What do you do when uncontrollable forces array against your sense of God’s calling?
In their hearts humans plan their course,
but the Lord establishes their steps. (Prov. 16:9 NIV)
Sensing the go-ahead to proceed with this missions trip to Japan, I began the morning of January 2, 2011 by praying about whom to invite. It was a Sunday. I’d be at church, and I’d have ample opportunity to approach potential team members.
There were two people who were already a given: “K,” who initiated this trip by asking me to consider it several months earlier, and my prayer team partner who was with me as we prayed for a Japan missionary via Skype call. That made three of us. Whom else should we invite?
God would begin to highlight people as I encountered them at church that morning, focusing my attention on them and zooming in like Robocop’s targeting system. I approached one couple in the prayer room. A member of the prayer team in the hallway. A couple in the foyer… I had approached a half-dozen people by the end of church services. Even if only one or two of them accepted, we’d have enough to form a team, but I prayed again and asked God whom else to invite. Right at that moment, my friend “M” walked by, and I heard in my heart, “Ask M– he’s half-Japanese.”
So I did.
He thought about it for a moment, then asked if I was inviting just him or his entire family. It wasn’t common practice to invite an entire family on a mission trip, but I felt compelled to extend the invitation to them all. They thanked me and told me they’d pray about it.
By the end of that week, I had invited a total of twelve people onto the Japan team and only two declined. Our newly-formed team of ten started to meet regularly to pray and plan the trip. During this time, M and his family shared their sense of a possible long-term calling to Japan. I mentioned that I had the impression that one of the objectives of this trip was to help plant a missionary family.
As we started planning trip dates, the ten of us had to figure out a window of time that would work with everyone’s busy schedule.
The dates that worked were March 17th – 27th, 2011.
And, as an unexpected bonus, M found out that if we traveled to Japan on those dates, the airfare would only cost $622 round trip, all taxes included. That was unbelievably affordable– we took it as God’s provision for us to make this trip feasible. We booked our tickets right away, two months in advance of our trip, nailing down those dates.
Our team would meet regularly over the next two months, preparing for the trip and working on our itinerary while leaving room for the Holy Spirit to improvise– I had recently experienced my breakthrough in the mountains, learning to do what we see God doing rather than spin our own wheels and try to make things happen out of our own effort.
As the team leader, I had been praying for a vision for the trip, and I got an impression that I would share with the team:
“We’re not going to save a single person in Japan.”
Come again?
“We’re not going to save a single person because that’s God’s job. He’s the One at work, and we’re just His children, tagging along with Him like kids in the back of the station wagon while Dad drives.”
This impression would set the tone not just for our trip, but for my approach to ministry from that point on.
I can’t save you, but I know Someone who can, and I’d be happy to tell you about Him.
Although we all felt a strong calling to go to Japan, we didn’t have a clear objective other than “to pray for Japan and encourage the missionaries who are already there.” That’s what we sensed the Holy Spirit was leading us to do, but this isn’t the typical objective for a missions trip, making it more of a challenge to raise funds for this trip. Some questioned our motives for going. Why Japan, a wealthy country? It’s not like we’d be building schools for the impoverished in Tokyo. Why ten people? Why do you have to go all the way to Japan to pray for them? Why can’t you just pray from afar? There were accusations that this missions trip was a “missions trip,” a smokescreen to help fund our personal vacations to Japan.
When you trust in the Holy Spirit more than in your own strategy, it can be rough to convince people that you aren’t lying or delusional.
Exactly one week before our departure date– it was still March 10th in California, but in Japan, it was already March 11– I was at my office, getting some work done late at night when my mother texted me. “Did you hear about the earthquake in Japan?”
I hadn’t heard about the breaking news, so I checked online and learned there was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan.
Then I heard about the tsunami.
Then I heard about the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear reactor.
I immediately emailed the rest of the team and asked if anyone wanted to opt out of the trip or cancel it altogether. A flurry of calls and emails came in the next morning, from friends, family, and coworkers: half of them were cheering us on to go at such a time, seeing God’s hand in preparing a team to go for such a time as this, and the other half assumed we’d reschedule the trip or cancel it altogether, and thought we were crazy for not doing so.
Our team conferred and prayed about this.
I again offered everyone the opportunity to opt out or cancel the trip.
No one on the team took me up on these options.
All ten of us believed that God knew this was coming up when He pulled the team and this trip together. We believed that this was the very reason we all felt called to go to Japan, even though we had no clear objectives up until now.
Over the next few days, news spread about worsening situation in Fukushima, and more and more people begged us not to go. We were torn between what we sensed the Holy Spirit leading us to and what conventional wisdom was telling us. I was under tremendous pressure to cancel the trip, as I was not only the team leader, but a staff member, and I was reminded of my responsibility for the safety of all ten members.
This was, perhaps, the toughest part: as the prayer ministry pastor, my role was to equip and encourage people to pray. Most of my team members were on the prayer team. I knew they were people of prayer, and I knew how gifted they were in prayer. If none of them sensed the Holy Spirit telling us to cancel our plans, would I be quenching what God was doing in them? Should I err on the side of caution and cancel the trip, even if it went against our collective sense of calling?
I had two young children of my own, and though they weren’t coming with me to Japan, Soo and I discussed the very real possibility that I might not come home from the trip. We both understood this. We both believed that I was called to go on this trip.
What followed was nearly a week of intense prayer, discernment, and self-reflection. My faith was being challenged and stretched—did I truly believe in the same God that I read about and sing about, or was I just going through the motions? Could I demonstrate my faith by trusting in Him fully?
The Sunday following the disaster, our senior pastor asked our congregation what they could do to show love to Japan. Congregation members donated laptops for us to bring to relief workers on the ground. Others gave towards our missions support and fully funded our entire team– we even ended up with a surplus of $10,000 that we would donate to an organization doing relief work in Northeastern Japan.
Meanwhile, concerns over safety intensified along with the deteriorating situation in Fukushima. I continued to offer each team member the opportunity to opt-out, every day, up until the morning of our departure.
No one opted out.
Soo took the boys to Seoul for our youngest son’s first birthday party, leaving from Los Angeles the night before my flight to Japan. The plan was for me to join them in Seoul after the Japan missions trip was over, so I took a different flight than the rest of the team and would leave about six hours earlier than them.
On my way to the airport with my brother and mother, my mentor called me and prayed that if God didn’t want our team to land in Japan, He would divert our flights, but if it were His will for us to go, we would arrive safely in Tokyo.
On the morning of March 17th, 2011, I boarded my Korean Airlines flight to Tokyo. The rest of my team would follow on Singapore Airlines (on $622 tickets) later that day.
Our plan was to rendezvous at Narita Airport, but was that God’s plan?
How would He answer my mentor’s prayer?
2 Comments