We were really sad on Sunday to see the eighteen-member Hawaii team leave.  They served here so well, so generously, so – full of life.  Along with several other great teams, they helped us move– packing, cleaning, boxing, unboxing… they changed 18,000 seaweed plates at the seaweed factory across the street from our old home, they prepared and cleaned up two huge BBQs and a ladies lunch, as well as two or three nights where they prepared food for all of the volunteers and families up here… they cleaned rows of street gutters, all of the tsunami gook under a very long house; raked and leveled several open areas that used to have homes; did a lot of babysitting; visited several temporary housing areas and old folks’  homes, and made a lot of friends.  It has been a great partnership that we are very thankful for!

One of the really cool things is that our friend Yousuke from Sanda has come up to work with us for a few weeks.  He has recently been thinking about his purpose in life and decided he wants to do something that will make his life count.  He has been really enjoying the hard work up here – and has boundless energy in doing it!  We loved how he became friends with the Hawaii youth – I think they will miss each other.  Yousuke has asked to stay on an extra week. Our kids and our team have really loved him being up with us (below center).

Lots of cool things have been happening with our friends Y. and with Yu.  I see both of them almost daily;  Y. and her three girls came to the BBQ we had last Friday night at Yu.’s home as well as worship on Sunday.  She wants to come weekly. They are both really wonderful.  On Wednesday Y. is going to Sendai to meet with her lawyer, as she is still battling over custody of the girls.  It has been a very painful and unfair process that we hope is becoming rectified.  Her husband had actually “stolen” the older two girls last May and by rights in Japan Y. could not get them back until it went all through the court system.  Her husband told lies about her, and after finally hiring a second lawyer Y. got her daughters back ten months later.  Imagine not having your two and four year old daughters for ten months… in the midst of grieving the tragic death of your mom and sister.  Can’t imagine.  We are praying for her lawyer appointment; we are seeking to stand with her and help as we can.

There are days when I listen to stories and do not seem too affected.  Today, I was doing ok, until I went to pick up my kids at Yu’s home where they were studying.  As she and I were talking, I started crying suddenly- it surprised us both.  I was just so SAD-ANGRY.  Angry at this tsunami that came and damaged so many people.  Took the lives of so many.  That is still causing so much pain.  As we were crossing over the bridge Olivia asked me today, “Mom, do you think God will stop another tsunami before it comes here?”  I couldn’t answer.  I don’t have any answers for why he didn’t stop the one a year ago.

Since we moved last week, Olivia has started taking a school bus to her youchien/kindergarten.  There is a stop just over five minutes drive from here that saves me taking her the twenty minutes each way.  It is just on the edge of this “valley of death” that lies below our community;  the bus pulls up next to one of the now-deserted junior high schools that overlooks a very bleak scene.

There is one other sweet girl, M.,  who gets on the bus at the same place, and I have enjoyed getting to know her mom during drop-offs and pick-ups.  She has shared with me bits and pieces of their last year’s journey.  The first day that we went, she asked me if I was Owen’s mom – her son R. is also in fourth grade in the same school (also a good distance away from the bus stop).  Like us, she drives her son to the  old elementary school, about ten minutes by car, where our kids all catch the buses up to their temporary school.  The apartments that they are living in now are really in the middle of nowhere- all the homes surrounding the apartments were either washed away or so badly damaged that they have been bulldozed.  They are living here just temporarily for a year until they can rebuild their previous home.  She shared that her kids don’t know anyone in this neighborhood – it is not surprising as it really feels like there is not much around it.

Today for the first time I took Molly to the bus stop.  M. and her mom really loved her… and then the mom told me that they had had a poodle for two years, who was washed away in the tsunami.  They have told M.  that the dog ran away and is probably being cared for by someone else- they can’t bear her to know the truth.  When the tsunami hit, her husband was at work- at the Onagawa nuclear power plant.  Onagawa was one of the hardest hit areas – when he didn’t come home the first few days, she feared that he was dead.  There was no contact, no word for five days.  She had to keep strong for her two children.  They went to a relative’s home but put a note on the door that they were fine, and where they were staying.  Five days later he appeared.  She couldn’t even speak.  When I tried to imagine what those five days were like – what they had seen; what they had heard and witnessed out their windows, what she imagined over and over again in her heart for five days – it feels like just too much.

