One Year Later

Exodus 16 Part 2: Empower the people!

What is Empowerment?



When I decided to do this “quick and little” Exodus 16 series I managed to underestimate the wealth of knowledge regarding the topic of empowerment. In fact I feel like I have read so much about empowering people and the different types of empowerment that I may be starting to dream about it. EEEEK!! So I have learned plenty about this topic for the time being and rather than write a 300 page report on what I have learned I am going to break this down so that it only meets the needs of our specific situation here in Kesennuma, Japan…and maybe a little bit more than that.



There are many different ways to demonstrate and define empowerment. Empowerment can be found in business, social services, religion, and in this situation, people with a need. When I am talking about “this situation” I am referring to providing aide to people who have been affected by a natural disaster. When I am talking about aide I am defining it as providing for basic needs, not military aide from a safety threat other than a natural disaster.



In the past few years as a Case Manager in Milwaukee’s Child Welfare system I had the opportunity to be trained on empowerment within the first few weeks of being on the job. To be honest I don’t remember anything about that training. Everything I learned about empowerment came from being on the job and having people above me who demonstrated effective, and sometimes ineffective, empowerment. I use to explain it to my clients in this way, “One of my roles is to empower you.  Pretty much the way I look at it is that I am here to help move certain road blocks so that you can make the effort and decisions on your own to reach your own goals.”



Maybe you are wondering why empowerment is so important that I felt a post needed to be designated to it. When one empowers another to meet their goal or to make a decision it results in an educational opportunity that will have a much longer effect on the individual than if someone were to just meet the goal or make the decision for them.



I have always had amazing supervisors. From working at Starbucks, to behind the bar, to Jesus Cares, to Child Welfare. The supervisors in those programs empowered the people they were in charge of and because of that the benefits were immeasurable. Some allowed me to make decisions even if they knew it was wrong. Because of this I learned much more and I was able to defend my decision making in the future.



So how does this apply? We here at the LECC center are not able to rebuild the life of a Japanese person affected by the Tsunami. Despite not having the manpower and the monetary funds to rebuild a whole city, doing something like that would actually cause more harm than good. Rather, as a center we have to recognize how we can empower the people of Kesennuma. If we do this correctly the effect will last much longer and the relationships built will be much more fruitful. Just giving them a gift card or a new house does nothing but meet a basic need for a short time. Even giving them a blanket only meets a need for a short time until the hot and humid summer comes around. The amount that people learn and take away from a situation where things are just given to them is miniscule compared to the education received when they are empowered to reach their own goals.



At this point many of you are probably thinking, “I can’t believe he just dissed our quilt making”. Before you really develop a hatred for what I just said I urge you to continue reading and listen to the explanation. The LECC recognizes that we have to in some way meet needs and empower people.  First they recognized that there are many people that still need things like blankets and clothes. So they provide that to those people. This is generally what gets people in through the center door. This gives the volunteers an opportunity to make a good first impression as well as figure out if there is a way that we can make a second, third, fourth impression and in doing so build a relationship between that person and the Church here in Japan. That is not all. Providing for the basic need does have a connection to building English class participation. Many of my students had their first interaction with the center when they received a blanket. They may not have come here had it not been for their basic needs being met.





The LECC also identified an open market to provide English classes to people who may want to acquire employment or become more valuable to their company as a bilingual employee. The LECC also realized that this was a way that the center could have repeated interaction with people in the area. This is where we apply that bread and butter empowerment stuff. The volunteers help an individual remove roadblocks that are possibly preventing them from acquiring employment since the tsunami. This means that the person receiving the service has to make their own decisions to apply themselves and find their own motivation to succeed. It is them doing it we are just here to help along the way. While this empowerment stuff is going on you also have a volunteer having multiple interactions with the individual. This isn’t all that easy actually. It’s vital that the volunteers have positive interaction with the person and demonstrates Christian love during these interactions. This will eventually cause people to ask why the volunteer is the way they are, opening the door to talk about Christ. It is also difficult because it is vital that the volunteer does not build too strong of a relationship with the person. The relationship needs to be built with the LECC, not the volunteer. This is even more difficult because old Japanese culture doesn’t support this per say.



