Faithful administrator

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a sermon about faithfulness, one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit—characteristics we should see growing in Christians. Instead of talking more generally about this characteristic, our pastor looked at a real person in the Bible: Daniel. 

A fruit photo was called for...and why 
not share with you one of my favourite
"Japanese" fruit: nashi, aka "Japanese
Pear". I don't like "Western" pears,
so loving nashi has been surprising.

As someone who grew up on Bible stories, the things that first come to mind about him are the amazing stories: spending a night imprisoned in a lion's den and not being devoured, being chosen by King Nebuchadnezzar to be brought into his royal service and then resisting the king's food, interpreting two king's dreams, and praying to his God despite that being illegal. Not to mention his three friends who didn't die after being thrown into a furnace.

But I have never really thought about Daniel as an administrator. 

It pleased Darius to appoint 120 satraps to rule throughout the kingdom, with three chief ministers over them, one of whom was Daniel. The satraps were made accountable to them so that the king might not suffer loss. Now Daniel so distinguished himself among the chief ministers and the satraps by his exceptional qualities that the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom. At this, the chief ministers and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. (Daniel 6:1–4 NIV)

The preacher pointed out these things about Daniel from this passage:

• First Daniel was part of three chief ministers over 120 local governors with the goal of the king not suffering any (financial?) loss.
• Then Daniel so distinguished himself that the king planned to set him over all the kingdom.
• Daniel had "exceptional qualities". In a different version (ESV) it says that he had an "excellent spirit" in him.
• His colleagues tried to find fault in him, but they couldn't "because he was faithful" (ESV). He was "trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent" (NIV). 

He had a lot of responsibility and was clearly gifted at what he did.

The story continues. Those conspiring against Daniel asked the king to make a new law that made it illegal to pray to any other God or man other than the king for the next 30 days. They lied to the king, saying that everyone had agreed to this law (but clearly Daniel had not). The penalty was the lion's den. The story says that when Daniel learned the decree had been published he went home to his upstairs room and prayed, just as he had done before, three times each day. He was discovered and they "dobbed" him in (Aussie and maybe British for reporting someone for doing wrong).

Daniel clearly didn't hide his devotion. When the king gave the order, he said, "May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue you!" We focus in on the lions and the rescue, but do you note that even the king knew that Daniel, one of his most trusted administrators, served his (foreign-to-the-king) God faithfully.

Over the years I have become more and more an administrator, a team leader, and a project/event manager. I enjoy what I do. It's a quiet job that I mostly do on my own from my own home. Though I interact with dozens of people through my week, it's usually via email or other text-based ways. Somehow it's easy to get discouraged. 

I don't know if other people who do administration get discouraged. I see some of the little (and big) tasks that go into the running of our Japanese church and am so thankful for the people who do them. They make sure supplies are ordered, that buildings are cleaned, that minutes are taken, that finances are managed, events are organised, and equipment maintained. Without administrators, our churches, missions, organisations, schools, governments, etc. wouldn't run. People tend to only notice administrators if they're doing a bad job!

But clearly administrators are valuable in God's sight too. Being faithful in what I do is glorifying to God, even when it doesn't feel that way. I found this such an encouraging sermon!

It doesn't make economic sense

I've been putting off writing here, because I had too many unformed ideas competing for air time. Plus, this week I've had meetings every day, a lot more than I usually do. I've also discovered over the years that meetings mess with my ability to process my thoughts into written words. In any case, I'm here now, and determined to get something coherent written before the end of Friday.

Last week I listened to an episode from my favourite podcast: Undeceptions. The topic was close to my heart: Dis/ability. There was lots to chew on, including different theological ideas about what heaven will be like, whether the disabilities that people experience here on earth will have any part of that or not.

One of my favourite earrings. It's
a shard of pottery, created by a
group called Nozomi Project who 
began after the giant triple
disaster in Japan in 2011. They
made jewellery out of broken
pottery, initially from what was
washed up on the shoreline after
the tsunami. Their tagline was
"Beauty in brokenness", a 
beautiful way to think about the
brokenness that disability brings to 
people's lives.

As one who has worked as an allied health worker, I was thinking about this topic from well before I encountered disability as a parent. As an Occupational Therapy student we were trained to think about people holistically, to consider their whole lives and probably more than most professions in the field, to think deeply on what someone could do as opposed to what they couldn't do.

And then we had kids and got neurodivergent diagnoses which gave us another perspective on this whole topic, especially as our kids moved into post-school years.

I'm not about to rehash what was covered in this hour-long podcast, but wanted mostly to mention something that particularly jumped out at me. The host, John Dickson, interviewed Kirk Patston, the Director of the Centre for Preaching and Pastoral Ministry and a lecturer in Old Testament and practical theology at Sydney Missionary and Bible College. He's got lived experience as the parent of an adult son with a disability as well as professional experience as a former speech pathologist.

