Ep. 49: Why Wait?

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God’s timing is never late, though it often feels that way to us.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 2:11 NIV)

We finally moved to Ofunato– the city God placed on my mind through a dream, the city where we were told we may not find housing– in October 2013, a full two years after my very first visit to the town.

Why did God make us wait that long?

It was only after moving to Ofunato that we’d see, in hindsight, how God worked out the timing.

1. God’s timing worked around our limitations.

Neither Soo nor I spoke Japanese– this was a cause for criticism when we first started sharing about our sense of calling there– and this would have been more of a problem if we had come soon after the disaster: in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, most of the relief work being done involved debris cleanup and supply distribution, the logistics of which would have required us to not only speak the language, but understand Japanese social norms well enough for us to not burden anyone else with translating or babysitting us in the midst of the gargantuan task at hand.

Arriving in Ofunato two years later put us in the next phase: disaster recovery, which is less about meeting immediate needs such as food and shelter, and more about providing ongoing emotional and spiritual care. This is the type of ministry I had been involved in when I was the prayer pastor at our home church.

By the time we arrived in Ofunato, the local volunteer base we served with had become staffed by three bilingual missionaries, with two of them being Japanese Christians who had spent years in the United States. We could thus discuss our work and have daily devotions in English, and Soo and I would have plenty of help with translation.

Plus, if we had arrived any earlier, there might not have been any housing available for our family.

2. God’s timing placed us where we needed to be at just the right moment.

Not only would I have been useless during the disaster relief phase, I wouldn’t have been able to share anything related to faith. During that phase, the Christian disaster relief network we served with was very firm on asking volunteers to show love to disaster victims by serving them without preaching at them.

By stressing God’s love through acts of service, like cleaning mud out of a house or pulling weeds from a farmer’s field, the network gained credibility with the people, so by the time Soo and I arrived, two and a half years after the disaster, our network and the Ofunato staff had earned enough trust to be more open about matters of faith. We started out by sharing simple testimonies, but over the next two years, our staff would be sharing about Jesus openly, having conversations with unchurched people about everything from baptism to crucifixion and the Atonement– and they listened.

How do I know?

They’re the ones who initiated these conversations.

Many workers had come before us to till the soil and plant seeds that we would simply water. Our time of waiting had us sitting in the dugout, waiting to step up to the plate in the order God had in mind.

3. My time of waiting turned out to be a time of testing and refinement.

The thing about pride is that God always reveals more of it in us, even when we think we’ve been beaten into humility and have nothing left to bleed. My pride was wounded countless times through this process:

• When we were rejected by missions organizations.
• When we had to raise support and couldn’t hit our numbers.
• When other families from our home church left for their overseas assignments months before we did, even though we were the first to announce our plans.

I was once asked what God was teaching me through the time of waiting. I replied that even a vision from God can become an idol if I pursue the fruition of that vision over God himself. I was so obsessed with getting to Japan quickly because frankly, it was embarrassing to be stuck in California for so long. My dogged pursuit of the vision was more about proving myself right than about following God’s calling, and it was only after I became aware of this did God release us to go.

—–

One of my first days of work in Ofunato took place on the anniversary of my entry into full-time ministry, seven years to the day I took a job as an admin assistant at my home church, where my duties included setting up for events, making coffee, and hauling boxes around. I’d eventually become a pastor and a missionary, and on my seventh anniversary (with seven being a number of completion or perfection in the Bible), I was finally serving in Ofunato, where I found myself doing what?

Setting up for events, making coffee, and hauling boxes around.

I chuckled to myself.

There was a time where doing this kind of work annoyed me, but not anymore; if anything, it was a privilege for me to be doing this sort of work in the city I felt so strongly called to.

And just like the nature of my work evolved at church, so it would in Ofunato.

(To be continued)