And so, today I just had to cry.  For this family.  They are just one of many families whose stories I have heard over these months.  They didn’t lose any close family members.  But they still have had — still have — a lot of pain in their lives.  I heard today that R., their son in Owen’s grade, has been getting into trouble for being mean to girls.  He’s always been a good kid, but… It’s hard to say how this kind of grief and loss works itself out.  I don’t know.  I don’t have any answers to those tenacious “why” questions.  But I pray that we can keep loving on the people here, helping when and where we can, and being Proclaimers to what I DO know is true:  that “God is for them and loves them with a Never Stopping, Never Giving up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”  (from the Jesus Storybook Bible – the kids and I have been listening to this daily in the car as we commute to and from.  For mom as much as for the kids!)  Corrie Ten Boom knew well the valley of death, and she wrote from her experience in the Ravensbruck Concentration camp:  “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”  This deep and unbreaking love, to me, is the kind of theology that we need up here in Tohoku.

(Photos below- before and after pictures of the valley of death – the area where we are living now.  In the after photo (taken April 17th 2011), our home is where the red marker is, just above the valley.  In the past year, parts of this area have become dumping grounds for tons of refuse and debris and thousands of cars, making the scenery that much worse).

We have moved again!  How much I have wanted to find time to write updates – in some cases individual messages to some of you who I know have specifically been praying for us – but my days and my nights have been filled to the brim.  In the midst of some pretty overwhelming days, we have seen God’s favor and care for us.  We know God has been answering your prayers in a variety of ways.

To back up – a lot happened last Thursday!

First – thank you for those who have been praying for our friend Y. who I mentioned in a previous post.  Last Thursday we got together for lunch, and  my friend Karen K. from the Hawaii team join us.  It was a wonderful few hours.  Y. had her five-month old baby with her, and Karen was able to hold her for a LONG time after we were done eating to free up Y. and I to share uninterrupted.  She told me that since we prayed together two weeks before, things had gotten better with her dad, and she is going to stick it out and continue living with him.  She said, “I can tell God has been helping me.”  Love that!  We had a great time together, sharing our stories and then praying.  Three times she cried:  The first two were when I asked her what her mom was like (she sounds like she was an amazing lady — and I told Yuko that I think she takes after her a lot!);  2) when I told her I have a dream to start a business for women in Ishinomaki like herself.  She grabbed my hand and just begged me not to let go of this dream.  I”m not planning to!  I continue to entrust this hope to God for him to bring along the right provisions to be able to do this.

Next- thank you for your prayers, worries, encouragement for our housing situation.  Also on Thursday, our friend Michiko called back the realtor who helped them find their home up here to just see if they might have something come up.  They didn’t.  But they called her back ten minutes later and said they had just received a listing for a rental home listed for up to a year – would we be interested?  We went that afternoon, saw the outside, and said we wanted to pursue renting it.  While our business manager and Michiko did a lot of the nitty-gritty negotiating, we were able to see inside it the next day.  What we didn’t expect was to see that it was FULL of furniture and stuff… that of an 80-year old lady, who from what we can understand was sort of being coerced out of her home by her daughter who lives in Sendai.  They left it “as is.”  Wow.  Fortunately, we did get permission from the realtors to box up her kitchen things and some of her “goodies” that were sitting out and put it away in closets.

Meanwhile, the land sale is going through, which is wonderful, and while there continue to be snags in the process we hope that we can move into a pre-fab home sometime in the fall.  In the meantime, God has provided a really beautiful home that is all that we need for the next few months. It is not in the direct area where we have been doing ministry, and so we need to drive our three children to their school/kindergarten- about fifteen minutes one way. It is a bit of a drag as most days they have three different times of needing to be picked up, but we are doing our best to find creative solutions to this when possible.

