If you knew that your time was short, how would you spend your days?

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^“Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” (Colossians 4:5-6 NIV)

After all the years of discernment, preparation, prayer, fundraising, house-hunting, and adapting to life in Ofunato, God seemed to be calling us to leave Japan and go to Santa Ana, California after our two-year assignment ended.

We had less than a year left in Ofunato. How would we make our remaining time count? Two things came to mind as I prayed about this:

1. Equip others AKA pass along wisdom and knowledge.

If I wasn’t called to stay long-term, then perhaps I should invest in those who were.

Since my colleagues at the volunteer base were planning on staying in Ofunato far beyond my two-year assignment, I became more intentional with sharing my thoughts on ministry with them, as if saying, “Here’s what I would do if I were to stay and continue the ministry.” Perhaps God had sent us to Japan not to stay the rest of our lives and do the work of the ministry ourselves, but to plant and water seeds that He was growing (1 Cor. 3:6). God had already put some gifted Christian leaders in place. Maybe my calling was simply to shepherd them, encouraging them to grow into all that God had planned for them.

There were also opportunities to encourage the many short-term volunteer groups that our base would host. The base had mandatory one-hour devotions every morning, a policy set in place long before I ever started serving there. (One could see this as being legalistic, but I saw it as a vital discipline.) Right after breakfast but before even going over the day’s work, we would all gather around the table to read a passage of Scripture, reflect on it, share our thoughts with one another, and lift the rest of the day up in prayer. I had the privilege of leading these devotions twice a week, encouraging– and being encouraged by– volunteers from around the world, ranging from Japanese high school students to retired Western missionaries. I cherished these times of devotion with the teams.

2. Make every message count.

During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. (Acts 16:9-10)

Because I was similarly called to Ofunato in a dream, I couldn’t help but think that I was also called to go and preach the gospel, like Paul. While I had been warned not to bash people over the head with the Bible when I first arrived, the people we were reaching out to had come to trust us by this point and had grown increasingly receptive to stories of testimony during our first year.

For our second year– the last we would spend in Ofunato– I resolved to share the Gospel more boldly, but tactfully.

I had heard stories of well-meaning but insensitive Christians coming in after the disaster to “preach boldly,” causing relational damage by their lack of tact. There had to be a better way. How could I contextualize the Gospel in a way that an unchurched Japanese disaster survivor could grasp without feeling bullied into faith?

Being sensitive to this forced me to get creative. I started using pop culture– movies, TV shows, music– to point people to Jesus. If it worked for the Apostle Paul in Athens… (Acts 17: 16-34)

Korean dramas were popular in Japan at the time, so at one event, I used K-dramas as an intro to the Gospel and started talking about love stories. Every love story has three parts: 1) You have two lovers who are meant to be together, but then, 2) something comes between them to keep them apart. 3) The two lovers overcome great challenges and barriers to end up together, the way they were meant to.

I then explained that the Bible is not meant to be read like a book of rules, but as a love story between God and you. Just like in any love story: 1) You and God are meant to be together in a loving relationship, but 2) something came between you and God to keep you apart, and that thing is sin. But thankfully, 3) Jesus removed this barrier by paying the price for our sins with his own life, allowing us to reconcile with God and be with Him forever, the way we were meant to.

I used anything I could think of to help illustrate concepts from the Gospel. At our second-year Christmas service, the message I gave was based on the movie Frozen, which was then the number-two biggest box-office hit in Japan. I talked about how Anna and Elsa started out in a loving relationship until a curse hit Elsa and isolated her, just like the curse of sin isolated us from our intimate relationship with God. A wall separated the two sisters, but Anna was always standing at the door and knocking, like Jesus does (Rev. 3:20)… There’s even a very obvious act of (spoiler alert) self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection that redeems Elsa at the end.

As I spent our second year in Ofunato doing ministry as though each day were my last, I kept my eyes peeled for a car with a 10-10 license plate, as I had the impression that this would be the visual confirmation I needed to move on to Santa Ana, like Gideon’s Fleece (Judges 6:36-40) or the ducks I saw crossing the street three years earlier.

I searched for a 10-10 plate for months with no luck.

Until one day, in March of 2015, just three months short of the end of our assignment…

(to be continued)