Ep. 54: God Loves Chain-Smokers, Too

<< Previous Episode

She was the last person you might expect to follow Jesus. But then again, so was the Apostle Paul.

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Sam 16:7 NIV)

December 2013. It was our second month in Ofunato.

We were serving with a base that hosted Christian volunteers from around the world and organized outreach events to local tsunami survivors. I was out in the yard, spray-painting pine cones for a Christmas craft, when one of my coworkers came back from a visit.

“How’d it go?” I asked. I knew she had been facing serious discouragement around that time, made worse by constant disruptions to her sleep, and that she had been feeling a strong resistance to visiting a local survivor whom I’ll refer to as Mari-san. I suspected a spiritual attack meant to keep her from visiting Mari-san, so we prayed together before she left for her visit. I was eager to hear how she did.

I couldn’t tell if she was in awe or in a daze.

“I can’t believe it,” she replied. “Mari-san just accepted Christ.”

Mari-san was, by outward appearances, probably the last person one would expect to surrender her life to Jesus. She had been known around town for having a darkness about her, likely due to a series of traumatic events she endured even before the disaster of March 11, 2011.

On the day of the earthquake and tsunami, Mari-san was on the balcony of her second-floor apartment when the waters rushed in, filling floor to ceiling in a matter of seconds. She cleaved to a post for dear life until the waters subsided twenty minutes later. Afterwards, she collapsed from exhaustion and lay unconscious for hours until being rescued by firefighters and taken to the hospital. Her home destroyed, she was relocated to a cramped kasetsu, or temporary housing unit, where I met her for the first time.

My coworker had asked me to start visiting Mari-san to help teach her about Jesus. Her kasetsu barely had enough space to squeeze in guests, much less one my size. I clasped my knees in as tightly as I could, snuggling into a pillow-sized space on the floor between an overloaded plastic shelf and her table, upon which empty alcohol bottles stood around a large ashtray like onlookers gawking at a smoldering wreck. Mari-san was a chain smoker, and in a space this confined, the smoke had nowhere to go but into our pores and the fibers of our very being.

With my coworker translating, I began to chat with Mari-san to learn more about her and see if she understood what it means to follow Jesus. When I shared some Scriptures with her, she paused, taking a deep drag and tapping ashes off her cigarette as she contemplated God’s word. She not only listened to the Scriptures, she would process them and come up with ways to apply the precepts to her life.

This would happen every time we visited Mari-san. What a joy it was to watch her being transformed before our very eyes: the darkness she once carried gave way to a sparkle in her eye, an infectious, childlike joy in her spirit. We encouraged her to pray out loud, and when she finally overcame her initial hesitation, she blew us away with the depth of her prayers. It was evident that the Holy Spirit was, and is, at work in her life.

Watching Mari-san grow in her faith, I couldn’t help but think about how she might have been judged by her outward appearance if she had ever tried to visit a church before the disaster– and how much the church would have been the one to miss out. Where human eyes might have seen a chain-smoking emo/Goth type, God saw a precious child who was created for so much more than she had ever seen in herself.

Perhaps this is why God had us bring the church directly into her constricted, nicotine-baked temporary housing unit instead.

(to be continued)