"A Glimmer of Hope for Quake-Damaged Japan," Part 2

A young woman named Lisa Shoreland contacted me one day about the possibility of writing a guest post for my blog. Because of our family's connection to Japan through my husband's sister and her family having been missionaries there for the past 32 years, I was very interested to learn that Lisa grew up in Japan and her parents still live there. We have had many Japanese people in our home, and still correspond with a number of them, who we are blessed to consider our friends.  While Lisa and I were emailing back and forth, a momentous event crashed upon the world's consciousness:  a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan.  I knew that Lisa has a unique perspective on this event and I asked her to write a personal post.  I think you'll be touched and profoundly moved, as I was, by what she shares.  Thank you, Lisa. To read the first of this two-part guest post, go back first to Part 1, "A Glimmer of Hope for Quake-Damaged Japan."

Keep the Japanese people and the rescue workers in your prayers.

A look at the pictures or videos of the devastation is enough to bring a tear to any one's eye. In many, one can see a stretch of water--black with dirt and collecting a wall of debris--growing and growing until it moves entire houses and drowns crops and city streets. As a dual Japanese-American citizen, however, there's something about this that drives the number 18,000--the number of estimated dead--close to home.

I was born and raised close to fishing villages like the ones up north, at least one of which--Otsuchi--has lost over half of their population to the tsunami. I have felt a fraction of Mother Nature's wrath and dashed through the house after my two frenzied cats and cowered in my mother's and father's arms beneath a fortified doorway. For 18,000 people, such measures had not been enough.

A Culture of Community

My mother is a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. She knows what it's like to grow up in a city where people are found shopping, attending school, or playing in the park one day and found dead the next.

She also knows that the Japanese are nothing if not resilient. The 350,000 people displaced in northeastern Japan will survive this with exceptional stoicism. Every day, they and citizens of nearby cities line up quietly and without complaint outside convenience stores to receive or buy food. Stores in the area have even slashed prices to help locals.

"Everyone is going through this together," my mother said over the phone one night. "This is no time for anyone to be making a buck. It would be shameful."

As with New Orleans after Katrina, the media crews that visit areas after natural disasters repeatedly cover a rise in lootings, crime, and even socio-political uprisings. There has been no such thing to cover in quake-damaged Japan.

"It's in our culture," my mother explained. "We have a history of valuing our community first and individual desires second. Many other cultures feel the opposite way. When disaster strikes, some people feel justified in 'getting theirs.' Japan has a shame culture, and nobody wants to feel the shame of looting a store or complaining about things being tough when everyone else is going through the same thing. We're taught that we are stronger when we hold together."

Not long after this call, I received word from Yasue that he had found his family. They were injured but alive in an evacuation center.

"We just have to work together," he said. "We're helping each other, and the world is helping us do it. In all this bleakness, that's our one glimmer of hope."

Bio:  Lisa Shoreland is currently a resident blogger at Go College, where recently she's been researching doctoral grants programs as well as poor credit student loans.  In her spare time, she enjoys creative writing, practicing martial arts, and taking weekend trips.

A Glimmer of Hope for Quake-Damaged Japan, Part 1

A young woman named Lisa Shoreland contacted me one day about the possibility of writing a guest post for my blog. Reading her sample writing, I learned that she is of Japanese descent and grew up in Japan.  Her parents are still there. While I considered her offer of a guest post and thought about a possible topic that would fit my blog, a momentous event crashed upon the world's consciousness:  a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan.  You will be touched and profoundly moved, as I was, by what Lisa has to share.  Please welcome Lisa, and come back Tuesday for Part 2 of "A Glimmer of Hope for Quake-Damaged Japan."  Thank you, Lisa, for sharing from your heart with us.

When I was 12, home alone one day after school while Mama had gone out grocery shopping, I heard the walls begin to groan around me in a low tremor--nothing unusual in Japan--but the tremor turned into an all-out rumble and my books began falling from their shelves.

My knees wobbled but I was unharmed when my panicked mother called.  I turned on the TV and saw that it had been a 7 magnitude earthquake, the strongest I'd experienced yet.

I wasn't in Japan the day a 9.0 struck off the east coast of Oshika Peninsula of Tohoku.  A mere bump of 2.0 magnitude destroyed highways, bridges, and homes, but its destruction wasn't as fearsome as that caused by the 10 meter (33 ft) high tsunami that struck less than 15 minutes afterward.


Rising Tides and Tension
I called home on Friday morning as soon as I heard about the quake.  My father frequently travels through Japan, sometimes as far up as Misawa, as part of his job with the U.S. military.  I began to wonder if he had been up north when the quake had struck.  I wondered if the tsunami had traveled as far south as Hiroshima, my hometown, and if my mother was evacuating my brother's seaside home for the mountains.  The longer the phone rang, the bigger the knot grew in my stomach.


