Love in Morioka

ただいま！ I’m back!

The last few days in Japan was very exciting and crazy, and zapped much of our team’s energy. However, we powered through it with God’s strength and ended on a strong note.

After coming back from Iwaizumi, we were blessed with two days of recuperating and VBS planning. During this time, M’s family friends drove all the way from Tokyo (a day long trip) to visit her and the church. The couple greeted our team like we were old friends and they donated boxes and bags of food to us. I was so touched to receive such kindness from brothers and sisters who didn’t even know us and treated us like family! There was a box of mini buns they donated (it looked like a Japanese version of Chinese buns) and the couple explained that a team of disabled workers made those buns. Those volunteers worked their best on making the buns because they wanted to support missions if even they physically couldn’t go on missions. This gives me so much hope because it really shows that nothing- not disabilities, not finances, not even people- can get in the way of God using a person to be part of missions.

The next night, our team was blessed with the chance to go to the さんさ踊り (sansa odori), a festival that features traditional music and drumming. It’s unique to Morioka and happens every year during the first week of August. M and I were dressed up in yukata’s, the traditional festival wear for women, with the help of the missionary’s wife and the pastor’s wife. The yukata’s were so pretty and I was very grateful that the pastor’s wife lent them to us to be part of the matsuri (festival). Our team went downtown to immerse ourselves in the culture along with crowds of other Japanese people visiting from local towns. The main event was a sort of parade down a main street, where hundreds and hundreds of dancers from different groups danced, played instruments, and sang in celebration. It was amazing to see the talent in Morioka with people of all ages and the pride the Japanese had in the culture.

On Sunday, we heard another sermon from the pastor about the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Jesus brought up this parable when a lawyer asked Him what it took to inherit eternal life. Most of us remember that the man explained what he knew already, which was, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” However, it is easy to skip Jesus’ previous question, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” It’s really interesting that Jesus doesn’t ask what have we read, but whether we’ve read it with the conviction to do what it says and to carry it out in our lives. For me, many things in the Bible becomes head knowledge, like trusting in God, loving my neighbour, and fleeing from temptation. I know all those things, but I often catch myself not believing it or acting it out in my behaviour. The pastor then encouraged us to love our neighbours like the Samaritan man did- with not 10% of ourselves, not 50%, not 90%, but with all 100% of ourselves. We become one with our neighbour so we place all the love we usually have for ourselves on to our neighbour.

What’s really cool is that the first sermon I heard after I returned to Canada was on the same passage! The pastor addresses Jesus’ response to the question, “And who is my neighbour?” However, Jesus doesn’t tell the lawyer who his neighbour is, but explains through the parable how to be a neighbour. What Jesus says is that we shouldn’t be focusing on who we should love, because he already asks us to love everyone- our friends and enemies. He wants us to focus on how to be loving. We continued on this note, where the pastor explained that a loving neighbour puts others first. This seems so simple, but it is the hardest thing for mankind to do. Throughout our whole lives, from baby to old age, we like to put ourselves first. We are most well aware of what we want, and things that deviate from fulfilling these desires frustrate us. But to love our neighbours as ourselves is to throw away selfishness and embrace selflessness. This includes throwing away what we value, such as our reputation, time, energy, strength, and finances.

It is admittedly hard to love others, especially those who don’t love us or who wrong us. But C.S. Lewis puts it best when he talks about loving our neighbours despite their mistakes:

Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why l hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again. (Mere Christianity)

My little rant on this amazing passage in the Bible has really extended this post, so I’ll continue the rest of my Japan stories (VBS and post-thoughts) in my next post. I’ll just ask for your prayers for me to be a loving neighbour. It’s always easy for me to find faults in others and ignore my own faults. But pray that I can be aware of what others need and to love on them unconditionally and intentionally. When I say that, I mean loving not because of bubbly feelings or because I will get something in return, but making a choice to love.

ありがとうございます！

Love,

J