Ah, the Tokyo Life

As of checking my email this morning, if I did everything I have been invited to that would be potentially good and cool this weekend, I would be:

-Leading an overnight prayer meeting for Japan praying at the same time as a Hong Kong group from 9pm Friday to 6am Saturday.
-Taking off to meet the GAPers (Gospel Assembly of Praise) people at the beach at 1pm Saturday afternoon.
-Either making it back at 7pm to go to Tokyo Baptist to watch a girl who found me on the 24/7 site on the internet but who I haven't met yet sing in a gospel choir there (how's that for a run-on sentence?)...or going to watch the same thing Sunday morning at 9am. She didn't find me to invite me to the choir concert...she's looking for a group that prays for the nations...I'm excited to meet her someday hopefully soon!
-Hongo for morning worship at 10:30am
-And reading Brother Yun with the English Book Club at Hongo from 2-4
-And worshiping with the GAPers in the afternoon at 4:00 and hanging out with them through dinner.

I'm in one of my super-hyperactive excited phases...so I look at all this and say...yay! Nothing overlaps! That might be doable! *laughing at self* Someone hit me over the head.

So...any of you Tokyo folks want to pray for Japan overnight, come to the beach with some cool people, or go watch a gospel choir with me? Come to think of it...oh man. This might be the Saturday my revival prayer group meets as well...wow. Never mind about nothing overlapping. Happy back to regular schedules, everyone! ;-) (I am *so* excited to be moving again!)

Silence and Hiding Christians

There is a very famous book about the 17th century Christian persecutions in Japan called "Silence", written by Shusaku Endo. One of my professors gave it to me to read while I was thinking about whether or not I would go to Japan. The characters in the book are being tortured for their faith, and the book centers around the complicated issues about how they will respond to the pain inflicted on them. Also threaded throughout is the theme of the silence of God and the struggle of the suffering Christians as that silence makes them feel abandoned.

Understanding the current spiritual climate in Japan requires understanding the history.

The tactic of the shogunate for determining whether people were Christian or not during the persecutions was very simple. They made whole villages come to the temples and then they brought out a round disk they called a "fumie". It had an image of either Jesus or Mary on it, and the people were forced to stamp on the image. If a person refused to tread on it, they were killed. Through this and other persecutions, the church became invisible very quickly.

Japanese Christians became very adept at hiding. There is a museum in Tokyo that is a whole collection of artifacts made by these Christians. There are many items with cleverly hidden crosses, images of Mary made to look like Buddhist images, and other ways that the Christians found ways to represent their faith so that they could practice without anyone knowing what they were doing. There's a fairly detailed website here with a picture presentation if you are interested in more about the Japanese hidden Christians.

The bans on Christianity lifted in the 19th century, and some hidden Christians came out of hiding and rejoined the Catholic church.

But there's an aspect of the Japanese church that is still hidden. You see it in the Christians who go to church on Sunday, but don't let their coworkers know they are Christian. Or it's in the many Japanese people who are waiting for a family member to die before they will get baptized.

Today, I had lunch with a young guy who recently became a Christian while he was studying abroad in Illinois. He's been back in Japan for a little more than a year now, and the adjustment has been difficult for him at times.

For awhile, I've been in something of an intense discussion with him. He decided several months ago that evangelism of any sort wasn't people's work, but God's work. He had decided it was just fine to let people be. Recently that view of his was developing even further, and he had decided from the tower of Babel story that diversity was something that needed to be defended. I am a fan of diversity, except when it goes so far as to say that all religions are equally true and should be "tolerated" in the sense of never saying "I think you're wrong" to another person. The center of our discussion has been that I believe that some things are True. And when something is True, it is worth defending to other people--especially when the Truth in question is Jesus, and a treasure of a Kingdom of God that is worth trading our entire life for.

For a couple months, we have been going around in circles with this discussion. And I couldn't quite figure out why. For whatever reason, my argument of, "This is worth standing up for because it is True", just doesn't seem to hold water when I pull it out here.

Last night I had a conversation with a friend until nearly 5am. We finished by saying, "Well...maybe we didn't solve any of Japan or the world's problems, but we discussed them all!" But there was an immediate fruit to our conversation, because we had been talking about the problem of hiding and isolation in Japan. So, this time when I came back to the discussion with this guy, that was fresh in my mind, and I explained to him that I saw Japan as a country of hiding Christians, and that it wasn't what God intended for us here.