He and his wife were working in four churches when their son, Jerrah, was born. Kirk talked about the mentality of someone in Christian ministry where there is always a feeling that there's more you can do and a sense that you can always do better. This really resonates with me. It's a strange mix of our worth is based on how much we do, yet our faith is about God's grace, which has nothing at all to do with how much we do. They weren't getting much sleep because their son was having seizures and not sleeping and they both ended up having to "live off government payments and people's kindness for a year." It was very different to the church work they had been doing, and this of course meant they thought about who they were, what did God really want from them. See the full transcript at the end of this post.

Kirk said, "It doesn't make economic sense". Indeed, the whole field of disability can make you step back and think about human value. If our value is based only on economic output, then disability really challenges that. So does caregiving of little children and elderly people. (Cross-cultural mission also doesn't make economic sense, but I digress.) Kirk also said, though, that "that's not to say that the Lord's not in it, and that God might actually be doing something deep and important here."

I think this is an important point to think on: that even if it doesn't make sense from an efficiency point of view, it's not the only perspective. God has a different view on our lives and we need to trust him that he's got a purpose in the situations we find ourselves in, even if we don't understand it now.

A portion of the transcript of the podcast:

 John Dickson:

How has Jerrah, over the years, helped you think through, maybe not at the highest philosophical and theological level, just approach our topic that I wanna talk to you about of, of disability? Have you found that this experience, this lived experience has actually had a big influence, or did it just simply turn your mind to the topic, as it were?

Kirk Patston:

Oh, no. Big, a big influence. Kind of an undoing of me, really. Yeah. Um, I think I had a framework about Christianity, which I, I knew intellectually I was always had to work against, that, um, what God really wants from me is, you know, lots of service of other people, lots of activity.

A very kind of activist, uh, account of Christianity. So, my wife and I have… We’ve got theological training and have worked in church ministry, and you’re always feeling that there’s more I can do. There’s more people I could talk to about Jesus. There’s m- you know, there’s better pastoral care I could offer, more, you know, there’s how can we grow things?

So you’ve got that kind of story where you’re, you’re productivity based. Sure. Um, and, and but with paradoxically at the same time knowing that the Christian message is actually about God’s grace- Yeah … where, you know, we don’t earn and where we’re actually unable to- Mm-hmm … perform. So it’s, it’s sort of weird.

Like, there’s this clash in it, and oftentimes I would identify and know that clash. But then along comes Jarrah, and, um, he came along in a period in our life when Lisa and I had four churches to look after that were all struggling. Um, but one or two of them in particular were just sort of going through a time of change.

New people were coming. There was this sense of, aha, these churches that were dying are not going to die. God’s going to do something. And then along came Jarrah with these uncontrolled seizures, and, he didn’t sleep. He’d just sleep in 40-minute little snatches. So we just… Our life was so chaotic, we just got to the point we just had to walk away from our ministry roles.

We just lived off government payments and people’s kindness for a year. And, um, so then you think, oh, who am I? You know, who am I as a Christian? Mm. What does God want from me? And you begin to see the dignity of, and the, the wasteful dignity of I’m going to care for one little person with epilepsy, rather than four churches.

Yeah. Um, and it do- doesn’t make economic sense. It’s not efficient. Mm. But that’s not to say that the Lord’s not in it, and that God might be actually doing something deep and important here.

(This is a transcript with this note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. I've removed some small errors, but I haven't checked the audio before quoting it here.)

Satisfaction in completing a project

Cover of our latest magazine, to be
mailed out next week.

On Tuesday we sent another magazine to the printer. Each of these issues is the culmination of about four and a half months of work of our team, so it's worth noting when each issue is finished. However, the magazine team is remote, so remote that five of them are currently living in Australia and the US. Different time zones and that we all hold many different responsibilities outside of the magazine combine to make it hard to do much at the same time at all. I don't even try for frequent all-team meetings.

A friend asked me on Sunday if I celebrate at these times, when we finish a magazine. My answer was "No, not generally." But when I thought about it later, I realised that if the weather is good, I'll often go for a ride to my favourite local park in the days following the completion of an issue. But this time of year it's hard as it's still pretty hot and humid. However my friend's kind question prompted me to take a moment...and so on Tuesday I rode to my favourite local coffee shop and enjoyed the treat of someone else making me a good coffee.

On Tuesday I also started writing our prayer letter, which, alongside this blog, is one of my favourite ways to reflect on recent events, as well as look forward to the coming weeks. Through doing that I realised that my Saturday mornings are extra busy in September (usually David and I try keep Saturdays free for relaxation and home-stuff). On top of that we've got a lot going on in October (three work trips between the two of us plus a camping trip and a one-day mission conference to speak at). Phew! 