So here it is simply. LECC needs to get people to walk in the door. They provide free basic needs (blankets for warmth). Those people receive basic needs and then find out that they could also learn English. If they learn English they may be able to get a whole range of other jobs. If they learn English they could do some of the things they have always wanted…like reading a book about magic so that they could increase their trick portfolio. This works because there is a market need, primarily in the younger generation, to learn English. Jobs are scarce here so being bilingual is an excellent way to get yourself noticed at the job fairs. Understand, though, that many of my students would not be able to come to class if they were worried about their family being cold or not having warm clothing to wear. I have one student who doesn’t come to class when it gets extremely cold, not because he is worried about himself but rather because he is worried about his mother being alone in a very cold house. Making sure she had a warm quilt met that need, and now I am able to meet with him six days a week for class. He is learning English so that he can get a job.

Here is the other purpose of the center. It is not only to empower the people in Kesennuma but also to empower the LECC Church in Japan. What is happening up in Kesennuma is a ton of first impressions. To be honest the volunteers coming here should know about God, but more important than that they should be willing and excited to make the best possible Christian first impression. I am talking about a legitimate good first impression. When we do this we have the opportunity to create a base for the Japan church to start from. It is not the volunteer’s job to build strong relationships with these people. In fact if we did we would end up doing much more bad than good. Seriously we would. If you want to have a discussion about grief and loss and building/ending relationships my Skype name is “Jesse Hieb”. I would love to hear your argument supported by facts on how having someone build a relationship in two months with a victim of a natural disaster and then leaving them is good for the person and the organization you are representing.



Up here in Kesennuma we are identifying people and making first connections so that people of the church in Japan can be the ones to develop the relationship with them because they are the ones who are going to be here for much longer than us. For those of you familiar with cold calling you can think of us like that. We are the ones making the appointments… making the first contact so that someone else can make the “sale”.



Yes we are open to talking about God and spreading the news of His love is our primary goal, but we are working as part of a team here. And as volunteers this is our role in the team. There is much more to it than that but that is the general picture. I am sure there are many people that disagree with the use of funds for Humanitarian Aide and Relief. There always is. But once you understand how it works and what the vision and mission is I think you won’t have a problem with sending volunteers over to make first impressions.



I wanted to bring this all back to the Bible for you. Some of you may need this, for others maybe you get the point already..but keep reading. You might be surprised what you read. In Exodus 16 God gives us a great lesson in what empowering looks like in an aide and relief situation. In Exodus 16 the people of Israel are hungry. They had nothing to eat. So God gives them food. But He doesn’t just fill up their bags of food for them. No, actually He makes them go out and gather it. Maybe you are thinking…that's not empowering. But it is. It’s providing an opportunity for someone but requiring them to utilize personal motivation and decision-making to make efforts to meet their needs or goals. In this case the Israelites had to get up and get their food. If they decided not to then they went hungry. We adopt that same principal here when we make people come to our location. We provide the need but they have to put in the effort and motivation to come here to get the blankets or clothes.

Another example that was presented to me while doing my research was when Jesus left his disciples and gave them that command to go baptize a whole bunch of people… know what I am talking about? Before He left the earth Christ trained His disciples and gave them all of the tools they needed including the Holy Spirit. Christ empowered them by giving them the gifts and talents they needed to go and empower others to do the same thing. There is so much more to this whole empowering others thing but we are just going to end it there for now.

I’m going to end this post with this last thought. The anniversary of March 11, 2011 is just a few days away. It will mark one year since that devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In that time the Church in Japan has been busy. They have also had to deal with numerous other challenges. Empowering is not a one-time thing. It requires ongoing effort and support. Think about how you can help empower the Church in Japan so that they can bring the love of Christ to the victims here in Kesennuma and the whole country. They have the tools; the same ones that Christ gave to his disciples. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need your encouragement, prayers, and gifts.


