Summer fellowship

Fall 2006...I'd spent the last four weeks muttering the mantra "I live here. I live here. I live here. I live here..." under my breath. When I jumped away from bicycles on the crazy sidewalks near Kawasaki station...when I ran for the train...when I was overwhelmed by Tokyo's ever-moving sea of people...I would remind myself that there was no going back--this wasn't vacation. I was living in Japan.

The VYM program that I served in from 2006-2009 had business meetings and retreats that happened in the fall and spring of each year, and it was fall retreat of 2006 when I first met the whole VYM group in Japan. I remember sitting in the back corner on the floor during one of our group worship times, lips pressed tightly together because I couldn't honestly sing the lyrics to the song the group was singing:

"We delight ourselves at your table, O God.

You do all things well; just look at our lives."

Look at my life, with my silly mantra to get me through day after day that seemed overwhelming?! Yeah, right. (Note: I know that God is good. Sometimes, I just like to pout about my life for a moment. :))

As I got to know my fellow-missionaries better, the song's lyrics took on special meaning. Not one of the missionaries "had it all together." No one was feeling necessarily competent or efficient. When we got together, we definitely did talk about exciting things God was doing...but we also talked about the darker things, like loneliness and doubts and culture questions and clashes. We talked about the ugliness that comes out when we are stressed, about the disappointment we feel toward ourselves and those around us.

And I realized that when we were singing, we hadn't been singing necessarily about gifts of wisdom, beauty, language skills, respectability, peace, goodness, etc. We had been mostly singing about grace. Yes, look at our lives--look straight at the realness of our pain and questions and struggles--and praise God whole-heartedly for His grace.

Summer 2011. This last weekend in Fukushima, we gathered together again. Many of us have left Japan and then returned. Several of us have gotten married and came with spouses. We have new ministries and new homes in new parts of Japan...new memories and stories of earthquakes and aftershocks and culture shocks and life. New experiences of grace and God's "doing all things well."

With this group of people, I can talk about both the elusiveness of hope and the miraculous doors God has opened...all in one breath. We mourn, cry, comfort, laugh, pray, praise...and love each other with a loyalty grown in honest difficulty, desperation, and experiences of grace. We end with hugs and talk about next time we'll meet...America? Japan? Only God knows...

And today, the first day of our fall semester, I was thinking of my dear friends, and of experienced grace...present grace...and the promise of grace to come. What a blessing! The lyrics ran through my head:

"We delight ourselves at your table, O God.

You do all things well; just look at our lives..."