Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV)
I fidget with the touch screen at my aisle seat on an airliner bound for Tokyo. There’s plenty of elbow room because no one is seated next to me.
My entire row is empty.
In fact, over half the seats on this Boeing 777 appear to be vacant. Though light on passengers, the plane feels weighed down with a viscous tension.
It’s March 18th, 2011. Thousands of people are trying to flee Japan, and here I am, trying to get into the country.
Exactly one week earlier, on March 11, a series of catastrophic events struck the coast of Tohoku, or Northeastern Japan: a magnitude 9.0 earthquake– the largest in Japan’s recorded history– followed by a devastating tsunami, which reached a maximum height of 132.5 feet and triggered an explosion at a nuclear reactor in the city of Fukushima.
I’m a pastor and the leader of a 10-member mission team from our church in California. My nine teammates are on a different flight that arrives six hours later than I will. We had all booked our flights in January 2011 and had this departure date set two months before disaster struck.
A map pops up on my screen. A curved arrow traces our flight path from Los Angeles, brushing along the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean. Our destination is Tokyo, but the map indicates that we’ve overshot the world’s most populous city, cutting a wide berth as we round the northern tip of Japan’s main island.
It appears that we’re avoiding a substantial radius around Fukushima, and I assume that it’s due to concerns over radiation.
Throughout this 11-hour flight, my loved ones and I had been praying that if God willed for our team to continue with our plans to go to Japan, we’d arrive safely at Narita Airport. If God did not will this, we prayed that our flights would be diverted.
I glance at the map. Our plane has begun a counterclockwise arc, approaching Tokyo from the northwest.
Looks like we’re going to land at Narita.
How did I get here?
The Prayer that set Things in Motion
Never in my life did I expect to become a pastor or a missionary.
I didn’t grow up in the church– never went to Sunday school, was never part of a youth group, didn’t memorize any Bible verses.
However, my Catholic mother did want me to attend any school that was associated with Jesus. Therefore, I attended a Baptist kindergarten, four years of Catholic elementary school, and a year in a Seventh-Day Adventist school.
Even as a child, I noticed that these three churches, though all professing to believe in the same Jesus, disagreed on a number of points, and each one claimed to have the correct version of the faith.
They couldn’t all be right. Therefore, I reasoned, they must all be wrong.
Cynical about religion by the age of 12.
Yet, my yearning to know God never died.
When I was 17, a science teacher asked our class how we could reconcile the theory of evolution with the biblical account of creation. (This was back in the day when a public school teacher could talk about such things without getting into trouble.)
Some of the opinions were amusing. Some were thought-provoking. Some were just bonkers.
I left that class with an even stronger disdain for religion—and, at the same time, an even stronger desire to know who God is.
My mother picked me up from school that day and drove us to a church to pray, as we occasionally did.
My mother was big on prayer. She first taught me about prayer when I was four years old, and even though our family didn’t attend weekly church services, we would sometimes stop by the local church to pray on our own.
As I knelt before a sturdy metal rack of candles flickering in their votives, I reflected on the discussion in my science class, and my indifference towards religion simmered into a sense of discontentment.
For years, I had been hearing about matters of faith from other people. If there really was a supreme being in the universe, I didn’t want to take someone else’s word for it.
A boldness to pray surged from deep within, and I silently pleaded, “God– whoever you are– I hope it isn’t a sin for me to pray this way, but I don’t want to hear about You from other people anymore. I don’t want them telling me who You are, or what to read, or what to believe. I just want to know who You are– to really know You, and not just know about You.”
God would soon begin to answer my prayer, and would continue to do so over the course of the next two decades.
I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me. (Proverbs 8:17)
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