The response was instantaneous. I was shocked at how quickly it framed his entire situation...not from my perspective, but from his. He was instantly able to summarize it as him pulling back. And then we had a super productive conversation about why he feels like hiding, how one fights the desire to hide, how one deals with reaching out when Satan is throwing condemnation after condemnation. It's amazing how changing a lens changes everything...we've been struggling all these weeks with questions of "If God doesn't need me, why should I do anything?" and "Is there even really just one truth in the first place?"...I would have thought those were central issues. Apparently they were not the core.

It's something I've been realizing more and more...sometimes the greatest faith is in leaving action alone and offering up a prayer. But very often, our prayers are weak because we are praying for God to do things that we could do ourselves, but are not willing to. "God...please heal this person, but don't ask me to spend time with them." "God...please reveal yourself to my unsaved friend, but don't make me ruin our relationship by speaking Your truth to them!" "God...please save our country...but don't give me an active role in Your work!" "God...please take care of hungry people...but don't make me give more than 10% of my income!" Our actions make our prayers hypocritical. We should pray with all our heart...we must offer the situations around us up in prayer...but if we believe that God will answer, that should create freedom and love that will propel us to act.

More on this later. I have several thousand ramifications I'm still thinking through.

Gathering Artists and Missionaries All

This last Friday, a had a lot of friends over to my apartment. My birthday was back in June, and this weekend people had some time, and so my friends informed me that they would be descending upon my apartment en mass. The problem with getting together with my missionary friends is always that all of us teach English until late in the evening. I get home around 10pm on Fridays. But, undeterred by such obstacles, they kept arriving in waves until we had six of us in my apartment, the last one arriving after 11:00 sometime. And then we had a wonderful time playing Apples to Apples and finally went to bed with the sun around 4:30 in the morning.

It was a really lovely time. We don't get together very often at all just to hang out.

My friends also went against my request that they not get me anything...I tried to tell them all I wanted was for them to come over and play board games, but Jenae arrived with a guitar case on her back, and after I got over my initial incredibly gullible and naive thoughts of, "Woah...did Jenae start playing guitar?!" and realized there was a ribbon on the back of it, I decided I was really glad they had gone against my request. They had all gone together on one really awesome gift.

My old guitar case is the one that came with my guitar...I recently had to sew about a foot and a half long tear in the side of the case that was just from me walking around with it, and the pocket in front has had a tear that has made it unable to hold anything since about my second week with the case. My old case is also no good for carrying a guitar while riding a bicycle, which is a necessary skill for my existence. Since it wasn't a backpack case, I would swing the shoulder strap over one shoulder and slip my other arm through one of the handles and bumble along that way, usually knocking my guitar into various posts and things that I am much more skilled at navigating around when I don't have a guitar swinging off my back.

So, Jenae arrived with a brand new backpack guitar case with all sorts of interesting pockets. It has little pockets in the backpack straps, one of which even has a little hole so you can put your ipod inside and then pull the ear buds out and listen as you walk. In fact, upon further inspection the following day, I am pretty sure that I can put everything that really matters to me inside the case. Which is to say, there is room for my song book, a notebook, my Bible and maybe one more book, space for guitar picks and my capo, and the nice little ipod slot. There is a strap at the top that one friend suggested might be for an extra bag, and if I could find some way to attach an extra pair of clothes, brush, hairbrush, soap and little bottles of shampoo and laundry detergent, I think, as I told my friends, that I could go completely gypsy. Then they were a little worried about having given me the guitar case. But I am overjoyed with it! It was so easy to ride my bicycle to church on Sunday, and I didn't clunk my guitar into anything.

People left a couple at a time in the morning until there were three of us left, and then the guitar came out. I had promised some of them I would play a song for them that I had written. I wrote the song quite a while ago...or, at least several months ago, but I've been really shy about sharing it. Then, a couple Sundays ago, I was playing guitar while other people were milling around and talking after church, and I played my song...it's no problem to play it if no one knows it's mine. ;-) But a 12 year old ran and found someone to translate for her to let me know that she thought I should send in a demo tape because a music company would surely accept it. Now, I am very aware that what she said is not true in the slightest...but I figure that if a 12 year old thinks my song could be on the radio, it is maybe safe to share it and put my name on it.