I realise that you don't really want me to list all the various tasks I've got on my mind at work (though it helped me to list them anyway, but I deleted them before I hit "Publish"). Most of it is planning and preparing for future events or projects in the coming months. It all feels quite messy. In contrast, our magazine process has become quite organised and clear, and it's very satisfying to finish one and hold it in my hand. So I do often find it a bit of a challenging transition from the intensity of finishing off a magazine back to other (often less clear-cut) responsibilities.

In other news on the self-care front—I did go to the dentist today, and got the all clear for another few months. And I'm continuing the struggle with cooking too much food for us two...but enjoying the leftovers on subsequent evenings!

Amazing true story I got to write

Every now and then I take on a short-term publishing project. Last year one of my colleagues asked if I'd be willing to write up the true story of an amazing provision to our mission in the 1990s. It's an exciting story that many who've been around OMF Japan for a while knew little bits of, but almost no one knew the whole story. I thought—This can't be too hard.

After I accepted the challenge I discovered I was wrong about how easy it would be to write, but it was satisfying to do. I was given portions of the story that had been written by different people and two recordings of one person's recollections of events. It was a complex story with many threads and people—one of which went back to before WW2 in New Zealand. Reconciling all the details was really challenging. My brief was to write it so it fitted on two A4 sheets of paper and could be understood by anyone with no prior knowledge of the story, Japan, or OMF. It was hard to pull together the multiple threads to write a coherent story that was so short.

The story is about how, in the 1990s, OMF Japan ended up owning a tract of land near a major train station in one of the most expensive metropolises in the world at that time. OMF was able to build our national headquarters on it as well as a mission guest home. Both of these buildings are still heavily used each week and are key parts of our ministry in this country.

The goal was to have a copy of this story in each of the guest rooms so that anyone who stays or works there can know of God's amazing provision of this fantastic facility.

This week I uploaded the story to our website and you can read it there: https://omf.org/how-omf-japan-came-to-own-the-land-its-headquarters-are-built-on/

Take a look and see how complex a story it is! But at the same time, how amazing it is! I'm so glad we have been able to get this written down so that it won't be forgotten.

This project gave me a lot of respect for people who write lengthy biographies and histories. Their capacity for research and holding a lot of data in their heads, then writing it all down coherently is amazing!

Processing our weeks in Australia

My husband and I have both found ourselves continuing to process our weeks in Australia, but especially the last three crazy weeks of speaking and travelling. It's processing that's happening in the quiet moments between other things . . . and in our subconsciousness (i.e. dreams...last night I struggled to pack for a return journey from somewhere and had lost luggage and a lost toothbrush).

Since we returned to Japan life has been pretty busy, yet fairly routine, especially after David started back at school and I got back into my routine editing work. So we've now got the mental space to do the processing needed.

Yesterday I enjoyed an afternoon puttering 
around our local area: the city we've lived
since 2010. I volunteered at school, did a 
little bit of grocery shopping, and met a long-
time Japanese friend. This photo is of the 
front of the school. The gym is currently having
a maintenance facelift, hence all the scaffolding.

The other day I watched an interview of a good friend/author. Part of his story is that he was medically discharged from the military, but not due to physical injury. This I knew, but it was interesting to hear him (with a bit of space since it happened) tell about the process and the advice given to him at the time. One of the things he was advised to do was to minimise chaos in his life, to seek out something of a boring life!

That struck me in terms of my own life. Missionary life can be full of not-boring stuff and plenty of chaos, especially at transition times. The challenge of living (even thriving) in another country is often not boring. Certainly there's plenty of stress involved at times. The temptation that many of us deal with is to fill your schedule with so many things to keep things interesting and make you feel like you're achieving stuff that you can report in your regular letters to supporters. 

And then there's the strange thing called home assignment. That's full of decisions, upheaval, and adrenaline-filled periods.

Overall, I'm grateful to be back into my relatively boring daily life here in Japan. I'm thriving with the household tasks of simple menu planning, grocery shopping, and making our own food. (Not that I didn't appreciate others cooking for us for much of our time in Australia.) I love being back on a regular daily and weekly schedule that we've been working with over the last couple of years. Though I do need to get some vacuuming done soon!

So what is there to learn? I think that for us, we need more margin during home assignment than we need in our daily lives in Japan. To us that looks and feels like laziness, it's uncomfortable as we're generally conscientious people who work hard at the things we're given to do.

And then there's always the deadly comparison. It's easy to look at what other missionaries do, and think that we should be doing the same. In mission circles everyone's heard the crazy stories that people tell about home assignments: "Yeah, we spoke at 52 churches in 20 weeks, never staying in the same place for longer than a couple of days, often doing two or three services each Sunday..." I exaggerate, but it's no lie that some people do incredible feats of travel and speaking when they're visiting supporters. I think that it's become pretty clear to us that David and Wendy Marshall aren't among their number.