Have a wonderful weekend everyone.

Hey all of you sophisticated good-looking people!
 

The last couple of days have been fairly uneventful. I have been working hard to figure out a way to make the transition from volunteer to volunteer much easier and smoother. For starters I am taking the initiative to create a volunteer handbook for the center. This is going to include everything from how to make things work here at the center to where things like laundry facilities are. It is also going to include a list of community connections that have been made since being here. Prior to coming here I was able to talk with the Jaspersens but after about two volunteers information will get lost. This is one way we can attempt to prevent that from happening.

My peeps down at the temporary restaurant units have become a vital resource for information and I have been talking up the future volunteers so that they will be prepared to be as helpful to them as they were to me. This volunteer handbook is going to be one of the best ways to ensure that previously learned knowledge gets passed down. This is also key because some of the things took well over a month to learn and with some volunteers only being here a month we want to make sure they are as productive and efficient as possible!

Next up I purchased a sweet little calendar to keep track of English classes. This will more so be used for when there is a volunteer switch. At the end of March there will be a week where the center is closed. The plan will be to schedule all of the next volunteer’s English classes for at least that first week so that there are no issues with contacting students and trying to figure out times… This is what I like to call COMMUNICATION!!!!!

I am also developing a couple of different procedures so that we can collect contact information and use it effectively. There was a visitor book that people use to sign but it has been difficult to get people to sign it and sometimes even read it. This new procedure should fix that and by the time all of the volunteers have come and gone, God willing, there will be an extremely long list of people that volunteers have had contact with along with how that person wants to be contacted, if at all, who their first impression was with, and what kind of supplies they received. Doing this will provide the church in Japan a way to make additional contact so that they can build a stronger relationship with that person and God willing share the message of Christ love more extensively with them.

The next thing I am working on is additional clothing apparel with the LECC Logo on them. This was originally something that was done outside of the Aide and Relief committee. God has blessed the decision numerous times to have something like this. For example two days ago I was at the store doing some shopping when a man came up to me. He explained that he was a Christian too… I was utterly confused until he pointed to the LECC Logo on my fleece. He asked if I was a Christian and if I go to church on Sundays. I said yuppers!!!! We struggled through the rest of the conversation (in Japanese). In the end I gave him a flier that I had in my back pocket…that I had used for writing my grocery list on :/. Here is to hoping he calls someone!!! Anywho the fleeces with the logos on them have been a blessing time and time again. This is not something in the budget and so this is going to be a little side project. The Logo is digitized by a company in the Waukesha, WI area. We have about five more volunteers coming that I know of…most of which are women. And the only apparel here are these large men’s fleeces. If you have any ideas of how you can help out and get something here by the time the first female volunteer comes on March 27^th I would love to hear your ideas!!! My email is hieb.jah@gmail.com

I have had the opportunity to meet more individuals with Samaritan’s Purse and it sounds like they may be able to help one of my students with fixing the damage to his house! I also just made contact with an NGO here in Kesennuma. I am looking forward to getting to meet them again. At this point it sounds like they might be interested in doing some English class!!! There are six employees up here in Kesennuma. This may prove to be a great resource to learn about how volunteers can reach more people affected by the Tsunami as well as share the gospel. Also I just want to clarify that in no way is the LECC relief center joining with or collaborating with other church organizations. I am however making connections with organizations in the area because it is an opportunity not only to gather useful and needed information but also to be a “bridge to the Gospel” (I heard this was the key phrase in the WELS so I thought I would try to use it ;)

It is Friday tomorrow! And its going to be an awesome day!!

What a week!!!

 

These last few days have been crazy!!!!! There is so much to tell but I would rather not make you read a novel of a post to get an idea of how awesome of an experience this is. So I am going to do what I did in a previous post and give you the high lights of the last week. I also have been working on the other Exodus 16 series but keep getting side tracked by research articles… and then when I am ready to come back to writing it is already late at night… I will finish though and get it up here by the end of the week.

Oh yes! If you are having trouble commenting on the blog do me a favor and send me your comment in an email and I will post it up there! (hieb.jah@gmail.com) Thanks!!!