The danger isn't even that people won't like it...though that would be sad too. But I've realized when people create something, it's not just like putting together a model airplane or making a stack of blocks (no offense to anyone who does those things in a truly artistic way), but it's like taking a small sampling of their own soul and putting it down on paper. You choose words that mean something real to you, and make a melody that flows out of somewhere so deep inside you you don't know how you even got to it, and whether it's profound or beautiful or deep or sad or joyful or simple, it's a sliver of you at the deepest level. It's not about skill, it's about beauty. As such, the greatest danger is that people will hear and be indifferent.

Some of the most beautiful music I have ever known was from a small congregation in Honduras. It was my first time in a foreign country, and I will never forget the shock of this six person church that sang with the strength of six hundred. Every note was wrong, but sung with the confidence of Pavarotti. And when I thought the song was finished (they had sung all the verses) they often continued on, either repeating a verse or adding a new verse they all knew that wasn't in the hymnal. That to me is beauty.

I wasn't the only one sharing music on Saturday, but my friend Kat had also written a song. After she heard mine, she tried to get out of playing hers. But we dragged her over to Hongo to use the piano and she shared her songs with us. After she was done playing, I was really glad I'd gotten to play first, because I thought hers were a whole lot better than mine! But the comparison is just anxiety. What is really amazing about the whole thing is hearing the music someone else has written and getting to see a little bit more of that deepest part of them which has dared to put itself on paper.

Amber was the third friend still with me in the afternoon, and she is also an artist. In addition to her painting, Amber's had the idea for a long time of putting together a liturgy written entirely by our group of missionaries. This might sound like a nice, normal idea after you've read this entry and assumed that we have original music coming out our ears or something, but when she came up with the idea, to my knowledge, only one member of the community had written music before and she wasn't even living in Tokyo. I didn't start writing music because of Amber's idea...I started because of the new, strange urge to do so. But it all kind of fits in with this vision that Amber has.

I shared my music in two ways on Saturday, and the second was almost scarier than the first. I had another song that was a simple two line melody. No words. But somehow about the deepest love song to God that was inside of me. I've been searching for words for it for more than a month now with no success. I would find some Bible verse that fit the meaning, but not the rhythm. And so, with Amber thrilled about the liturgy coming together, I offered up the two lines and asked her if she had an idea for words.

We finally ended up with some that were perfect: "Falling at Your feet I worship You, I'm giving everything to You." And that is it...the whole song. But it seemed fitting...I couldn't finish it alone.

I think about the verse, "When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church."

Worship is a blend of beauty...it's an offering of the beauty that we have. In community, that means we give over ownership of the beauty that we see. And our beauty becomes blended with the beauty of another person.

In Which Pamela Fails at Housekeeping

Do you ever have one of those weeks where everything falls apart when you touch it? Or, at the very least, doesn't really fix like you intend it to?

Now, I am an intelligent person. I got an 'A' in Calculus, I was selected to be the senior recognized in math, English, and Spanish at my high school, I had a good ACT score, I was accepted to a private liberal arts college and graduated cum laude with a double major and a concentration, I have studied three languages and can get by in both Spanish and Japanese. But let me tell you! All of these credentials are just paper credentials...if you want to know my true intelligence level, just watch me try to solve any problem that your average high school dropout could solve without breaking a sweat.

My Japanese washing machine has a lint filter that is a small net bag hanging off the side of the washer. For a long time, I have been disappointed with its performance. It leaves little flecks of lint on many of my shirts. The other day when I was looking for new laundry detergent, I stumbled across a replacement net bag. Wonderful! The picture on the back showed how it went through the center of the plastic square that held the net and then tucked around the front, held in place with an elastic band.

All seemed well. Until I took the old net out of my washing machine and examined the part. I had hoped the old net would just come off and I could put the new one in. On further inspection, and with at least one very quiet warning alarm going off in my brain, I noticed that the old net was, in fact, glued to the plastic part. There was no way to test out the new net without removing the old net. So, pushing caution and the very quiet warning alarm out of my thoughts, I cut out the old net and put on the new one.

In some defense of my intelligence, I had figured out that there was maybe a problem even before I tried to put the net back in the washing machine. But trying to slide the part in revealed without any shade of doubt that the new net, which had to wrap around the outside to work, now covered up the parts that were supposed to slide into the machine. So, in effect, I broke my washing machine.

When I told this to my Christianity Today class that night, they said, "Ah, yes. Americans are always trying to fix things themselves." I protested, "It was just a net!" They laughed all the harder when I told them I still thought I could fix it if I glued the new net in and then cut away the extra material covering the plastic. Apparently Japanese would have called the washing machine company.

That was last Friday.