When I find myself working with a lack of sufficient margin I need to remind myself that I don't need to perform to any audience. I don't get extra points from anyone for being super busy. What I mostly get is physical signs that I'm too busy and stress. And, I need to let go of caring so much about what others think of me. The only one whose opinion matters is God...and I can't do anything that will make him love me less (or more). I'm saved by grace alone.

We're back in Tokyo

This morning it's a week since we landed back in Tokyo. The last week has been a bit of a blur, however. We came back very tired and my health hasn't been superb. But all that is improving as we settle back into life here. We're very happy to be back in our own little apartment and slipping back into routines. It was wonderful to be welcomed back to our church in Tokyo and feel like we'd come home. While time with family and friends in Australia has been good, there is a joy in being known here too, in our other home.

Yesterday I drove to my friend's house in a nearby city to pick up my 16 potted plants! My Japanese friend has quite a green thumb and she's done a great job of looking after them. It's challenging, though, to take care of plants in pots in the midst of a Tokyo summer. Extreme heat with lots of sunshine stresses most of them. Our apartment is very bright, which is wonderful in winter, but finding places to put plants in the summer is a bit challenging (our tiny balcony and bay window are on the south side, and very hot). My office is on the north side of the building and gets little direct sun at any time of the year, so I haven't usually put plants in here, but have four of them in with me just now...and I really like them!

I also got a haircut on my way home from my friend's house. The hairdresser was pretty nervous about cutting my hair so short. Not many Japanese women have their hair as short as mine, so getting a haircut can be a challenge. (I now have a video I show them of myself with freshly cut short hair that makes them much more comfortable.) This salon is so much cheaper than anything I could get in Australia (about AUD11) so I persevered and managed to get away without getting it cut through our whole time in Australia, but it was getting very shaggy and feels much better now it's been trimmed.

I've been working on our August newsletter. It's been a couple of months since we wrote to people and a lot has happened. Actually, when I started work on it on Saturday, I found reviewing what we'd done in Australia quite stressful! It's good to look back and debrief a bit, though, because we'll have to decide what to do next time we need to take a home assignment (which, if we keep doing this every two years, will come much faster than we want it to).

David's already back at school too, and loving it. He really does love his job and this school, which makes me happy too.

But now I must get back to other urgent matters that have been waiting...especially the Autumn issue of the magazine I'm the managing editor of—our busyness and then travel and post-arrival recovery time has slowed up the whole process.

Finishing off our home assignment in Perth

I'm dropping in here quickly from Western Australia. We've been very busy since we got back from holidays just over two weeks ago. In Queensland we spoke at a church and two Bible/theological colleges before flying to Perth (five and a half hours) last Friday. In Perth on Sunday we spoke at two churches. This coming weekend we've got four more speaking opportunities before we fly to Tokyo on Monday.

In between all these up-front opportunities we've been meeting various people over meals, in fact we're out every night this week except one. It's been a lot and my body is protesting. It's been very encouraging, but also very tiring, despite getting good food and sleep and even some exercise (we've walked nearly 30,000 steps in the last three days). Unlike some missionaries on home assignment, we've only slept in six different beds over the last 11 weeks, and one of those was for a total of about seven weeks (in three segments). That's definitely worth being thankful for! But nonetheless, we're longing to be home in our little apartment, and back into our own routines.

It's also been a lot easier doing this HA without any children or teens under our care. We've spent time with them in the last 11 weeks, but then they went back to their own lives (in their own cars to their own homes). Juggling the care of kids while doing speaking on home assignment was the norm for us many years and it's really nice to put that behind us now.

One thing we've continued to do, though, is try to appreciate the localities that we have passed through. This week we've been enjoying Perth. We've been to Kings Park and walked along the nearby stunning rivers (Canning and Swan). Our hosts even took us to Fremantle to enjoy fish and chips (but it was at night, so we saw little of this historic city). Here are some photos from our recent outings:

Canning River and a Coral Tree.

Perth and the Swan River from Kings Park

Fraser Ave in Kings Park

False Sarsparilla or Native lilac (Australian native)

More Swan River

Pink (or Hill) gum, viewed from the Federation Walkway

A portion of the elevated walkway

Queensland Boab tree

Ornamental pincushion (native to southern Africa)

The above sign describes the below flower—an astoundingly large flower on a gum tree.

Close up of the Coral Tree flower

Another gum tree in silhouette. 

The soil here is very sandy, hence river-side beaches aren't uncommon.

Can you see the Black Swans, the birds the river is named after?