Fear kept me from trusting God.
I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. (Philippians 4:12-13 NIV)
My family arrived in Japan for a six-week stay in November 2011 and stayed with friends in Kyoto. Our goals were to see how we would fare in Japan as a family, explore options for moving to Japan as missionaries, and visit Ofunato with Soo and the boys, to give them a glimpse of the city God was placing on our hearts.
We booked our flights using air miles accrued from several trips we had made to Korea, saving us several thousand dollars. Every penny mattered, as I had quit my job and our support-raising efforts had yielded $1,300 up until that point. Generous gifts from our supporters, certainly, but how we’d survive on that for six weeks in Japan, where, at the time, food and groceries cost at least twice as much as they did in the U.S., was in God’s hands.
In Kyoto, Soo, the boys, and I learned how to navigate daily life in Japan: traveling by train and bus, shopping at the convenience store, using a washing machine at the laundromat. We were also trying to gauge how much it would cost for us to live in Japan, and as we asked other missionaries, a common number seemed to emerge.
We were told that for a family of four, we would need at least $50,000 U.S.D. a year, and that was just to cover living expenses. Ministry expenses would be in addition to this figure.
We were also looking into ways to obtain visas that would allow us to stay longer than the 90-day period given to tourists. The only option for us, not having any Japanese ancestry, seemed to be a work or religious visa, which must be sponsored by an established organization in Japan.
Being new to Japan, we didn’t have many connections to anyone, much less a potential sponsor, so not only did we need to somehow raise at least $50,000 a year, we had to find an established organization willing to sponsor a family of newbies who had no experience, could not speak Japanese, and wanted to go to a city along the Northeastern Coast because I saw a map in a dream.
Sounds ridiculous, I know. It’s no surprise that we’d continue to hit roadblocks.
Some organizations told us that they didn’t have a presence in Ofunato or Iwate Prefecture, so they would not send us there without any support structure in place. Another said that they could send us to Sendai, but not Ofunato. And one organization told us that it didn’t matter where I felt called to, because if we were to join them, we’d go where they’d send us.
Frustration. In the meantime, our thirteen-hundred dollars were quickly dwindling away. I was so tempted to email out an appeal for support, but every time, the Holy Spirit would nudge me to stop and pray instead, trusting that God would take care of it.
One night, I had yet another vivid dream: in this one, I was balancing my checkbook and found a rather large amount of mysterious origin. In the dream, I said to myself, “I need to talk to my boss.” I woke up the next morning, checked my email, and found a message from my boss, who asked if we could connect via Skype, as he had something to tell me. Due to the time difference between Japan and California, our call wouldn’t happen for another ten hours or so, so Soo and I went about our day as planned, bringing our boys with us. We spoke with another contact regarding a visa, and again, hit a obstacle on the road towards our calling.
We boarded a train and headed back to the house in Kyoto, defeated and exhausted. God, did you really call us to do this? As our boys napped in their strollers, I leaned over and muttered to Soo, “I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off… If only we had $50,000 dollars, we’d have a year to figure this out.”
We got home, tucked the boys in for the night, and made our web call to my boss, for it was now 6:30 A.M. in California. After catching up for a few minutes, he broke the news that the day before, another staff member had been checking the mail and opened an envelope containing a check from an anonymous donor, made out to the Bay Family in Japan, in the amount of $50,000.
Did I hear that right?
Fifty-thousand dollars?!
The exact amount people told us we needed for a year! The amount I had just mentioned to Soo on the train hours earlier! The news of this breaking after my dream about an unexplained infusion into our bank account the night before!
Awestruck. Speechless. Soo and I wanted to fall face down before God and confess our lack of faith before Him.
It certainly appeared that God really wanted us to go to Japan, and if He got us this far, we trusted that He would get us all the way to Ofunato.
We decided to hold out on joining an organization until we found a way to get to the city of my dream. And now, with this generous gift from an anonymous supporter, we had more time to figure it out.
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