変わらない愛

I've just finished singing a song that has "unchanging love" (kawaranai ai--the title above) as the first line...

Tonight has the perfect feeling of Fall--a little crisp coolness that makes you want to curl up with a blanket, but it isn't too cold to eat ice cream... :) I ended up catching my early train home from the kindergarten today, and since the evening was so nice I decided to get off at Niigata station and walk back to the church rather than take my next train. It's about an hour walk, with half of the pathway being beside a river where you can see the lights of the city yet take in the stars, trees, the sound of waves, etc. Have I mentioned before that Niigata City is a beautiful place? :)

Anyway, I walked and listened to old band songs and just mourned in general, which felt like the perfect thing to do on such a night. It feels like a good chunk of my life in Japan is spent mourning...I'm always getting used to things, and then things change. Part of the reason is because the people close to me are always changing--it's the nature of the program. Part of the change is just the changes in job focuses all the time, and the changes that happen in relationships with the churches, where you can never quite understand what's going on because of the language.

It's funny, because working at Nozomi isn't new to me...but being here all the time is. This area isn't new to me...but living in this house is. Lindsey and Cindy aren't new to me per se, but our relationships have changed this semester.

And so much has changed simply in my personality and roles, it seems like. A year ago, I was quiet, not expecting to lead anyone except from behind, and my biggest concern was being nice to the people around me. Now I'm brainstorming, jumping in as a leader by default even when I shouldn't be...

Mourning tonight actually made me think of Laura and Efrain the most (my former coworkers). I remember going to Sado Island with the Nomura's and Betsy, Efrain's birthday party and farewell party, singing with Laura almost once a week. I still remember singing with her in the car for the last time--we were crying so it was difficult to sing, but then we had to laugh too because our voices would crack with emotion at the most inopportune times...I remember being Ef's little sister, and always being able to count on him for taking the crowd and being the one with charisma. Goodness...how long has it been? But I still miss them. Being full-time at this place and not having him here is harder and weirder than I thought. Like, why would you mourn people 5 months after they left? I don't really know...

Sigh. It's really hard to work out of a place of unchanging love. I have a picture of what it could look like with my family, and with other people. But isn't it funny--and I hate myself for doing this!--how often we work out of the idea that we aren't loved? Working to impress, building relationships to protect, laying down rules to give ourselves roles and lines that give us identity...I do it so often. Especially here, when you can't understand the language and have the joy of knowing that you'll often screw up more often than you'll ever do anything right...it's really hard for me to go through changes and to not have the roles defined. Because if I don't have the roles defined, then I don't know if I'm doing things right, which means that I could screw up really big...or worse, I could just be screwing up all the time and acting really selfishly and people could be disagreeing with everything I do and I could just not be catching on at all...hehe, and this is dehibilitating self psycho-analyzing, de shou?

And all of this...makes me mourn the past again. I was safe with Ef and Laura, because we all had our roles and had them figured out. This...this is new and different and has already been messier than I would like it to be, in some respects.

I KNOW that it's good. On the worst days, I think that I'm barely working here as an English teacher now, and I'm not really doing anything worthwhile. On the better days, I realize that God has brought special people in every day, and the school seems to literally be exploding with new people coming in. Tonight we had a new boy come with his mother. They lived in Hawaii for a long time, and they want him to keep his English up...AND, get this, he's a Christian and he wants to be involved in a Sunday School or something. We've been looking for kid translators to help us start up a kid's program...and here this kid just walks thru our door and asks! It is things like this that make me realize that God's blessing is way more important than man's blessing...and seeing God's blessing is so very very exciting!

One girl came to my house and talked about "Who really is God?" for an hour Sunday night.

The kindergarten teacher came running with me to the train tonight and we again talked all the way to her house, and she invited me to the school sport's day later...

The "gifts class" starts tomorrow...don't ask me to explain it right now...it's just another example of God's blessing in ways that I could have NEVER pulled it together myself...

Don't ever let anyone tell you that being a missionary isn't a humbling experience--it is. Even the whole time that I'm writing all of this processing, I'm realizing how selfish it is to be thinking this way, and to being trying to get success and accomplishment and work to make myself and my relationships safe. Blah for human nature and sin. So, back to the unchanging love of God idea...so important.

Alright...have to actually prep for class tomorrow and go to bed. Enough selfish processing for tonight. :) At least I'm accompanied by Paul, who says, "The things that I want to do, I don't do, and the things I don't want to do I do. What a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God in Christ Jesus..."

See? The answer: unchanging love.