We Laugh at Key

This Saturday at Key was a particularly sweet time, in my opinion. One of the Japanese guys was supposed to lead a Bible study. I sent him an email around 4:00 when he wasn't there yet, and it turns out he was asleep, but came right over after getting my email. We spent the first hour just hanging out, speaking broken Japanese or broken English...often both in the same sentence. In the end, Kim came up with a great game for us to play. Which is the source of all the pictures in this entry. The game is kind of a combination of pictionary and telephone. It's a little difficult to explain, but everyone started by drawing a picture or writing a phrase. So, if I draw a picture, I pass it to the person on my right. That person looks at what I've drawn and writes on another paper what they think the picture is. Then, they pass what they've written to the next person, who has to draw a picture of what was written down without seeing my original picture. The results are hilarious.

We had a woman come in to see Key for the first time. She actually walked in after we were finished. Three people were in a backrub line and we were just laying around and talking. She asked us what we normally did at Key, which is always a hard question to answer. But one of the Japanese guys rescued us from our efforts to explain and said very simply, "We laugh." And we certainly laughed a lot last Saturday. Here are some of our pictures from Saturday (and hopefully some laughter) to share with you guys:

Here is the first picture, drawn by my good friend Jenae. Later, she explained to us that this picture was supposed to represent "Allergy Season".

The next person (who may or may not have been me) wrote,
She sang a song to her favorite forest flower.
Followed by...(I think you're getting the idea now)

A hermit sings in the garden.

There is a strange man dancing in flowers.




Here's the next round. Note that we had non-native English speakers in the group, which is how this lovely situation came about. :-) :



Loving my planetes.



Save the earth.



Don't smoke for the future of the earth.





And my personal favorite:

This one started with a caption rather than a picture: A Shepherd.

An astrologer is standing with chicken.

Watching the stars with my best friend the chicken.

Yay for laughter!

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.

Kids make me happy, plus more transitional ramblings

On Saturday, the ELCA missionaries got together to have lunch, kind of to recognize me and also the new J3s who have finished language training and will be starting their assignments soon. The highlight of this time for me was teaching Aaron's daughter Cassidy how to do a headstand. I just can't help it...after several years of coaching beginner gymnastics, I see a kid trying to stand on their head with their hands by their ears and I have to help them learn how to balance. :-)

Anyway...apparently I made a friend. During church today, I received these notes in sequence. The last one was my very favorite. :-)

Tonight I rented a movie on itunes about three soldiers who are returning home from Iraq. I mostly got it because I figured I would be able to identify very well with the return culture shock. There were a couple really good return culture shock moments, but my favorite part was when they were in Colorado. There was dust blowing around. I realized I haven't been anywhere dry enough for there to be dust blowing around in about two and a half years. And something else really strange...they were outside in the Rockies, and I realized the sound their feet made on the ground was familiar...it was the crunch of dry pine needles on mountain soil. It's comforting in a way. Today, I finished my last human-given responsibilities in Japan, with the exception of moving myself out. It was nice to feel a longing for home. I'm excited to sit up on a mountain where the air is fresh and dry and the ground crunches and dust blows around and gets in your eyes...I'm excited to see the sky jam packed with stars...and I can't wait to go back to a small town pace of life if only for a little while...

I guess what all of that means is that I'm finally letting go...I've been letting go for several months now as God has gently helped me pry away one finger at a time, but it's to the point where I dare to let my heart remember some things it loves about home. I don't know if that seems like a big step to anyone else, but I was surprised to find that my heart had made it.

Things to be happy about one's last week of teaching classes in Japan

1) A huge bouquet of orange, yellow, and white flowers
2) A lovely simply bouquet of greens, two pink tulips, and three daisies
3) It is the first week of my entire time in Japan that there has been enough touch
4) I got to hold Mirai's baby (Kentaro) off and on all afternoon.
5) Playing "Life Stories" is an adequate lesson plan for any level of class when it's the last week.
6) I get to give away a couple Bibles with verses in them
7) God gave me one class with two Chinese students (no Japanese students) this term, and with them I can really rejoice about my future even as I'm saying goodbye.

The End of an Era

Yesterday morning there was a mini-prayer summit at the Assemblies church close to mine. The day started at 9:30, and it took every ounce of courage I had to get myself in the doors at all...it was 11:00, just half an hour before the end of the prayer meeting. So much courage was necessary because these people have only seen "Pamela with a Tokyo-wide vision". And I knew that if I went I would have to tell them what is now the truth: I am leaving. And at the moment I can make no promises that I will ever be back.

If I could have teleported straight from giving them that news to an airplane, I would have done it.

Many other people have accepted my leaving with a calm lack of surprise. But this group is, of course, different... A Brazilian pastor said to me, "I'll keep that in prayer. Maybe God is calling us to start off from your prayers without you...but I hope not. I think you have the same heart [for prayer in Tokyo]." It sums it up well. These are the people I found when I felt all alone in my vision...we encourage each other just by existing at the same time in the same city. And it seems like people are finally starting to come together so that it's more than a vision...something is beginning to be built.

I keep thinking back to the IHOP prayer seminar a few months ago, and one experience in particular. I had dragged a number of friends along to the seminar, and they were all sitting in the back of the room. I had been dragged to the front and given a microphone to help lead harp and bowl worship. But the distance between me and the Lutheran missionaries was driving me *crazy*. I had the strong, strong urge to be sitting next to Jenae in particular. Finally, I set down my microphone and did it, earning me a strange look from the other girl who was leading.

