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Awaiting Dawn
Life and writings of Joseph Stoll
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Monday, December 2, 2013
Haitus
Hey all,
As you may know, I recently quit my job to pursue writing full time. That means I'm about to get a whole lot more serious about blogging and a whole lot more regular in my posting.
In fact, I'm working on getting a much nicer Wordpress site up and running at my own .com address.
Now, you may have noticed the subject of this post is "haitus." Well, ironically, getting serious about blogging means that I'm going to take a slight haitus for a few weeks to get that other blog up and running, then I'll start a regular posting schedule, there. So, I hope you'll forgive me, but this will likely be my last post for the next few weeks. Don't worry, at latest, I'll start up again at the beginning of January. However, I hope to be going a bit sooner than that.
As you may know, I recently quit my job to pursue writing full time. That means I'm about to get a whole lot more serious about blogging and a whole lot more regular in my posting.
In fact, I'm working on getting a much nicer Wordpress site up and running at my own .com address.
Now, you may have noticed the subject of this post is "haitus." Well, ironically, getting serious about blogging means that I'm going to take a slight haitus for a few weeks to get that other blog up and running, then I'll start a regular posting schedule, there. So, I hope you'll forgive me, but this will likely be my last post for the next few weeks. Don't worry, at latest, I'll start up again at the beginning of January. However, I hope to be going a bit sooner than that.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Beautiful Japan
I still have a few more thoughts from my trip to share. Mostly over jet lag and getting adjusted to America, again. Here's some more about Japan from a couple weeks ago:
Japan
is a nation of beauty. In food, art, pottery, music, traditional architecture,
and nature, everything is supposed to be beautiful. Anyone who wants to come
here and serve God must love that beauty. Loving that beauty will get you close
to the people you come to serve.
A
couple days ago, I spent the night at a nice hotel (called a ryokan in
Japanese). While there, I realized the beauty of this society.
Every
part of the stay at the Ryokan was beautiful. In my room, little red teapot
awaited me with green tea bags, a cup, and a dish for putting the used bags on.
It all was arranged nicely on a tray. The room was arranged in classic Japanese
style, with straw mats for the flooring material and a low table surrounded by legless
chairs:
Hotels in Japan give you free yukatas (robes) to use for the duration of your
stay. They’re thin, comfortable, and look pretty nice. You also get a
complementary pair of slippers to wear around for the duration of your stay. Yes, I have pictures:
After
arriving, I made myself some of that tea and watched the wind blow the leaves
down from the autumn-faded hillsides. The tea didn’t taste that great, but if I
was going to stay a night in a ryokan, you can be darn well sure I was going to
bleed them for every penny. I had three cups.
View from my window |
They even has a notice out front I was staying there. Well, they tried. |
Japanese
people know how to relax, at least the 1-2 days a year they decide to. I could
go on and on. The public bath downstairs was just… rejuvenating. And I don’t know
why, because you’re stark naked in a room full of people your same gender. I took two baths, which for a hotspring town was pitiful by Japanese standards. Most Japanese will jump in before dinner, after dinner, and in the morning. And if they have the time, they'll run around town with a robe and a towel and find some serious natural hotsprings. I think they have my same mentality: every penny.
My
breakfast contained no fewer than 14 different foods and/or drinks served using
no fewer than 15 different plates and/or cups, each with a unique design. Food
in Japan does more than taste good, it looks good. It must have taken at least
10 minutes just to set the thing up for me. These meals look something like
this: http://www.unmissablejapan.com/sleeping/images/Ryokan-breakfast.jpg
Japanese
are unbelievable musicians. In America, everyone says what a great piano player
I am. In Japan, I’m positively second-rate.
At the
same time, there’s a tragedy to this beauty, because inside, people are really,
really hurting. And their exterior has to remain beautiful. No matter how
depressed, lonely, and anxious you are, on the outside, you have to maintain a
beautiful exterior, because everything in Japan is beautiful. So as much as any
servant of God in Japan must love the
beauty of this nation, you also much be able to see beyond the beauty to the
hurting insides and the incredible spiritual needs of this people.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Three Pictures of Japan
Just one more day in Japan. Here’s some thoughts from
earlier in the trip.