So from last week Wednesday:

02/22/2012

This was an exciting day! Mainly because class went well but more importantly because I got to learn some magic!!!! I have a student who actually had actually made initial contact through the Jaspersens. He became an English student with in the first week of me being here. We have some pretty awesome classes/hanging out time. Besides the magic I found out that he is skilled in two martial arts and won first place two years in a row in Miyagi Prefecture for bodybuilding. Now you may ask, “what do you mean?” What I mean is that when this guy was 30 years old he was a gorilla. He maxed out on his bench, squat and dead lift for a total of 600KG, which converts to somewhere around 1322.77357311. I mean that is pretty impressive. Now if you saw him today… it’s a little different story. He explained his size this way: “I deflated”. 

 

02/23/2012:

Thursday night. My first Toastmaster’s meeting ever! I won best Table topic of the evening!!! And got a pencil to prove it! I heard three speeches about the day of the Tsunami… it was really quite interesting. We were in a very emotionally secure environment for the people speaking, which allowed for some extremely emotional speeches. Until this evening I had very little understanding of the thoughts and emotions that some one would have been thinking. Tonight gave me an even better understanding of how to communicate with some one who has been through this natural disaster. The information I was privileged to hear I would never have expected. I could tell you about it but to be honest that would not be fair to the people who used tonight as more of a group counseling session than a speech club. So I am not going to give you detail but I am going to post another article about this night in about two days.

02/24/2012:

The fun part of this day was in the evening. As tradition I treat myself to meeting new people by going to the Temporary restraints every Friday evening for dinner… This Friday was no different. I walked into a new restaurant. I struggled through the ordering process (because my reading is still bad and there are no pictures). I ended up asking him to surprise me! The owner asked me what the LECC was…he saw my fleece that has the logo on it… Thank goodness for branding and marketing!! I obviously struggled through explaining this…until (dun dun dun duuunnnnn) a young chap walked in and said, “Hey what’s up! Who are you? (In English) turns out this young chap was my age and was Japanese but had rocked out a year in California and spoke English like a native. He also was a wormer employee of the rastaurant I was sitting in. He now became my translator/friend. This turned into meeting two other guys that were there that also spoke some English. These guys were cameramen for a Japanese news station. In the end we had a pretty awesome evening talking about God, food, some new Japanese dance comparable to the cupid shuffle (I will teach it to any one who wants to learn), and the fish market. The night ended with me agreeing to meet my new friends at 5:00AM the next morning at the fish market to watch some sharks and gigantic tuna come in to port. Pretty awesome… we are pretty much best friends now.

02/25/2012:

Kesennuma Horumon (pig intestine)

THIS WAS THE BIG DAY!!!! This day definitely fits the criteria for top five days in Japan. It might even take the whole cake! Today the center was open for a few hours. But because of the snow all of my English classes canceled… but happened next was a million times better. I had been invited to a toastmasters meeting where clubs from around Japan were coming to Kesennuma to encourage the people of Kesennuma. I decided to go ahead and grab on to that opportunity. It ended up being a trip not even Bob Marley could match. We had a few minor hiccups but this is the very fast version of the night: had a super Japanese meal including raw shark brain (kind of sweet tasting), Kesennuma Horumon (fried pig intestine, a Kesennuma specialty), amazing emotional speeches in English and Japanese, I met and befriended a Buddhist Zen Monk! (He is going to let me come to his temple that he is in charge of and have a look around!!!! Pretty stoked about that! Ooo and he has email… who would have thought?), Laughing, crying, more eating, pictures, a rainbow colored wig, many many toasts, more laughing, more crying, giving a speech at the end of the night to wrap up the event…making people cry…making people laugh. The end… or so I thought J

The number of connections made for the LECC through this event was priceless. The amount of support and appreciation received tonight was incredible. God blessed the LECC center in more ways than any of us could believe. This made me extra excited for the month to come. The blessings just keep coming… now we need to make sure that we effectively and efficiently use those blessings!

