Happy July 4th to all of those in the U.S. (although a week late 
We hope and pray that as the summer wears on in the Northern hemisphere, that you are staying cool! It’s gotten up into the 90′s here at ARI and with no AC on most of the campus it’s been a feat to continue to work and stay cool. Although it’s nothing like the heat that is hitting the SouthEast of the US right now and I’m sure other places, we are bearing. But actually, the interesting thing is that the rest of Eastern Japan (where about half of the Japanese population lives) is going through the same thing as “setsuden” becomes popular. Setsuden is basically the practice of cutting off unneeded electricity. So people are keeping the AC at around 83, the trains aren’t running the AC, a lot of escalators are not running and many of the refrigerators for drinks, sweets, etc… are turned off in many stores.
On the one hand it’s amazing how people are working together to make sure everyone has enough electricity, but it’s also interesting how people are trying their best to keep things “normal,” as they “used to be,” which doesn’t seem like such a bad thing right? Yet that assumes that everything was good in the beginning. Yet the economy has been lagging for years, social problems have been on the rise as the wealth gap grows, one of the guys that was previously in our youth group just finished his first year of university and doesn’t know any other Christians on campus. He says that people around him say “God and faith is for people who live in countries with no peace.” (We recently realized that 1 in 800 people go to church on Sunday in Tochigi, the prefecture where ARI is located.)
While there are many beautiful things in Japan, we hope and pray that Japanese do not want to return to the previous “normal” Japan, but that this incident will lead to the transformation of this country, a chance for the people to search their hearts and see what their real needs are and to find the source of living water that will take away their thirst.
So you might ask what this has to do with the title above. Well this situation that we find ourselves in here at ARI, that is “post 311” Japan, has created many opportunities for growth and problems. We are in the middle of deciding how best to continue this year’s training program, and each person has their own idea. This matters so much because for our participants particularly, this decision has a tinge of a “life or death” feeling. We have held our training program in Tokyo for the past 2 months and are now in the 3rd and final month. We are scheduled to return to the main campus in Tochigi at the end of this month. Yet, we are returning to a place that as we said in our previous post is in a “low contamination zone” for radiation. For some of the participants (students) that’s good because they’re comparing low to high. For others it’s just interesting because they wanna learn more about the radiation, and for others it’s frightening, cuz any radiation is too much!
So, how do you help to bring all of these people to a common understanding and move together “in sync.” I’ve come to learn that maybe moving “in sync” means that we allow people to make different decisions and respect them as we all move on. Maybe we won’t all be able to move back to ARI and finish this training together. But maybe for some people, God has already did what He wanted to do in them and it’s time for them to return.
Throughout the various encounters over the past few weeks we’ve learned more and more that our job in ministering to people here is not to be “police” to make sure that people learn, grow, change, develop, accept, respect, or any of the other things that people are “supposed” to do as they learn. But our job is to be a conduit for God to invite them to something bigger.
We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes itclear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves. -2 Corinthians 4:7
nice story, jon