The home is located on a small mountain bluff overlooking the ocean.  I am sure that before 3/11/11 it was an amazing view up here!  Now, it overlooks the valley of death, as I call it… It is one of the worst-hit areas on the entire coast.  Over five hundred people were killed in this small area.  I think of everywhere I have been so far, the drive through this couple of miles makes me the most depressed.  It looks like a bomb was dropped;  in addition to the tsunami, this area had many gas fires that just added to the awfulness.  This area (Hiyorigaoka) has been in the news frequently because of a kindergarten that decided after the earthquake to try and get the children home on the school bus.  The bus driver came down the mountain, saw the tsunami coming, and tried to return, but was picked up by the tsunami and the bus was carried to the gas station that had caught fire. The four children remaining inside were all killed;  the bus driver escaped but has since fled.  There is an ugly lawsuit pending between the parents of these children and the kindergarten, which has announced it will be closing its doors.  It is just sad, sad, sad.

The home we are living in now is up on the hill just to the left of this photo.  It is the second bank of homes away from the overlook.  From the second story, we can see the whole spread of damage across the valley.  Today I met a neighbor across the street, who is in the homes right at the front of the cliff.  He shared how terrible that day was;  he found a rope in his home and was able to save a number of people who were being thrown against the side of the mountain.  He said there was one junior high boy who managed to crawl up the mountainside and tumbled into their home, just sobbing.  He stayed with them for three days until they could find his family.  Our neighbor said that they housed ten people for three months, as did many others in our neighborhood.  Even though they were safe, the homes just below them – their community – were completely washed away.

ANYWAY – on that Thursday, after finding out about this possible home up on the bluff, as I was having lunch with Y.  I told her where we may be moving.  When I told her the address, it was the third time that she started crying – our new home is a five minute walk from her dad’s home!  I had NO idea she lived anywhere near here.

Since moving on Sunday, she has come by twice.  On Monday, she brought her five month old (her other two are in daycare) and stayed for the day, helping out with some volunteers who are here, hanging laundry, eating lunch with us; sharing more of her story.  It was a very rich time.  She took our kids on a walk to the nearby park, where Olivia found a four leaf clover and Owen found a five leaf one!  At the end of the day, we all walked back to see where she lives – incredibly close.  She loved when we gathered around and prayed for her.  She said she is so glad to know that friends in the US and other parts of Japan are praying for her!  Keep praying, please!  As I continue to hear more details of her experiences,  I do not think I have heard a worse story coming from 3/11 than hers;  she is in need of a tremendous amount of healing, and the outpouring of the love of Jesus.

I have to say that this past week has been stretching in oh-so-many ways.  If it were not for an amazing team from Hawaii, I don’t think we could have pulled out moving out of and cleaning up the old home, and boxing up and cleaning up the stuff of the 80 year-old who had lived here and then moving us all in.  We have felt very upheld by the servanthood of friends up here who have ministered to us!

In addition, our good friend here Yu. worked all Sunday afternoon with a small team to clean up the old home.  When we went to leave the home, we discovered that even her shoes had been boxed up and moved to the new home!  She borrowed an extra pair of someone’s flip flops.   It was a really fun time for this other friend from here to bond with all of us.  We ended the night with dinner and a trip to the onsen baths.

