What do you do when you’re stripped of your abilities?
Upon completing our training in Chicago, we were commissioned as short-term missionaries in a service at our denomination’s annual meeting.
The missionary who would eventually become our supervisor in Japan had been in contact with me throughout the missionary application and orientation process. I hadn’t met him in person before, and he floated an idea by me: since our home church was sending a summer missions team to Tohoku, Japan in June-July of 2012, would it be possible for me to join them? That way, I could meet him as well as the other missionaries from our organization, and we could get a better idea of possible ministry opportunities in Tohoku. Using the last of our family’s accrued air miles, I booked a flight and joined this mission trip the day after our commissioning service.
I arrived in Japan and joined the summer missions team at a volunteer base in Kesennuma, one of the cities devastated by the tsunami– when the waves hit, fuel tanks along the shore were ruptured and the fuel caught fire, burning as it floated atop the 35-foot waves.
Destruction by fire and water at the same time? Unimaginable horror.
Our assignment was to help renovate damaged houses. We were split into two teams to serve two different homeowners. The team I was on was assigned to a very large, very nice, two-story Japanese-style house that was flooded up to the attic during the tsunami. The house withstood the water fairly well- aside from some water marks and rusted fixtures, it still looked, for the most part, like a new house. Knowing how much real estate costs in Japan, I thought to myself how the homeowners must have been doing quite well before the disaster, and I wondered why they hadn’t been able to clean up and rebuild the house after over a year.
We got to work tearing out walls and floors– a huge task given the size of the place. During a break, we learned that the homeowners had escaped the tsunami by fleeing to a nearby hill, where the husband later built a shelter out of scraps and debris that he found. This family had owned a fairly successful inn that was washed away by the tsunami, leaving them without their livelihood. They now did odd jobs to scrape together a living.
I repented for judging them and thinking that they might have been rich people taking advantage of volunteers to rebuild their mansion.
After tearing out walls beneath a staircase, I spent a good deal of the afternoon prying nails out of beams where the wood floor had been torn off– there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of nails. As I hunched over the dusty floor, removing rusty nails one at a time, I thought about what ministry had become for me: when I was the prayer pastor at my home church, my role involved a lot of speaking and listening, but here, I was unable to even say a few friendly words to the homeowners, as my Japanese was still very intro-level and the best I could do for them was to pull nails out of the ground and haul ripped floorboards to the dumping grounds.
Was I really bringing my family from California to Japan just to do this sort of thing? Without language skills, I wouldn’t be able to exercise most of my “spiritual gifts.”
The most I could offer was my physical presence and labor.
I prayed and asked God what he was trying to teach me through this. My thoughts soon turned to Jesus, and how he emptied himself to become one of us and live among us:
Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross! (Phil. 2:1-8 NIV)
Jesus set aside his deity to become one of us, to be with us. As the Creator, he could have done any number of things to save us, but he chose to become a humble servant, being nailed to a cross along with our sins.
As I reflected on this while sawing through planks of wood, I remembered that Jesus himself was a carpenter. Cutting, sanding, hammering– he wasn’t a stranger to any of this. And there I was, getting to do what he used to do when he was here on Earth.
I got to be an imitator of Christ, albeit in a different way that one might expect.
Over the past few years, God has been teaching me to find my identity in who he is rather that what I do, and this trip had only reinforced that notion. He hadn’t called my family to Japan to map out a strategy and accomplish a list of goals, but rather, to live among the people whom he loves, to walk alongside them in their trials and challenges, to bear his image and reflect who he is, to make ourselves available to the needs in the community.
On our team’s last day at the volunteer base, the morning devotions were led by a a construction manager from California who volunteered to spend a month there rebuilding houses. He talked about how carpenters have a tool belt filled with tools to help them get the job done, “And for us,” he said, referring to missionaries, “our tools are words.”
Words. I’ve used a lot of them over my years in ministry.
I’d listen to the words of others as they shared their pain, their struggles. I’d counsel them with words of insight, wisdom, and God’s truth. I’d pray out loud with others, letting the Holy Spirit guide the words from my lips to help strengthen, comfort, and encourage them. I’d write a weekly devotional for members of the prayer ministry I led.
Words were indeed the tools of my trade, and in Japan, I felt as if I’d been stripped of my tool belt and had to start over, collecting one new tool at a time. I didn’t have anywhere near the vocabulary I’d need to do the type of ministry I’d been doing in California: the most I could offer anyone to show love and care at this time was to help tear floorboards and walls out of a damaged house.
It was my way of expressing the one Word that mattered.
Jesus had nails hammered into his body because he loves us.
And that’s why I traveled halfway around the world to pull nails out of the floor.
We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19 NIV)
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