It took seven hours, but my mother finally picked up. She had been asleep and my father, the lighter sleeper, had spent the night in his office in the nearby Marine Corps base, manning the phones while the disaster unfurled up north.  My brother, his wife, and their newborn child were safe in their home.


Closer to the Disaster
My childhood friend Yasue was not so lucky.  He lived in an apartment in Tokyo, where major power blackouts went on for days before he was able to respond to my frantic e-mail.  He was alive but scared, and his livelihood--the guitar he had played alongside famed bands on several Japanese TV programs--had been shattered beneath a fallen bookshelf in the quake.  Worst of all--worse than the radiation scares that even now have thousands of people stocking up on food or even leaving the city--was that his family had yet to call him.  They lived on the coast in Sendai, a city directly hit by the devastating tsunami.


A look at the pictures or videos of the devastation is enough to bring a tear to any one's eye.  In many, one can see a stretch of water--black with dirt and collecting a wall of debris--growing and growing until it moves entire houses and drowns crops and city streets.  As a dual Japanese-American citizen, however, there's something about this that drives the number 18,000--the number of estimated dead--close to home.


I was born and raised close to fishing villages like the ones up north, at least one of which--Otsuchi--has lost over half of their population to the tsunami.  I have felt a fraction of Mother Nature's wrath and dashed through the house after my two frenzied cats and cowered in my mother's and father's arms beneath a fortified doorway.  For 18,000 people, such measures had not been enough.

You can read Part 2 on Tuesday--Keep the Japanese people and the rescue workers in your prayers.


Bio:  Lisa Shoreland is currently a resident blogger at Go College, where recently she's been researching doctoral grants programs as well as poor credit student loans.  In her spare time, she enjoys creative writing, practicing martial arts, and taking weekend trips.

Relief Information for Japan: CRASH Japan

Here is Relief Information received from our relatives in Japan:

Please pass this information on to your churches--let everyone know--put it on your blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

CRASH Japan 

(Christian Relief, Assistance, Support and Hope)

Please help support CRASH's efforts

Click on the link to get an update and to help.

CRASH Japan is the website for the disaster response network of Grace Japan located in Ome-shi, Tokyo, Japan.

My husband's sister and brother-in-law, who have been missionaries living in Japan for 32 years, highly recommend this organization, saying they are well-organized and efficient.  They ask that anyone interested in donating go through this group; churches interested in helping, this is a group supported by the Japan Evangelical Association.  There are missionaries who we know personally, living in Sendai, who are now working with CRASH Japan to house volunteers from Tokyo who come to help.  Keep praying!

New info:  Here is another very informative blog, written by the coordinator of CRASH Japan in Tokyo, and his family, the Thompsons--click here.

The Prayer Emphasis Begins Today: Suggested Daily Prayers for Two Weeks of Prayer for the United States

A 6-week Prayer Emphasis

We have just finished four weeks of the 6-week Prayer Emphasis, having prayed two weeks for our Country, followed by two weeks for Our Churches.  I would urge you to continue to emphasize these prayer targets when you come before the Lord.  The Suggested Prayer Requests for both these two-week periods are included here, if you wish to refer back to them, or perhaps are just now able to begin--I know that God will honor your prayers, and we do need to continue to pray for these areas.

Suggested Prayer Requests

for the Two Weeks' Emphasis on

Prayer for Our Families

April

10:  That Godly leaders would be raised up in our nation.

11:  That husbands would love and cherish their wives as Christ loves the Church.

12:  That wives would reverence, admire and praise their husbands, submitting to them.

13:  That children would honor and obey their parents and that they would be responsible, diligent and hard-working.

14:  That God would strengthen and unify one-man, one-woman marriages, and that each partner would show faithfulness, love and devotion towards the other, honoring their vows before God.

15:  For Christian fathers to lovingly lead their homes and families and that God would give them wisdom and discernment, that they may lead with Godly purpose.

16:  That wives and daughters would be committed to modesty, and truly know how to please God in their dress.  That women's hearts would desire to please God, and not men, and that they would be complete in His love and trusting Him with their future.

17:  That God would provide for each family's needs by providing employment for the father.

18:  That Christian marriages would produce Godly seed (children who would believe in Him), and that pregnant mothers would experience safe, healthy, normal pregnancies and delivery of their unborn children.  For peace, comfort and contentment for those who desire to have children, but have not yet born, or are unable to bear, children.  That all Christians would surrender control of their lives completely to God, including submitting to Him the decision of how many children (or gifts) He will give to them. (Psalm 127)  That mothers would be nurturing to their children.

19:  That all Christian parents would "raise their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."