It has been a joy to receive help from our new Ishinomaki friends.  On Saturday, a large group of about 18 volunteers, led by Eric and Jonathan, went over to Yu’s home and crawled under the floors to pull out all the muck left there by the tsunami over a year ago.  While some of them were under the house, they discovered a sewer hole with the lid pried open.  That explained the terrible smells they have been experiencing!  Her family was incredibly happy to have these things taken care of.  But it was also wonderful the next day to have her come and serve us.  We really believe in building mutual relationships that are founded on principles of friendship and reciprocity…

As I have had a few seconds to think about the experiences of this past week, I have been able a bit to realize how God has brought us to the exact home where he wanted us, exactly when he wanted to do it.  I remember several days before that Thursday reasoning with God that it would certainly help my stress level if He just told me THEN what He was about to do.  I don’t think we lost faith that God would do SOMETHING, but I know that I was getting tired and anxious of waiting.  I have thought a few times this week of a phrase that Mother Teresa said, “Let Jesus use you without consulting you.”  I wouldn’t have picked a home that would have us driving through the valley of the shadow of death six or more times a day… I would have loved to be closer to the school friends of our children and our new friends.   Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have chosen three moves but only one.

But I would not in a million years have missed the opportunity to live a five minute walk away from Y.  This is a HUGE, spread-out city.  But God has placed us together as neighbors.  Absolutely amazing.  If Jesus will be good enough to use our family to show His love to her family, then He can feel free to move us around at the last minute without consulting us.  I have thought a lot about how God answers prayer.  It is not always in the ways that we desire.  Sometimes it seems He is holding out on answering one prayer in order to answer another, more significant one.  I think it was St. Augustine’s mother who wrote:  “You did not do what I was immediately asking, that You would do what I was always asking.”  God is answering our always-prayers, and weaving them into the prayers and needs of others around us.  It is a wonderful thing to be at God’s disposal.  Oh for grace to trust Him more!

We just sent out an email update –  this is almost the same info but for those who don’t receive our monthly updates.  (Please email us if you would like to begin receiving these!)

We have been very grateful for the home that God has provided for us for the past two months.  It has been a great place to start our new life here… just a short drive from Olivia’s kindergarten and the older kids’ elementary school, and a place where we have had a chance to meet and minister to the neighbors.

We need to move out of here by the end of this week.  At this point, we do not know where we will be moving to.  If nothing else opens up, we can move into one of the small apartments that Be One has been using to house volunteers.   We are happy to report that the land purchase should go through this week where we will build a pre-fab home as well as a smaller home to serve as a ministry center.  We’re not sure when that will be done- hopefully by early fall?  Another really positive thing is that there is a large team of volunteers from Hawaii coming this week who have offered to help us move, and that should help make it not as stressful.  But we certainly appreciate your prayers for this process!

There have been a lot of bumps in this road, for sure.  We keep thinking it will end and it hasn’t.  A lot of life is like this, isn’t it?  We have realized that our uncertainty and frequent changes in housing are helping us to better understand and empathize with the much more challenging plights of many of our Ishinomaki friends who’s homes were washed away.  And we also realize that this has been a great season to really seek to put faith into practice – not just talking about faith, but really trying to live out the reality of “believing in what we cannot see.”

Last week we studied together a rather obscure passage about Elisha in 2 Kings 3.  Three kings come together over their common dilemma – they desperately need water for their livestock and their people.  They call upon Elisha for answers;  he prays and orders the men to dig ditches.  The next morning God filled the ditches with water – not from wind or rain, but mysteriously, in a way that only God can do.   I love how Spurgeon writes about this:  “The Lord has His own sovereign modes of action:  He is not tied to manner and times as we are, but does as He pleases among the sons of men.  It is ours thankfully to reeve from HIm, and not to dictate to Him.”

So by faith, we are preparing to move in four days!  We have seen in our own lives; in the lives and examples of many of you;  in the testimonies of the saints of old and recent – God’s faithful and gentle and detailed love and care for His people.  We know He has not forgotten us.  But we are feeling a bit weary and ragged.  Please pray that our faith would not falter; pray for us to be genuine but also strong with our children as we go into another time of transition later this week.  Pray that this next moving experience would be another chance for God to shine!

Many of you have watched the short video made by Healing Hands International a month after the tsunami.  They returned to Ishinomaki in February and early march and made a follow-up video with Eric and other Be One staff who are up here.  The father-daughter featured in the video are friends I have shared about  previously in our blog.  It’s really well-done, short, and I think will give you a bit more of a picture of what we are about up here.