02/26/2012:

I had another superb set of English classes lined up for the day! The “Lions Chaser” was first up and this proved to be a very educational couple of hours as we talked about the origins of Buddhism and some difficult beliefs of Christianity mixed in with some talk about food and family. This was followed with a little adventure through Kesennuma for the yearly festival that takes place by the harbor… pretty awesome. They made the Guinness book of world record largest apple pie! And yes I bought some and ate it… Amazing!!!

This was later followed by a surprise revisit from “the Lion Chaser” who brought me a slice of heaven… chocolate pie that his sister baked. I am pretty sure he comes from a family of dessert makers… because this was better than the apple pie!

08/27/2012:

The center was closed today. It is closed every Monday to A. give me a chance to run errands B. to have a break C. to hand out fliers if available. 

This Monday was spent doing a little of each. In the morning I did some errands and then in the afternoon I decided to go check out Oshima Island because I had heard so much about it. The ferry ride was fun!!! I walked a few parts of the island. Saw some beaches that were pretty awesome… found some gigantic star fish… tried to find the temp housing units but was not so successful…climbed the island’s mountain for a view of the sunset… When I returned to Kesennuma later that evening I decided to go to the temporary restaurants for dinner. I went to the same place I had gone with the toastmasters crew a few days prior. When I walked in the door the owner’s of the shop said “JESSE!!!! You came back!!! We had so much fun with you! How long are you in Kesennuma for? (In Japanese)!!! The temporary restaurant owners pretty much all know me and most of them have the center’s flier hanging up in the shop. This particular restaurant actually has a picture of me pinned up on the wall!!! If you ever make it to Kesennuma go check it out!!!

02/28/2012:

Pastor Nadaira and Pastor Nakamoto arrived today around 2:00PM! They surprised me with some presents of quilts and five huge boxes of clothes!!! I was not expecting this at all so this will be nice to have something extra to do during down time. These clothes will prove to be quite interesting as well I am sure.

02/29/2012:

Today was interesting… I have to switch hotels because the one I have been in is full for the next two days… I will move back in on the 2^nd of March. As I left, the hotel staff told me they were eagerly waiting for my return! It is nice to be missed J! I went with Pastor Nadaira and Pastor Nakamoto to hand out quilts to people in the destruction zone. This proved to be a very interesting experience…

In the afternoon we went to the “home depot” here in Kesennuma to get a pole to hang the clothes that the pastor’s had brought with them. While we were there a man came up to me and started speaking in English. He asked, “What church are you with” This question was likely prompted because I was wearing a fleece that had the LECC logo on it. There are four of these fleeces. Pastor David Habben and his family paid for these fleeces to be embroidered. We recognized there was a need for some branding and marketing so this was one of the minor steps that were taken…Good thing!!! Turns out the man was the project coordinator for Samaritan’s Purse. This is actually a really awesome organization. Turns out they have been here since August and are building houses for those who lost theirs. They hope to have built over 120 houses in the Kesennuma area before April. AWESOME!!!! Anyway we talked for a while and I am going to be heading over to their center to see what is going down and maybe utilize my slightly rusty carpentry skills for a day or two.

So there you have it folks! Kesennuma is working hard!!! the anniversary of the Tsunami is just around the corner! Today marks my half way point. I return on March 31st to Milwaukee. Its going fast! I still have to get in a lil winter camping!!!

Enjoy your weekends!

 

Go chase a lion!

My first time at a sushi bar...
I think Milwaukee needs one of these.

If any of you took a look at the profile about me on this blog you might have noticed that at the bottom the question, “How do you chase the lion?” is written down there. This post is about that.