20:  That we might care for widows and orphans in their affliction, and keep ourselves unstained from the world, thus fulfilling the definition of "true religion."  James 1

21:  For Christian families to establish a "family altar," and a daily time for studying the Word of God and praying together.

22:  That families would be discerning and hate evil, and that they would be doers of the Word, and the will of God, not just hearers only.  That the fruit of the Spirit would be abundantly evident in the lives of Christians.

23:  That families would fear God and love His Word, and that any idols would be recognized, repented of, and cast out of the lives, hearts and homes of true believers.

24:  That family members would be willing to die to themselves and their fleshly desires, and live sacrificially, for righteousness' sake.  That families would be salt in our culture.

A 6-week Prayer Emphasis

We have just finished the two-week emphasis on Prayer for your Country, (scroll down to see the Specific Requests).  I would urge you to continue to pray fervently for your country.

Here are the promised "Suggested Prayer Requests for the two week emphasis on Prayer for Our Churches" which begins today, March 27 and goes through April 10.  Pray for your own local church, and also the Church which is the Body of Christ around the world:

These are merely suggestions.  There are Scripture references at the end of many.  I encourage you to look these up in your Bible and study them.  Don't forget the encouragement to fast and pray either Monday or Friday, and optionally to meet with others to pray.

You may pray for these requests on each day March 27-April 10, or pray all of them each day, or whatever the Lord lays on your heart.

Pray for Our Churches:

First and foremost, that we would repent of our sins, fall on our faces before a Holy God and ask forgiveness, turning from our wicked ways, and seek righteousness, that revival may begin with the House of God.

March:

27.  That we may have a fear of the Lord and a greater reverence for God. Proverbs 1:1-7; Psalm 111; Psalm 34:9

28.  For churches to return to their "first love" and receive God's grace to obey Jesus' commandment to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength and to love one's neighbor as oneself. Revelation 2:1-4; Mark 12:30-31

29.  For professing Christians to truly possess eternal life by faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ alone, and surrender to His Lordship, and not be those to whom the Lord will say, "I never knew you." Matthew 7:21-23

30.  To depend completely and entirely on the Lord Jesus Christ.

31.  To be led by the Holy Spirit, living after the Spirit, not in the flesh. Romans 8:5-6

April

1.  To abide in Him and His Word to abide in us, that we may bear much fruit. John 15:1-8

2.  For greater love and encouragement of one another and to put love into action, that they may know we are Christians by our love. John 13:34-35

3.  For boldness to share the gospel, and to be a faithful and true witness of the gospel to unbelievers.

4.  To be willing to gladly suffer affliction and persecution for the sake of Christ and for God to give strength, encouragement and perseverance to those who are suffering persecution for their faith around the world.

5.  That we might know His Word, believe His Word, love His Word, obey His Word, being not only hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word, and hide it in our hearts that we might not sin against Him. Psalm 119:11; Matthew 7:24-25

6.  For unity in doctrine.

7.  For God to help Pastors, Elders and Leaders in their leading, granting them wisdom and discernment, energy to put their convictions into action, knowledge and understanding, and for them and their families, blessing/reward and encouragement.

8.  For false teachers and teaching to be discerned and put out of the church. Matthew 7:15-20; Revelation 2:2-3

9.  For Christians to forgive those who have offended them, even as Christ has forgiven us and for healing and oneness in relationships within the Body of Christ, putting aside all bitterness, wrath, and malice.

10.  Healing for those who are sick.

As I write this post for the beginning of a special time of prayer for our country, I cannot help but think of the Japanese people, and lift up my prayers for all those who are suffering after the devastating earthquake which took place just days ago.


My husband's sister and her family lived in Sendai for many years, as missionaries there, (they now live further north, and we have heard that they are safe).  Over the years we have enjoyed getting to know many Japanese people--a number who still live in the Sendai area.  They have spent time in our home, eaten at our table, laughed with us, loved us, and we have found it easy to love them.

We are waiting to hear of the safety of those that we, and my husband's family, know--and we are praying.


For those in Japan who have lost loved ones, homes, and possessions, and those who do not even know for certain where their loved ones are or if they are safe, we want you to know that we are praying for you, and we extend to you our deepest sympathy and our love.

A Time of Special Prayer 

Click above to see more details and your invitation to 6-weeks of prayer for Our Country, Our Churches, and Our Families:  Today we begin 2 weeks of prayer for Our Country.

Though you do not need direction as to how to pray, and those of you around the world will be praying for your own countries, these suggested prayer requests for the United States were included with the invitation, for lifting up prayers together, if you would like, on a theme each day.

Suggestions for Prayer for Our Country

March 13-26, 2011:

March:

13:  Pray that Biblical marriage will be strengthened, defended, and upheld.  President Obama has decided he doesn't want to defend the Defense of Marriage Act any more.

14:  Pray that Planned Parenthood will be defunded, and abortion abolished.