Yesterday I began a staining project I have wanted to do for a long time. Just a board that I bought for a makeshift table / shelf and then discovered once I removed the plastic that it was an unfinished board. The stain was actually in my apartment when I moved in, so I was happy for a chance to use it. Like everything else in this country, however, it came in a bottle with all Japanese instructions. The lesson from this project was that a red plastic plate is not a suitable place to pour out the stain. It's mostly fine, but a few "mysterious" streaks of red now decorate my board.

This morning is my cleaning day, and another ongoing problem in my apartment has been my shower drain. The period of time in which it is not clogged seems to become shorter every time I fix it. While looking in the hardware store for a new laundry machine net, I found a product that is supposed to work with any kind of drain with two holes. My bathtub drain and shower drain are connected at least partially. (The bath room in Japan is almost always a bathtub with a shower on the outside of it, so my bath room has one drain inside the tub and another just on the other side of the tub wall. Everything in this room can get wet, and the toilet is always in a separate room.)

Before you say, "Pamela! Stop buying and attempting to use mysterious Japanese products when you can't actually read Japanese so well!", know that this product was actually quite helpful. It was like a little pump that you put over one drain and then pushed on it to send water and cleaning solution through the system. But the best thing it did was somehow help me to realize, as the water was being forced through to the other side, that the shower drain problem was not what I thought...in fact, there was a whole part of my shower drain that was unexpectedly removable. I really thought it was enough to take off the drain itself. And with this discovery I entered into the dark depths of all that is evil...or at least all that gets trapped inside shower drains. But, with the help of a toothbrush, plastic bag, rubber glove, my handy Japanese shower drain pump thingy and a supply of incense burning about at nose level, I believed that good had prevailed.

It did not take long after the drain had been reassembled, however, to learn that it still was not draining properly. Better than before, but still not perfect. I'm not entirely sure what more to do, but dread is growing inside me that it might involved my parents' recommended use of a coat hanger to go as far down the pipe itself as possible.

Psalm 139:1-18 as written by my Beginner Bible students

God, you know me completely.
All day you know my behavior. You can understand about me anywhere.
You see me everywhere. You know everything I do.
You even know my future.
You sometimes guide me and sometimes watch me.
You comfort me by your hand.
This makes me happy!

You are everywhere. I cannot escape from you.
Whether I go to the right place or the wrong place, you always help me there. Even after I die you are with me.
From the ocean to heaven your hand will strongly catch me and support me and you will lead me.
If I try to get in a bad place you will find me.
You can find me anywhere.
It doesn't matter if it's dark or light.

You made me very carefully in the inside of my mother's body.
Life is really wonderful and complicated! What a great work you did!
You knew me from the beginning of my making, in which I was completely alone.
You saw me before I was born. You know every action, past, present, and future, I will do. You investigated all my actions before the world was created.
Your thoughts are very precious! It's impossible to count them.
I have no way to know the specific number of your thoughts, there are lots of them! When I go to paradise, you are always beside me.

I love random encounters!

The last time I had a random encounter on my street, it was a Catholic guy whose dog decided to come and say 'hi' to me. That was exciting. I think tonight was even more fun, though.

Tonight at around 10:00, I was walking home for the night and got stopped by a girl who asked for directions to a station. This is not normal. Usually, people ask me if *I* need directions because I am a foreigner out on the street. But I explained that the station in question was pretty far, and that the next stop on that same subway line was much closer. It was on my way, so I started walking with her.

We had a pretty normal exchange. I asked her if she was a college student and she said she was. She then explained to me that she was an exchange student "too", and I didn't bother to correct her. I'd just left an hour conversation on a street corner with one of my students in which we discussed cults and religions and truth and wasn't quite in the mood for starting another one. But then when she asked me what my major was I had to say, "I'm not a student, actually...I teach English in the Christian church." But then we became good friends. She is from Korea and she is a Christian. How is it that I manage two random encounters with Christians on the same street? I haven't randomly encountered any non-Christians there! That's too weird for Japan.

I ended up walking her all the way to the station. We traded email addresses. She invited me to come out to church with her sometime. She asked me if I was going to be back in the area tomorrow. It was just a really cool way to end the day...celebrating getting to meet a sister randomly on the road and help her to the train station.

I really like life on the streets. Some of the best things happen out there.

English Class Quotes

A couple weeks ago I did a lesson on internet and sms English in my advanced classes.

Today, I got an email from a sixty something year old Japanese man who speaks in slow, cautious English. He said the following:

2day I can't CU.

*laughing really hard*