A few years ago I was at a church service where Pastor Hartmann of Atonement Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI preached a sermon about “Chasing the Lion”. In fact the bulletin from that church service still sits in a frame in my apartment in the States to this very day. What was written on the front
of that bulletin encouraged me to continue doing some of the things that I had been doing at the time and stop doing some of the others. That bulletin has a lot to do with the reason for this leap of faith that I took. After hearing that sermon so many years ago I remember promising myself that when I die I wanted people to think of me as someone who was a lion chaser. About four days ago I finally decided to go ahead and take a look online at the book “In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day”. At this moment I have only been able to read the first chapter (it’s provided online) because I refuse to pay for the shipping to get the book here. This book is where the whole “chase the lion” phrase comes from. Have a gander! And then let me know what you think!

20 years in Japan and finally at the age of 26
I eat raw fish!

Three days ago a man walked into the center around 3:00PM. To be honest this is very unusual. He is my first unplanned visitor to walk into the center since my first day here, which was about three weeks ago. He began by asking if he could start English class. I obviously said of course and we began by having a quick chat before my next English class came. Well in that 15-minute time frame I learned a whole lot about this guy. He was a pharmacist, lived across the street, and knew stellar English. Oh, and he learned English by reading a chemistry book. He ended up staying for about 3 ½ hours that first evening and participated in a very interesting Bible class…lots of questions were asked and I can remember some very specific times, where, if it were not for Pastor Hartmann being willing to answer my questions about “my faith”, I never would have been able to answer my fellow Bible studiers.

Sunrise at the Kesennuma Harbor/Fish Market

Any who, Mr. Masayuki returned the next day at 1:00PM for our scheduled English class. It was during this two-hour conversation where we talked about everything from food, cultural traditions, stereotypes, religion, soccer, and Hurling! But it was also during this conversation where I realized I was in the presence of a true “Lion Chaser”.

Oshima Island at Sunrise

It came out in our conversation that Mr. Masayuki had lost his father at about six years old. He said he never knew how to be a father because he didn’t have one to give him an example. He was fearful that he did not do his duty as a father for his own three sons. Trust me, he did… if you only knew what his sons are now doing we would give this guy the father of the year award! Any who, my student proceeded to tell me how he learned some English in junior high school but then when he went on to undergraduate school he was very poor. He was so poor that he bought English books instead of Japanese ones because those were cheaper. He managed to learn English using these books, graduated from undergraduate school and returned to the Kesennuma area to take care of his mother. He explained that he really wanted to go to post graduate school. However, because he believed in his responsibility to care for his mother, he returned to Kesennuma rather than chase that dream. Mr. Masayuki got married and had three boys. He worked at the hospital here in Kesennuma as a pharmacist. Well one day he received a letter informing him that he had been accepted to post graduate school. So what did he do? Well with three children he decided he was going to chase the lion. He would work his 50 hours a week and then early in the morning on Saturdays he would make the two-ish hour drive to Sendai to study all day Saturday and Sunday. He would return late Sunday night and head to work the very next morning. He did this for four years without ever taking a weekend off. He received his Master’s degree 20 years after he received his undergraduate degree. For twenty years he held on to his dream. And then when he was given the opportunity he didn’t hesitate, even though he knew it would be difficult for his family and for him. After receiving his Master’s degree he was offered a position to be a professor at the college. He chose not to accept it. He explained that it turned out to be a good thing, because had he taken it, he never would have met me and never would have been given this chance to learn more about Christianity… something he had always wanted to do.

One of my students brought me lunch!

Mr. Masayuki is truly a lion chaser. He saw the center’s calendar on the window and decided to take a chance. He decided to chase the lion. I hope that you all are having a wonderful week. I hope that maybe this post gives you a little inspiration to go ahead and grab on to that opportunity that was placed in front of you by God. And I hope that you enjoy the many blessings that God intends you to receive from it. As for me, every day I am reminded of the blessings God intended for me when He set this opportunity in front of me. As terrifying as it was to go for it I am forever thankful that I did.

more shots from around the Kesennuma area

How would you respond?

 

I was asked to write a human interest piece so here goes my attempt at something like that. This is not part of the Exodus 16 Series. 

How would you respond?

My first day at the center I had the honor of listening to a story about the Tsunami and its effect on the people in this region. The story was a second hand account about a gentleman and his family. This man who the story is about, I do not know his name, had been working at one of the hotels here in Kesennuma at the time of the earthquake. The hotel was built far up on a hill looking over the entire city.