Today we went to Sendai to meet with our Asian Access colleagues, the Adairs and Ray.  We love being with them!  We had a great Bible study together that I will need to share on another blog.  Then lunch, and  a quick shopping trip to the local huge home center…. to buy supplies for our disaster survival kits.

Our organization has been proactive over the years in encouraging all of our staff to have disaster kits in their homes.  I don’t know how many actually have done this… we made one eight years ago, and I had to throw away the canned goods dated 2005 when we moved up here!  Our friends hadn’t made theirs yet, and ours needed to be updated, so we went together, split up the list, and bought what we could.  With at least weekly quakes that wake us up at night or make us wonder a bit, we are definitely living in an area where we need to be prepared.  Last year there were several aftershocks that caused the electricity to shut down for awhile;  there has also been research done that a different earthquake will cause another tsunami in the same region in the near future (article in Japanese here).  We don’t want to live in fear, but we do want to be wise and be as prepared as we can be.

We made a list that was a combination of an Asian Access list and one I found that the Red Cross has posted.  Here’s what we have so far:

• LED flashlight
• head flashlight
• batteries
• bottled water
• large box of prepared rice packets
• scissors
• kitchen knife
• long lighter
• chewing gum (Red cross said to buy treats – still need to get some chocolate!)
• alcohol wet tissue
• bug spray
• sun block
• instant ice packs
• calorie mate
• mess eating kit
• ground tarp
• toilet paper
• can opener
• one burner gas stove
• replacement gas
• large pan
• notebooks
• ziploc bags
• large bag to hold most of this

Addition:  my friend here, Y., gave me several suggestions.  She knows well, after living on her second-floor for two months without electricity or running water.  She says to definitely include:  rubber gloves (since there was no way to wash your hands, these are necessary for food prep and not passing on germs); towels for children, cuts, etc., face masks.  These are now on our list!

Still need:

curry/food packets

SPAM, of course!

other canned goods

first aid kit

transistor radio

pens

Pretty much every day as we build relationships here we are hearing stories of the tsunami.  I am still taken by the many heroes who are here in our midst – who risked their own lives for another;  who cared for the needy;  who showed love in the midst of great danger.  I would like to at times share with you some of the heroes I am encountering — I hope in this small way to honor them.  You will never know their names;  and unless I have their permission you won’t even see their pictures – but it helps me to process these experiences as well as to help all of us not to forget.

Here are just a few hero glimpses:

• On Sunday morning I took Ian with me to visit a family I got to know briefly last summer during my first visit here.  Be One helped to fix up their home;  their 20-year old daughter A. and a friend hung out with me at a BBQ.  I found out that A.and her friend have both since gotten married at the justice of the peace; her friend’s official ceremony was just this past Saturday;  A’s will be in August.  Many couples, like these two, held off their weddings for a year in deference to the year of grieving.  I asked A’s mother if she approves of her new son-in-law.  She proudly told me the story– that after the tsunami, when he couldn’t get in touch with A. and her family, he got on his bike the next day and rode through high water, debris, and areas with no roads about 20 kilometers to check on her family.  Then, he took A’s grandparents with him back to his small apartment for several months because their home was washed away.  I can’t wait to meet this guy!
• Olivia’s kindergarten teacher… I had a parent/teacher conference, and it was then that A-Sensei  told me her story… She was on the school bus taking children home when the earthquake hit.  The bus followed protocol and returned to the school, when A-Sensei got a text from her mom saying that a tsunami was coming.  She quickly told the other staff, and they gathered all of the remaining kids and boarded the bus and headed to the mountains.  They had no cell phone or any contact with the outside world.  Snow was falling, and the children were quite cold, so they cautiously brought the bus down the mountain and went to the evacuation center near their kindergarten — a junior high school with a 3rd story.  They took all the kids up there, tore down curtains to help keep them warm, and stayed for the night.  The next morning, mothers who didn’t know if their children were alive or not began swimming from their homes to the school in freezing cold, dangerous waters to get to the children – water above their chest.  A-Sensei did not know if her parents and brother were alive or not.  It wasn’t until a day later that she was able to leave her post and get to their home in the mountains.  Her parents had been in another city on the coast, and were able to survive at a higher floor, but their car was washed away.  They swam home twenty kilometers because it was the only way they could be sure if their two children were alive.  They were finally reunited several days after the tsunami.  As A-Sensei told me this story, I reached out, grabbed her hand, and thanked her for the wonderful care she took of all the children, putting their needs before her own.  She broke down crying.  Everyone just did what they had to, she said.  I told her she is is amazing.  She is still traumatized by those two days, and cannot go near water.
• Today I heard the story of a mom who was trying to get back to her house before the tsunami came.  She had a friend in the car, whose family was also waiting.  She dropped the friend off at home first, and then proceeded to try and make it back to her home.  She didn’t beat the tsunami; she was killed in her car.  Her husband and 3-year old boy waited on the roof of their home for 24 hours, until the water went down.  I saw his picture – it breaks my heart.  What a friend she was!
• Today Owen and I had our first play date – a boy in his class who he likes to play with at school, and his mom, who I’ve really enjoyed talking with while waiting for our boys to get off the bus.  They both came over, and we all had a great time.  She is a single mom… She spent nearly two hours telling us her story from 3/11 and the following days- pretty amazing.  Their home is RIGHT on the water (we went and hung out there afterwards – it is RIGHT on the water!) – but it was built well and is one of the few homes in that whole area remaining.  Her parents and brother survived on the second floor.  She went  to the school after she heard the warning to check on her son, but then decided to try and drive to her home and check on her parents right on the water. On the way,though, she saw the water coming, and ditched her car, running all the way back to the elementary school.  Over three hundred children were in the gym.  Many had been stuffed up on the balcony of the gym, but the majority were on the floor of the gym.  They had the door to the ocean open, with teachers watching anxiously.  Our friend Y. was coming from the opposite direction- the side of the river – and she realized that they didn’t know the tsunami was coming from both directions.  She quickly went and shut the gymnasium doors, just seconds before the water starting coming.  One of the other nearby schools lost all of the children in the gymnasium because the water rushed in and the kids couldn’t get out.  All of the kids in this gymnasium were safe.  She was able to hold her  fourth grade son through the worse of the tsunami, and protected him from seeing the terrible images that many children still have in their minds.  They returned home a day or two later.  When the kids were finally able to go to a temporary school in May, Y. had to carry her son on her back through thigh- to-waist high water every day – there was still no electricity or running water at that time, and the water in their area had still not receded. She actually was put on the news as a newscaster found out about their “hidden village” where people were living even though their homes were in bad shape and the flooding was terrible.

Y.’s sister heard on the news that most of the people who lived in Y’s small area had been killed.  With a very sad heart, she drove through the mountains for many hours to get to their home, assuming that her parents and sister had been killed and she was going to bring Y’s son home from the school evacuation center.  She was overjoyed to find them all alive, and had brought some much-needed supplies.  Y. ended up cooking on cinderblocks outside of their home, and took food around to the neighbors stuck in their homes.  She is still caring for the elderly man who lives on the second floor next door – he has left the first floor just the same as it was the day after the tsunami.   She took care of her three-year old neighbor’s son for awhile after the mother did not return home (previous story).   Her previous company was washed away, so she is tutoring children part-time after school to try and earn a small living.  We are going to have our two oldest go this Friday and see how that works out – they can use some extra help in Japanese!   Her son had a great time here building Legos with Owen- all of his Legos, and other toys had washed away.  But she said they were just so happy to be alive…  Her home has been condemned, and they will not be allowed to rebuild there, but it continues to be their home for now.  She is quite an amazing woman- I am looking forward to learning much from her!