Audience of One

Thoughts from the aeroplane

It first really dawned on me that my Japan experience had changed me when I automatically went for the chopsticks for the meal on the flight.

Actually, scratch that. It first dawned on me that my Japan experience had changed me when I realised, near the end of the flight, that I had used chopsticks for both meals without noticing or thinking about it.

Actually, scratch all that completely. I knew my Japan experience had changed me long before that. I mean, 私はイギリス人です, 神様は愛です and all that. (Bet half those kanji are wrong though.) But learning a language doesn’t really count as changing. The change will be noticeable if I, without thinking:

• say “ありがとう” (arigatō) instead of “thank you”
• bow to other drivers on the road
• bow instead of shaking someone’s hand

Then of course there’s the less noticeable changes. When I first started this blog the idea was it would be a record, in some small part, of my Christian life. That concept hasn’t exactly failed (after all, I did say “some small part”) but it’s not exactly been that much of a feature. So here goes.

When I came to Japan I had a vague idea that planting churches was a good idea. Now I’ve lived with a professional church planter for two and a half months, I return convinced of the fact, and I’m having to prepare myself for the inevitable frustration of the Anglican dislike for church planting. (A brief explanation of church planting: starting a new church, potentially with members of your current church, in a new location in order to reach out to that location.) I mean, surely it should be obvious that along with being an evangelist, the apostle Paul was a church planter? Why do you think (in human reasons) he wrote so many letters to different churches?

When I came to Japan I thought I was pretty good at trusting God in my work. After all, I would reason, if it hadn’t been for his help I would have messed up my exams and not got into the university I wanted. I got a B in music where I needed an A, and the normally strict admissions office let me in anyway. (I later got the paper remarked and got an A – turns out loads of people were heavily under-marked on one exam. It was almost as if God was saying “look, you’re a talented musician (of course, I made you that way), but so you know that it’s me you need to rely on, I got you into university even without the grades”.) The year previously, after having never written a proper practice essay for English, I got a B rather than the F I’d expected before the exam went so well. (Note to younger Christian readers: this is not an excuse not to work. “Oh, I trust in God that I’ll do well in my exams so I won’t do any revision!” Not a clever idea. I feel that exam was definitely the exception to the rule. As was Geography the year before. No idea why I needed an A in GCSE Geography or a B in AS level English, but I’m sure God has his reasons.)

Anyway, I realised that in some spheres I did seem to trust him, but in others I completely forgot he was there. Take the church website I’ve been designing and programming. Countless times I would struggle for days, even weeks, trying to get one little thing to work; countless times I’d completely forget about God. Then when about to give up, I’d suddenly think: “hang on, I can pray about this”. With one exception, my prayers were answered within an hour, and the problem would be solved. (The one exception, however, resulted in a couple of days in which I learnt a load of other things, so I’m okay with that.)

I wrote this on my feedback form:

I’ve learnt that geeky and technical problems aren’t somehow separated from spiritual assistance, and that prayer and programming are essential companions when working on a church website to a tight deadline.

For some reason, possibly because programming and theology seem completely unrelated disciplines, I had kind of subconsciously been thinking that God didn’t know anything about UTF-8 encoding or Internet Explorer rendering bugs. If you’d asked me, I’d have said “yes, of course he knows” but that wasn’t how I thought while working. And of course, prayer always came as a last resort. As the interviewer said in my debrief, it’s hard to learn to pray first sometimes, though you’d think it would be obvious given the results.

I’ve also learnt not to feel confident about my public speaking ability. I gave what I think was a really good first sermon (things to work on of course, but it was my first), and followed it up the next week with a pretty rambling and incoherent testimony. The sermon had gone so well I’d almost forgotten that I should probably proof-read and practise my testimony. This is tied to the last point – I’d been praying about my sermon for weeks, whereas I hadn’t prayed at all about giving my testimony. Again, you’d think it would be an obvious thing to do.

There’s many other things I’ve learnt, but I think those are the major ones from the actual Japan experience. There’s also lots of things I’ve learnt from books I’ve read and from talks I’ve listened to, but they’re (perhaps) for another entry.

(Everything prior to this sentence I wrote on the aeroplane, but it’s only now I’ve had a chance to post it.)

Matthew @ 09:51, July 19, 2006 to Diary | Comments (4)