The earthquake came that day as he was working as a chef. The earthquake was beyond frightening. But the earthquake came and went and this gentleman remained at his job to deal with the damage that had happened there at the hotel. Twenty minutes passed. That is when the Pacific Ocean unleashed all of its horror and strength on the north east coast cities of Japan. Kesennuma was one of those cities. Thirty percent of the city was destroyed by water. When the tsunami came the gentleman was safe because he was high enough. Unfortunately though his home was not. But not just his home, his wife, his children and his parents were also not high enough because they were in his home. The home and family that he was going to work every day to provide for. His home was swept away by that terrifying water we were talking about. And so was his family. According to the gentleman who told the story the family has not been found and the husband has no one but himself.

Last week during one of my English classes we had a very small earthquake. It hit quick and it left just as so. But the look in my student’s eyes did not. I had seen this look many times in my past career as a social worker. It was a look that people exhibit when they have flashbacks. We had to stop class for a bit because I could tell that my student had just been re-traumatized. I shifted my focus quickly off of English and on to him. We talked about his experience and we talked about the things he had seen back at the time of the Tsunami. No he was not the man from the hotel. But he was a man and he had endured a significant amount of trauma. He also had been re-traumatized numerous times since March of 2011.

The last couple of days I have had plenty of time to think about every thing I had seen and heard here in my first two weeks in Kesennuma. One of the things I tend to do is try to put myself in someone’s shoes and try to see if I can experience what thoughts may occur in some ones head if this were to happen. Here is what started to come up in my head when I did that:

20 Minutes. I could have done something.  Did I fail as a father? A husband? A son? I should have done more. I should have chosen them instead of work…but I didn’t have a choice…or did I? Why did this happen to me? Why couldn’t I have been taken instead of them? It’s my fault. I hate God. I hate life. Maybe they are still alive and I just haven’t found them. They can’t be gone. They were all I had.

I know I will never be able to put myself in his shoes but even trying to if you really try hard enough you will be overcome by so much sadness that you realize you need some way to pick yourself up out of the mood you just got yourself in. The sorrow of loosing a loved one is indescribable. But loosing your whole family with out ever getting to say good-bye is hopefully something you and I will never have to endure.

I thought about what I would do if I were to meet this man and to be honest I hope I don’t. I don’t know what I would do. In fact I don’t know if I could handle hearing his story. If I did meet him though I would give him a hug and I would ask him if he wanted to tell his story and then I would cry with him for as long as he wanted. Then when we were finished crying I would ask him if he wanted to plan to meet again so that we could cry some more. I would keep doing this until he was ready to continue on through the grieving process. And hopefully in that process I would have the opportunity to share the gospel with him.

My English student is only one of tens of thousands who have to deal with flash backs of the March 11^th Tsunami, every day. In the United States we flood a school with counselors when a fellow student dies. Here, in Japan, that doesn’t happen even when cities are wiped out. That’s partly a culture thing. But even with cultural barriers we are all humans. We all suffer and we all sin. Most of all we all need Christ because when we have begun that grieving process of loosing a loved one or a friend Christ is there to give us comfort. Christ is there to give us eternal life. Christ is the one there with open arms saying, “I love you! You are not alone”. How could you make it if you didn’t have that?

Japan has always been notorious for being a difficult mission field. It is not easy to talk about Christ here. In fact it’s freaking hard. This northern part of Japan I remember was considered to be especially difficult. This was “old country” which meant that new ideas and new religions were “out”. But since this tremendous disaster occurred nearly one year ago this area has become an opportunity. God gave you and I a gift. Maybe not exactly the way most would like it but he gave us a gift. He gave us an opportunity to spread his love and grace to a region that would have been passed over because of the lack of opportunity. There is a lot of clean up to do here…but there is even more church work to do. God gave us a pretty clear wake up call with this disaster. God might have well said “These people need me too, don’t pass them over, share my love with them too”. So that’s what we are going to do!