The wind blows where it will.
During our preparations for the trip, we reviewed guidelines on what would be culturally appropriate for short-term missionaries in Japan. For example, it isn’t common to walk up to strangers to strike up a conversation, especially if we couldn’t speak Japanese. Prayer in public would be a no-no, and if we ever did find ourselves praying for someone, we shouldn’t lay hands or touch them, as physical contact with a stranger would be highly inappropriate.
This pretty much ruled out street evangelism. So how could we share the love of Jesus during our time in Japan?
Some of our team members got the idea to make a T-shirt with a message printed on the front and the back. When the disaster hit on March 11th, it was decided that the message would be a single word, in Japanese and English.
“Hope.”
Ever since the moment our team arrived at Narita Airport, our vibrant shirts would capture the attention of the people around us. On the trains, passengers would read our shirts and flash us thumbs-up signs. One woman bowed towards us, glassy-eyed, and whispered, “Thank you.” Someone asked us who we were and why we were in Japan during such a time.
We shared that God’s love compelled us to come.
At one busy station, a uniformed employee glimpsed us from one of the ticket booths, abandoned her post, and started asking us about why we were there. She talked about how distraught she was after the disaster. We offered to pray for her. She told us that she didn’t have any money to pay us for it.
We told her we didn’t want any.
She welcomed the prayer, eyes clenched shut as the women of our team laid hands on her shoulder and asked God to bless her with peace. After being taught not to bother strangers, make physical contact, or pray in public, we found ourselves in one of the busiest train stations in the world, laying hands on a stranger and praying for her in public.
We only did it because she was open to it.
We only did what we saw the Father doing.
After spending a day in Tokyo, delivering donated laptops and emergency blankets to a relief organization, our team boarded the famed Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto and took a block of seats, settling in for the three-plus-hour ride.
A team member named “M” and I started talking about a passage she read as part of her devotional that morning. It was from John 9, where Jesus healed a blind man on the Sabbath, much to the chagrin of the Pharisees, who insisted that sin was involved in both the blindness and Jesus’ healing of it. Jesus replied to them, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains” (John 9:41). We began to discuss physical versus spiritual blindness.
The train made a stop. More passengers boarded, with one three-generational family taking seats directly behind us. A little girl and her mother noticed our team T-shirts and told the girl’s grandfather about it because he couldn’t see for himself.
He was blind.
He leaned forward and started speaking to us in Japanese. K and Y, the only two Japanese-speaking members of our team, responded, with Y translating for the rest of us.
The blind man asked us why we all wore shirts that said “hope.” We replied that we were there out of God’s love for Japan.
He told us that he’d been seeking truth his whole life. He said he could sense light coming from us, especially from M’s daughter, who had begun to befriend his granddaughter.
The blind man said, “I might be blind physically, but my heart isn’t blind.”
Y and I had been talking about physical versus spiritual blindness right before this family boarded the train. Coincidence?
K continued to engage the family in conversation. We learned that they were fleeing Tokyo, heading south to get as far away from Fukushima as possible. They had enough funds to get to Osaka, the next big city after our stop in Kyoto.
K had several hundred dollars worth of yen in his pocket, given to him by a former missionary to Japan for this trip. He handed the crisp new bills to the blind man to help his family relocate.
We asked the family if we could pray for them. They welcomed the opportunity. The blind grandfather knelt on the floor of the bullet train, tears streaming down his face as our team surrounded him to pray.
Don’t approach strangers to talk about Jesus and pray for them in public? We didn’t have to. Strangers were approaching us to talk about Jesus and pray together.
God is at work, and we’re just His kids, tagging along in the back seat of the family wagon while Father drives.
The train arrived at Kyoto Station, our destination. We said our goodbyes to the blind man’s family, wished them well, and disembarked. As we gathered our luggage on the platform, the train began to lurch away, and one of our team members shouted, “Look!”
In a moment straight out of a television drama, we saw every member of the blind man’s family standing at the windows of the train, palms pressed against the fogged-up glass, waving goodbye to us as the train rolled its way out of the station. All that was missing was a violin playing in the background.
We thought it’d be the last time we’d see this family.
The next morning, we attended Sunday services at our host church in Kyoto, followed by a time of fellowship over lunch. (It was my introduction to the after-church curry rice luncheon.) It was about time to wrap up when my eyes drifted to the stairway leading down from the main entrance.
I saw the tip of a white cane tapping down the stairs, followed by a pair of shoes, followed by a familiar-looking man and his wife.
It was the family we had encountered on the bullet train the day before! How did they find us? We didn’t tell them where we were headed, other than a brief mention of us staying at a church in Kyoto. The blind man told us that the family continued to Osaka as planned the night before, but he wanted to know more about us and the God who sent us there, so he had his daughter go online to look up churches in Kyoto.
They came to Kyoto and happened to find us at the right church.
They asked why K had given them money– was there a catch? What would motivate someone to just give money away? K told him that there is no catch, as it was a gift given by grace. He explained that with Jesus, forgiveness is a free gift that he need only receive. This began a lengthy conversation with the pastors of the church. The blind man returned to this church several times to ask more questions.
Almost one year later, he made his way from Okinawa, the southernmost part of Japan where his family had relocated, to the church in Kyoto because he wanted to ask more questions about Jesus. He made this trip by himself– a journey of around 1,000 miles. Afterwards, he returned to his family in Okinawa and sent a handwritten thank-you note to the pastors in Kyoto.
A handwritten note from a blind man who hadn’t written a letter in nearly thirty years.
As of this writing, I don’t know if this man has formally made a decision to accept Christ as his savior yet. It wasn’t our role to heal him or save him– that’s God’s job.
We’re called to plant seeds and water them, but it’s God who makes them grow (1 Cor. 3:6).
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