected by the toxic yellow sand brought it upon themselves? The construction workers who had to work outside all day in that stuff? The residents of Beijing, who, at the time Kumamoto's levels were at 70 micrograms per cubic meter, were at seven hundred micrograms per cubic meter? Was the relative health of my lungs more important than theirs?

And this is what led me to realize compassion is true realism: compassion is the acknowledgement that bad stuff happens, and it happens, as far as we know, indiscriminately. It's choosing to share the burden of suffering, instead of patting ourselves on the back for merely being in a situation that allows us to avoid it.

Compassion, by its very nature, is vulnerability. It's weakness, and I don't like feeling weak. But that's what makes compassion compassion. Didn't God stand to lose His only Son when He sent Jesus into the world? And yet Paul encourages us in the letter to Philippians to be like Jesus, who took on the form of a servant, humbling himself even to the point of death on a Cross. Talk about vulnerability and weakness!

All the cards I received while I was in Japan.

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus prayed that his disciples be protected, but not taken out of the world. This world is a smoggy, risky one, filled with uncertain paths and outsiders and people who seem to be doing such better things than you. There will be tribulation, and no holy job title is going to protect you from it--in fact, it may just usher you right up to the front lines. But this is the promise Jesus gave his disciples, and the promise that he gives to us: we are his. He is the Way and the Truth and the Life, and nothing can separate us from his love. This is what I endeavored to preach and learned to take to heart during my 29 months in Japan. Thank you all so much for the prayers, support, encouragement, and love you all sent to me in that time. May you all be filled with joy and peace and be guided by the light of the truth of Jesus Christ. Amen.

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
John 17:15-19