Bearing Witness to True Peace and Joy

🎄🎄Merry Christmas Everyone!🎄🎄

I want to start by thanking all of you who supported me in prayer for my survey trip with Pioneers to Japan. It means a lot to have you all in my corner; it was truly helpful and much appreciated. I have dozens of great experiences I'd love to share, but for this letter, I'll focus on a few key moments that God used to confirm, teach, and prepare me for what is yet to come. However, if your interested, I invite y'all to reach out for a call or to get coffee/tea, and I would love to share even more stories of my time in Japan and how God is moving throughout the country.

Peace within Darkness

As this was my first time in Japan everything was new to me, including what spiritual darkness was like there. The first few days visiting some of the major shrines and museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka were a unique experience in genuinely feeling direct spiritual darkness associated with a specific location. In one room, dedicated to Buddhist or Shinto history/artifacts, I would experience a clear uncomfortability and pressure on my chest, and in another... nothing. I later learned that this exact experience was common amongst Christians all over East and South-East Asia. I was glad that a Pioneers leader prepared me to be present and still not participate in the worship that occurred in these places, which is disguised as an innocent part of Japanese culture. These first few experiences helped me to know how to be a biblical witness to both joy and peace throughout the rest of the trip.

One major example of that was with my Japanese tour guide, whom I "by chance" had for both of my food tours despite them being in two different cities. These tours were a way for me to engage with Japanese culture outside of only seeing religious sights. They also allowed for a lot of time to talk and walk. Once the guide told me I had both tours with her, I knew God was being very intentional in this encounter. During the second tour, we unexpectedly had 45 minutes where it was just the two of us, as the others in the tour were late, allowing us to discuss deeper spiritual topics and sharing about some of our spiritual experiences. While I didn't get to present the whole gospel to her right then and there, I was so excited that I could plant some seeds of the gospel and that I may be able to continue the connection, as she also does online language tutoring.

Ministry Potential

Hiroshima was where I started the official Pioneers part of my trip, where I stayed with one of the missionaries and shadowed their normal ministries. My favorite of these was everyone participating in prayer walking the Peace Park (the memorial park for the WWII atomic bombing). Prayer walks have been a favorite ministry of mine in Chicago, so getting to pray for true Peace and true Joy to spread through the city, in the place where the Japanese pray for a godless version of peace, was a great experience and one I hope to continue in any city I live in in Japan!

As the trip continued and I met more Japanese people from a variety of backgrounds, I saw more clearly what these religious sights meant to the people and how that same spiritual darkness is present even in otherwise very joyful events. Being Japanese means that big and small life moments typically happen at a shrine. In Dazaifu, we saw hundreds of people come to pray and get good luck charms for getting promotions or doing well on school entrance exams. I even saw a whole wedding party come to the shrine to be blessed. In Aoshima, families went to the shrine for family photos, and businessmen went for blessings/charms of success. I knew intellectually what the prayer needs were for Japan, but in these moments and places I felt the real need. If you have no peace about your career or school the automatic instinct for the Japanese is to get a charm. Even sadder is that many of them don't even know if this works. It's just expected by society for you to do these things to gain favor in your life, and if you don't and fail, it's your fault for bringing bad luck/curses on yourself.

In feeling this need more and more, I started to feel more at peace about joining in with what God is doing in Japan. In principal it is quite simple what I will do; bear witness to the true peace, joy, and hope only found in Jesus, specifically where it is not present. And it was clear that for 99% of the Japanese people, their prayers are sadly misplaced.

Even amongst all the misplaced prayers, it's amazing to see the desire for connection and how people are truly searching and wanting to see something come from that effort. I saw this in my favorite experience of the whole trip. Near the end of my time in Japan, a 75 year old man named Kazuhiro out of nowhere tapped me on the shoulder and asked to talk in English while we were on a 2 hour ferry ride to Shikoku. He had picked up learning English in his retirement as a way to connect with new people and give him something to do. Even without perfect English, it was amazing to get to swap stories and speak about all kinds of things. Nearly 1 1/2 hours into our 2 1/2 hour conversation, I was able to share the gospel to him and the centrality of Jesus to the gospel, as he had heard a bit about Christian beliefs through his travels in Europe. This was an answer to one of my 3 main prayers I shared in the last newsletter, and I am so glad to have made this connection during my time in Japan! God is already activating people with a desire for connection within the loneliness that Japanese culture drills into people, and this was another opportunity to see how my approachability will be used by God for his Kingdom purposes in Japan.

Next Steps

I'm very excited to share that as of Dec 10th, I am a member of the Pioneers Japan Launch team! This was a crucial step to moving forward and makes everything much more official for me. I now have 3 main responsibilities that need to be completed prior to me being able to move to Fukuoka.

1. Bible school Classes: I am working on my 4th class now and will have all 6 completed by the end of April.
2. Japanese Language Learning: During the call where I got my offer letter, I was informed that the team will need me to achieve a higher level of Japanese than originally required before joining the team in Japan. This level is N5 and usually takes ~500 hours of study to reach, or about 6 months of serious study.
3. Support Raising: In the same way that I have a minimum language target set for me prior to moving, there are also financial targets to meet prior to being able to move to Fukuoka. (I'll go into more detail in a January newsletter 😊)

For those who are interested in partnering with me financially right now, this giving link is the best option, and thank you in advance.