Yesterday, they announced the time that they are going to start holding prayer meetings in the hope of building something bigger. It will be 1st and 3rd Saturdays from 2-4. Now, let me tell you something amusing. There are 52 hours in a week. There are exactly two activities I have felt a responsibility to be involved in during my last months in Japan: the building of a house of prayer and the building up of our fellowship group called Key. What do you suppose the odds are they would be in direct conflict with each other? Sigh.

But the decision was really made a long time ago at that prayer meeting where I moved out of the front to sit with Jenae. Key will keep my loyalty for the remaining months that I am here. The decision makes no sense in terms of greatest numbers, greatest efficiency, greatest value...it only makes sense in an upside down world where Jesus is King, where love is the greatest law, and where "important" is defined by that law and His calling. For now, a precious vision has been given back into His hands. And as Stan said yesterday, "Well...He is still King. And He's not surprised."

I sent in my application this afternoon.

Fathers

A couple snapshots from church yesterday:

-It was our annual meeting and a very heated discussion was going on. Something to do with how many people are on the church council, whether we are mistreating people by electing them over and over again, etc. One of those times when everyone has gotten very serious. In the middle of it all, Aaron's daughter Cassidy started drawing a picture on the white board. She didn't know Aaron was watching her, but in the middle of all this debating, he was distracted completely from the task at hand. Just looking at his daughter's art with a smile. Sometimes, it doesn't seem like other people are recognizing our work, but often I think God is watching it, secretly and silently from behind us so as not to distract us, but with a huge grin on His face.

-After the meeting, we came out to the office to discover that the pastor's son had been doing some "art" of his own. That is to say, there were now permanent marker "signatures" all over the chairs, desks and table. Once most of the church members had left, the pastor sat his son down, showed him the damage, and let him know why it was damage. Yuki began wailing in the middle of this, but his father continued to patiently and persistently tell him what he had done. After that, the rest of their family went back upstairs (home) and Yuki and dad remained, clean up tools in hand. Yuki is three years old, so I know he wasn't actually helping so much. But the two went around side by side until all the marker was erased.

It's interesting to me that other people are often the first ones to confirm the fears in our head that we are not doing any good, or to confirm that our greatest efforts are actually increasing the mess instead of decreasing it. There is this truth that we as Christians have to come face to face with at some point: God does not need us.

Some of us stop there. Some refuse to believe it and stake their entire identity on the fact that they are needed by God...their ministry looks frantic, and they have a lot to lose if something goes wrong. Others hear they are not needed and drop out of the game altogether...if God doesn't need them, what's the point? Still others understand but not fully...they feel a contradiction between the truth that God doesn't need them and the truth that God calls them to obedience. Fear of God and failing keeps them "in line", but they haven't understood the whole picture.

The truth is that God wants us with him. I believe we can make him smile. The Bible tells us he rejoices over us, and the Hebrew for that word actually means "spins around in circles". I love to think about God getting all "improper" and spinning around in circles of joy over the little actions, the small prayers, the heroic sacrifices of a moment that are made in his name. He knows we make messes sometimes, but isn't that what being a kid is? I remember another time when one of Aaron's daughters was upset and she cried to him, "But you're the dad, and that means you can fix it!" Human dads can't fix everything. But our heavenly Dad really can and does bring all things around for good. Often by handing us the cleaning supplies and cheerfully saying, "Let's get to work. I've got just the thing for this stain."

The Beautiful Mess

It is interesting to notice the way that my perception of how long I'm going to be in Japan changes the way I minister. When I told God back more than a year ago how I was willing to stay in Japan however long He called me to, I remember noticing that it changed everything...my heart through all of itself into the mission here because of that belief that I was here for a long time. Now that (pending any major surprises) I am heading back to the U.S. in April, I find the result has been a throwing aside of caution. I am teaching boldly...at least for me. No more patience...the days are numbered. And this is what my teaching looks like when I am being bold...

My Beginner Bible class has stopped being beginner in any sense of the word. Part of this is because Winter Term has characteristic low numbers, and rather than being a true class, it's almost a cell group with me, two church members, and Takaaki. The poor guy hears more sermons a week than anyone else I know. ;-)

I've borrowed a curriculum called The Beautiful Mess from a Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. I love telling my Japanese students the title for the course, because they can't fathom what "beautiful" and "mess" are doing so close to each other. Our first week was all about ways that we try to hide our messes from God. It was amazing. We had a list on the board of what the mess was and how we tried to hide it from God. Etsuko came up with something brilliant. One mess we wrote down was "sin, guilt, and shame" and when I asked how we tried to hide it, Etsuko immediately said, "charity." Once she had explained about doing good out of guilt rather than out of love, the other church member was sitting with a very intense, concentrating look on her face. I don't know if I've ever before gotten this woman to turn her eyes to herself and not just look to others...she's one of the people who serves *all* the time. And I found myself wondering and hoping for the possibility that this woman could serve not out of feeling shameful or inferior, but out of the knowledge of how awesome God thinks she is. I imagine her shining instead of trembling.

The Beautiful Mess curriculum always ends with time praying for each other, and I decided we would do so every week. And that has been powerful.