I present to you three pictures that represent Japan. They
were taken near Matsumoto Castle, a truly amazing building. In one, you see a
little piece of rope or something amidst the beams supporting the roof at the
very top of the castle. According to a description in the same room (which
makes up the entire sixth floor):
“Lowered from the ceiling, the goddess of nijiroku-yashin is
enshrined. There is a legend connected to the goddess. On the night of January
26, 1618, in a vision, one of the young vassals on duty saw a women dressed in
beautiful clothes. Handing him a brocade bag, she said, ‘If the lord of the
castle enshrines me with 500 kg of rice on the 26th night of every
month, I will protect the castle from fire and enemy.’ It is believed that because
the bag was deified, the castle was preserved and has survived to be the oldest
castle in its original form”
That little thing is a shrine to the goddess. It was a bit
hard to see, because it was so high in the rafters. Houses in Japan have some
kind of charm in the rafters that’s supposed to protect the house, and
generally a Shinto priest will bless the house when it is built. I don’t know what
percentage of houses have these charms, but usually they’re hidden (often above
the indoor ceiling but beneath the outdoor roof).
The spiritual strongholds in Japan work something like this.
They’re hidden and hard to see, but the Enemy’s power is right there, hovering
at the top. You may suddenly find your church divided and wonder how this happened.
That’s because in Japan (similar to America), demons are really good at being
sneaky. This isn’t Africa, where witch doctors hold animistic societies in a
state of terror.
I spent a little while sitting at the top of the castle and
praying for Japan. Most people passed through quickly, but I sat and enjoyed
the view and the refreshing breeze. As Matsumoto castle is so well preserved, my
back rested against a (potentially) 400-year-old beam of wood. The cool breeze
felt spectacular. The windows opened to north, south, east, and west, so I
prayed a blessing in each direction over Japan.
From there, I took a picture of Japan through the windows of
the castle. At the very bottom, you can see the roof of another tower of the
castle, rising as a representation of the old feudal system, which still
drastically affects this culture and particularly its attitudes towards
Christianity. Beyond that, the stunning fall colors of trees intermix with
modern Japan’s houses and buildings. This captures both the beauty and the mass-produced
visage of this nation. Far away, the forested mountains rise over everything as
a reminder that God has a purpose and plan for Japan, and that purpose and plan
is good, and it has not changed.
Yet, despite all this beauty, a spiritual bondage holds this nation captive.
The third picture is much like the second, but the prison of
the old feudal system has vanished, leaving the beauty of God’s purposes for
this nation.
Again, I ask: will you pray the Lord of the Harvest to send
laborers into the field?
Friday, November 8, 2013
Takyubin adventures
So, I had to send a suitcase ahead using Japan’s incredible takyubin
service. This is basically like mailing a package through the USPS, but immensely
cheaper (it cost me about $20 to mail a huge suitcase across Japan), faster,
and you can mail your stuff from various locations. The biggest takyubin
company is Kuroneko, which shows a picture of a black mother cat carrying her
baby cat by the scruff of its neck in her mouth. You can’t spend a day in Japan
without coming across one of these signs. They mean something like, “Mail your
suitcase from here so you don’t have to drag it around the Tokyo train system.”
Anyways, I found an old hardware store with the cute little
black cat out front and went in with my bulky baggage. The place was empty, and
an old man sat lazily behind the register. He handed me a takyubin slip, and I
began filling it out. That’s when the problems started.
I started by writing the street number, forgetting that in
Japan, you start with the prefecture and then get more and more specific (city,
neighborhood, street address). Whoops! He pointed this out, and I decided to
play the “confused foreigner” card. Kindly, he offered to fill out the form for
me.
However, I didn’t know my return address, because I was only
staying there for a few days. Not quite sure what to do, I said, “could you
wait a minute? I can go check it at home.” So, I left my suitcase with him, ran
home with the slip and his pen, and checked the address on my laptop. In
America? Probably not. But this is Japan. I love the fact that I could leave my
suitcase with some random hardware shop owner as I ran home.
Riding my bike back to the store, I got the slip completed
and mailed my package. Whew! Thanks, old man.