15:  Pray our country will repent and turn back to God and the foundations of faith upon which our country was founded.

16:  Pray for Godly leaders to be elected to the highest positions of leadership and decision-making in our land.

17:  Pray for laws to be made and upheld which are Biblical and Constitutional.

18:  Pray for the salvation of our country's, states' and cities' leaders.

19:  Pray for the worship of the One True God and Jesus Christ in the United States:  for America to truly be a Christian nation, and for the overthrow of any false religions and their influence in our nation.

20:  Pray for the safety of our nation from attack and for our security.

21:  Pray for our military:  for safety and salvation.

22:  Pray for wisdom, integrity, honesty and discernment in our leaders at every level of government.

23:  Pray for the educational system of our nation.

24:  Pray that all those who are righteous will speak up and boldly stand for what is right.  Pray for revival in our land and for a hunger and thirst for righteousness.

25:  Pray for the strengthening of the marriages and families of those in leadership and authority over us.

26:  Pray for Godly laws to be enacted.

Tofu and goldfish

Well, unfortunately I came down with this horrendous bug that's been going around. Tuesday afternoon at Bonita's and my hair appointment I started feeling really lousy. I went to the sofa, once home, crept under a fleece blanket and stayed there. By bedtime, my temperature was 102.3 (and I never ever have a fever!) Fortunately, the plans for yesterday were to stay home in order for Bonita to work, with Dane and Kelsey's help, on preparing their missionary presentation. They are finally updating it from the old "slide" presentation. She is not as computer-literate as they are, but very creative, so with their help, she had a lot of fun with picasa.
Yesterday was also Arnie's birthday, so we had planned to have a little celebration supper last night. What to do? Would they still want to come with me sick? We gave them the option, and Tonya decided to stay home with the little boys, while Nathan and Don decided they would still come. Everyone had a fun time! I felt better after a long nap, during which Kelsey took on (she's a great cook), the dinner preparations, with Bonita's help. They had Haystacks, one of our favorites, and always fun with a group. The name comes from the shape on your plate after you stack it all up! We start with brown rice and/or tortilla chips (smooshed), (we have also served it with baked potatoes) and top that with chili, and then you add your favorite toppings! Our topping choices include the usual, the unusual, and the you-put-what-on-it! The sky's the limit! Lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, onions, peanuts, pineapple, black olives, apples, raisins, coconut (my husband's favorite:), jicama, and of course, salsa and sour cream! We encourage people to be adventuresome and they always go back for seconds!! For dessert, Kelsey made an out-of-this-world dessert--"Peanut-Caramel-Candy Bar Cake" (It just happened to have a Snickers bar in its ingredients (Arnie's favorite)!) Arnie had some fun telling us his "birthday-dinner requests" in the days prior to the event, so we had some fun with him!! Besides his requests for rack of lamb, and turkey with all the trimmings, he said he wanted three tofu dishes (remember he's been living in Japan for 31 years :) The description of the third tofu dish was more than a little interesting!!! They start with soup. They place a square block of tofu into the bowl of soup and then put LIVE fish around the tofu after which they pour boiling water over them, which causes the little fish to swim into the tofu. Then THEY EAT IT--Very fresh! So Kelsey and I both thought of the same idea: we got some tofu and some goldfish crackers and voila! he got his wish!!

After everyone left, we watched Fireproof, which they had not seen. I thought it was even better the second time.

Arnie and Bonita

Today was a good day! Bonita, Jerry's sister, and Arnie, came to church with us. They're home on furlough from Japan for 6 months. We, being the relatives living closest to the airport, have the great privilege, and I do mean that (!) of picking them up at the airport and getting to have them stay with us, sometimes for a whole week or more (!), at the beginning and end of each furlough! Bonita and Arnie should write a book entitled, "Being a Great Guest" subtitled, Leave them wanting more. We always want them to stay longer!! At church I sat Bonita down (31-years experience as a missionary in Japan, plus I don't know how many years in Ethiopia) across from Stacy, returned missionary after 1 year in Liberia. Bonita's words were very encouraging to Stacy, I think. It was very interesting to sit and listen. Very fun to have your relatives come into your world and get to know you better by seeing you with your very best friends and worshiping with you. In the afternoon, we looked at their amazing nature photos taken in Yosemite! Arnie is an amazing photographer! All I could say was Wow after each picture came up on his laptop. The California poppies are in full bloom and it's like God took a paint brush and just whoosh! brushed the hills with orange! It's gorgeous! Then Bonita, Kelsey, Dane and I played Dutch Blitz! The Gunn sisters are so much fun and fantastic game-players! The only downside right now in their visit is Arnie's Poison oak, and Bonita's cold, but you would never know either of them had it--no complaining. We hope they will both be better tomorrow.