Jesus Sightings at Key

Aside from all our laughing at Key, I was struck really strongly as we sat around in a group that every person there was a person who had been impacted personally by Jesus. As we were sitting around, one of the guys pulled out a book of pictures from Israel. He showed me one of Mt. Sinai--a landscape of jagged, rocky mountains that I can't imagine how a person could climb--and he told me that he had been in a prayer group and seen a picture of him and Jesus with mountains like that. He said before he'd had that experience, he hadn't really believed in Jesus. He described the picture he had seen: Jesus flying down a mountain to him.

Key is supposed to end at 5:00, but we were still hanging out and talking at 7:00. For about an hour we'd been saying we should go eat. But at this point it was 7:00, Bibles were spread all over the place, and another Japanese guy had enlisted us to help us find this Psalm he'd been meditating on recently. I proposed we bring Bibles along to the restaurant. And while we waited for food, he told us all about how his life had been changed so much...how he had gone from being a person who had been scared away from the harsh teachings of the church he was attending and had recently been touched by Jesus through the Lutheran youth gathering we attended last fall. Now he had quit his job and was considering going to seminary.

Another Japanese member of the group was suicidal and snatched to safety when Jesus found him.

It's a special group of people...a group that can sit together and say, "We have known the Lord."

Kazuhiro said it best maybe when someone said "It's like He chose you." And he flipped right to John 15 and read, "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last."

I wonder what this fruit will be. If it will be fruit that the group bears together or if everyone in the end will scatter out to be planted in a different place. But for now, the fruit seems to be that young Christians, Japanese and English, have a place where they're coming together and starting to trust each other. We're starting to learn how to communicate and how to share our joys and struggles, and it's a group where His name comes up all the time, whether we're doing Bible study or drawing silly pictures.