Unfortunately, I walked out with his pen in my pocket.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Heart for Japan
Some thoughts from last week in Tokyo.
Today,
I met with an old friend named Bun who got saved during my summer project in
Tokyo in 2006. We’ve kept in touch over the years, and whenever I visit Tokyo,
we meet up and usually laugh a lot.
Today, we met up in Shinjuku, which houses the busiest train
station in all of Asia. Something like a million people pass through Shinjuku
station every day. At one point out on the street, Bun told me, “We’re walking
to the white sign.” Well, with eight story buildings lining both sides of the
street, I spotted about 10 signs that matched that description. “This is
Shinjuku!” I said. It became our joke of the day whether seeing strange people
walking around, massive crowds in the station, or a 3 story anime/manga shop:
“This is Shinjuku.”
Bun and I talked a lot about something I posted a few days
ago describing how the Japanese society turns the Japanese people into robots.
He completely agreed with me. But Bun will never turn into a robot. God has
created him uniquely, and stands in that identity, whatever the society says.
During my year and a half in southern Japan working as a
missionary, I experienced a lot of brokenness. It was a hard, lonely time, and
once you’ve experienced that kind of difficulty in a place, it’s easy to grow bitter
towards a culture.
“Why do they have to do it this way in Japan?”
“Japanese people are all robots.”
“Japanese people may be nice on the outside, but inside,
they don’t care about you at all. It’s just to save face that they’re so nice.”
This trip, perhaps my biggest prayer was that God would
restore my heart and love for the Japanese people. And He has allowed me to see
the difference between the Japanese people and society. The people really are
some of the kindest people you will ever meet. Full of more problems and inner turmoil
than you could ever imagine, but selfless. If anything, the problem with Japan
is that people are too selfless, which causes them to lose their identity in
the group, which leads to bitterness and depression. And this is the society:
it puts you into a box and removes your individuality. More and more, I see
these amazing people as caught in a whirlpool they can’t escape, the whirlpool
called Japan.
Really, we’re talking about spiritual principalities enslaving
this incredible nation. We’re talking about a whole demonic chain of command which
the Prince of Darkness has assigned to prevent the Japanese from experiencing
the Father’s love and stepping into who He intends them to be. In a place with
so many deep problems, it’s easy to look at the people and grow bitter.
Eventually, despite working here as a missionary, you really don’t like your
neighbor very much, even if you in some abstract way “love” him.
However, the Bible says that we don’t wrestle against flesh
and blood but against powers and principalities. All your frustration ought to
be aimed toward the demons which exercise power over Japan, not towards the
people they are enslaving. Of course, we can never fully excuse people for the choices
they make, but they are not the objects of our anger. Ultimately, it’s not even
Japanese society that we aim our grumpiness at, it’s the strongholds behind it.
Gaining this perspective has freed me to love, again. To
laugh at the silliness of Japan. To see the little smiles here and there, even
on my robotic server at Otoya, one of my favorite chain restaurants. I saw the
edge of a genuine smile on her face when she gave me change. The powers
couldn’t suppress it completely.
After I said goodbye to Bun, praying over him that he would
never lose his individuality, I walked into Shinjuku station, the carotid
artery of Tokyo. I laughed a little in the joy of the Lord to find myself again
in the largest city in the world. I found myself walking down a barren hallway lined
with staircases to various trains against a crowd of hundreds. Kids in their
middle school uniforms, adults in suits and ties, couples holding hands, rebels
with light brown hair, and the occasional foreigner. You could stop in that
scene, but it would continue all around you like autumn leaves blowing in the
wind.
As I walked opposite the crowd, I saw their emotionless faces.
I actually saw them. And for a moment, I felt something of God’s heart for
them, His deep, deep love for the droves of people gliding through this tunnel
at a breakneck pace, never imagining where they’re heading. It was nearly more
than I could bear without crying. His love overwhelmed me as I felt it over
them. I wish I could accurately find words to describe the power and intensity and
compassion of that love.
Will
you remember Japan in your prayers? The millions in this nation who understand
nothing of Him? Will you pray the Lord of the harvest to send workers into the
harvest field?
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