McConnells on Mission

Long story short: We are home. Two missionaries (and one cat) made the thirty-some-odd-hour odyssey of planes, trains and automobiles from Japan back to Indianapolis and all of us came through it no worse for the wear. Was it hard to leave ARI? Sure, you bet, but it was a great joy to be back in the loving embrace of family for the holidays.

Now the single most popular question to ask us is, “So, what’s next for you?” And what a fabulous question it is. Work, family, house, volunteering, church? school?? ANOTHER mission??!? You name it, Meg and I have talked about it.

It’s scary, and at the same time it isn’t. Neither of us has ever had to rebuild a life so completely from the ground up. But… I’m also thinking about all of our ARI friends. After hearing about all of the challenges they face, well, everything in my life feels like the volume has been turned down. If you get my meaning.

We do know that we aren’t leaving town again immediately. Another long-term mission is definitley possible but probably not for another two or three years at least. Meghan is taking some graduate-level classes this spring and I might do the same in the fall. We don’t have jobs in the bag yet, but we’ll get there. Life is happening.

But whatever we do, our mission isn’t over. It’s not tied to one place or marked out on a callendar. All of the other stuff in our lives will fall into place sooner or later. The biggest question mark in my mind is how we will continue to live this mission that we have been called to. I don’t know yet. I’ll keep you posted.

As the fall colors swept across our campus here in Japan I could not help but gain inspiration from the brightly colored leaves outside my window. They turned shockingly bright so quickly. As the growing season comes to and end and the chlorophyll in the leaves is destroyed, the beautiful autumn colors are unmasked everywhere I look.

In my mind these delicate leaves ask me a question. In the brilliant gold of the gingko tree do I see God’s awesome power of transformation or the revealed truth of our world?

In truth, I see a lot of both.

As we begin to pack up our bags and divvy up our horded books and illicit jars of peanut butter, we’re taking stock of all that we’ve received here. It’s a lot of transformation and a lot of revealed truth. I think all service, whether it’s crossing an ocean for a service mission, volunteering at a homeless shelter, organizing and contributing to disaster relief or just sharing in fellowship with somebody else in the grocery line, can be a profound experience of change if we’re open to God’s message.

This message is alive and at work in our lives. It calls us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Everything else is just static on the line, wind in the trees.

Many of the students here at ARI have shown us this message in trying to find a way for all people to live in dignity, with enough to eat and a healthy environment. Many of the volunteers and staff show us this message in their sacrificial living. Their gracious spirits teach us to refocus our lives to rejoice in what we already have – the abounding love that exists beneath all things.

This shift, where we all shed our working colors and burst into something eye-catching, is a constant life process. We all do it and all the time. It may not seem as brilliant as a crimson maple tree, but when we pick up an ornament off the Adopt-a-Family tree at the back of church or throw a can of applesauce into the community food drive, we can feel that revealed transformation.

We’re packing it in for America soon and counting down our days. It’s a sad thing to be doing, but we’re glad to be returning home. However, as we figure out how many pounds of odds and ends we can stuff into our suitcases, there is a lightness of transformation and a simple glimpse at god’s plan riding home along with us.

Happy Thanksgiving to all you out there! I hope that you are well and enjoyed far too much good food and the warmth of family.

Here at ARI I somehow got it into my head that I was going to cook a turkey for 45 people. Having grown up with family dinners of 4 (plus or minus a boyfriend or cantankerous cat) this would seem like a problem, but after HTC I felt I was an easy contender.

Miki, Steven’s wonderful wife and Yahoo expert, ordered me the biggest turkey we could find - 9 kg or about 21 pounds. It was by far the largest bird I’ve ever tried to cook. I employed Jan, a wonderful German volunteer and fellow meal service volunteer, into hefting the dang thing up and down it was that heavy.

Not wanting to make Thanksgiving any more stressful than really necessary, I made myself a promise. I would cook the turkey and mashed potatoes and everything else would be typical ARI dinner. Somewhere in my mind I had this vision of a side-dish of our baby carrots, so exquisitely cute and sweet, or some newly harvested broccoli accentuating my lovely bird.

Riiiiiight. For our vegetable Nang, a participant from Myanmar who lives about 10 minutes walk from China, made fried cabbage and pig’s tongue. No, that was not a mistake in my typing. Pig’s tongue. The participants have been doing a meat processing class, so they have all these leftover pig bits that we’ve been masking in soup and fried rice. I guess those are just the consequences of using everything but the oink - Thanksgiving just happened to be the tongue night.

I was really trying to be nice about it, but turkeys don’t have tongues. Tongue doesn’t belong on any Thanksgiving menu that I have been privy to. Well, ARI has been a first for many things, so chalk up ‘pig tongue on Thanksgiving’ as another excellent experience.

Go-chan, our meal service staff member made the soup. We were on some kind of roll (not the warm and squishy kind that make great leftover sandwiches) and she made taro soup with more cabbage. Taro is this kind of slimy potato that most Japanese seem to love. It makes your hands itch like madness itself when you peel the horrid little hairy tubers so I can’t really say that I’m a fan. They’re actually just the last harvest in a whole line of slimy vegetables that we eat here. The worst contenders are okra which seems extra viscous here and moroheya which is this nasty, slick spinach-like thing from the middle east. I never grew into any of these vegetables and actively dislike anything that has to do with taro.

So! Turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, pork tongue with cabbage and hairy potato soup with cabbage… Wait a minute!

I did spend a fortune not only on the turkey but on a single, measly can of chunky cranberry sauce. Jane, the only vegan in our midst, somehow ended up assigned to helping me. About the only task I could give her was getting the cranberry sauce out of the can. She looked at it like it was unholy. I asked her if I could take her picture and she refused to hold it anywhere close to her person.

At our dinner table I was the belle of the hour. I received many salutes for my turkey (which was actually really, really good!) and Andy G, another German volunteer, gave me the best compliment by literally licking his plate clean. However, it was still a regular ARI dinner, so many people ate their turkey with chopsticks and stuck with the brown rice over potatoes. Sachiyo, a Japanese volunteer, even had her nightly dish of natto. Natto is a snot-like fermented soybean dish and is quite possibly the most horrible thing you could put into your mouth. It’s faintly cheese like in that it’s gooey and fermented, but actually, it’s really just gross. Andy says it tastes loamy, but I think that’s giving dirt a bad name.

Even without the stuffing, the green bean casserole, warm rolls or the pumpkin pie - it was Thanksgiving. It was a meal where I sat with my community and gave thanks. These days when it’s my turn to say grace before the meal, I always begin “Dear God, we thank your for our many blessings and also for our trials, that we may grow through all life brings.” My friend Arati from Bangladesh heard news that the daughter of her neighbors was killed in the recent cyclone. Miki’s father was struck ill, so Steven, Miki and the kids left for Kyushu, hoping to say goodbye. Myar’s brother, the eldest who provides for her parents, was wounded while working in his wood shop and might lose his sight.

In the midst of the slimy soup and pig’s tongue side-dishes I am so thankful for my health and the health of my family. I am thankful to return to my country, to my state of Indiana. But more than all, I am also thankful that I have so many people who share their love and support with us. We have been very blessed, but should we be asked to bear trials and disasters we will not do it alone. Our ARI family, our parish family of Christ Church, our old friends, old coworkers, and strangers who we have brushed against all bring such light in times of darkness. Thank you all!

Wishing you all a lovely Thanksgiving and a safe holiday weekend!
Pictures:

Nang and the pig’s tongue.

Jane and the offending cranberry sauce.

My magnificent turkey!

Meg vs Turkey. Meghan wins!

Here’s the main table. You can see Andy getting mashed potatoes and avoiding the leftover egg curry from lunch.

My Thanksgiving dining room.

Sachiyo and her natto. Mmmmm. Don’t you just want to eat that?

Andy G enjoys the last little bits of gravy.

As a volunteer in ecumenical relations I often sit back and think about just what does ‘ecumenical’ really mean. Oh, I’m sure that there is a good dictionary with an exact explanation, but somehow it’s a shifting, malleable word. In Japan, where Christianity is less than 1% of the population, I have discovered that ecumenism is a lot different. There is a, “we’re all in this together” spirit. Part of this is due to being such a minority, but there are also historical influences.

During WWII all protestant churches were forced by the government into one body, named Kyodan. The Catholics were allowed to remain separate as Italy and Japan were allies, but all other Christian denominations were formed into Kyodan. No theological or denominational divisions were allowed from about 1941 to 1945. After the war several churches broke away to reform, including the Anglicans, but many remained with Kyodan.

Today Kyodan is known as the United Church of Christ Japan. The Nishinasuno church that lends incredible support to ARI is a Kyodan church. We have attended a few service there and found the congregation very welcoming and warm. There are a few things about the service that are very different from what I’m used to, such as they don’t use a lectionary for Sunday readings, but they never made me feel uncomfortable for not being UCC.

There are many connections between Christian groups here. Often I am surprised by how our Anglican church in Utsunomiya works closely with the Catholic church. Indeed, there is an agreement that allows Anglicans to receive communion at Catholic churches so that when we visited a Trappistine monastery for Christmas Eve we were allowed to take communion.

At ARI though it’s more than just Christian relations though. Here we live closely with people of many faiths. Ecumenism starts to mean more than just co-operation among the Christians and expands into worldwide religious accord.

Florence, a very smart and committed woman from Cameroon, finally summed it up for me in her final paper:

“At ARI, we don’t have just Christians. There are Christians from the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Pentecostal churches; there are Buddhists, Muslims and even those who belong to no faith. When I first learned that we all have to be meditating and sharing together, it started bothering me how successful this exercise will be. From the beginning there were some grumblings and worries, but it was not long that it all died off and everybody was always looking forward to attending the next day’s morning gathering.

“My best moments have always been when we are asked to observe a ‘moment of silence.’ At this point, all is quiet and I can imagine everyone accepting at that time that there is a super being who oversees whatever happens on earth. It doesn’t matter to me whatever name we give to this super being, for example, God, Allah, Jehovah or Buddha. At that time, all hearts are united as one, no matter what happens. Every one thinks and meditates on the common good of life here on earth.”

“I have come to learn that if this is very successful, it is because everybody is given the opportunity to think and act freely no matter his or her religious background…In this way, we shall live together and serve each other with unexplained love.”

Last year we arrive at ARI just in time to get roped into the annual Harvest Thanksgiving Celebration. Somehow I thought this year the whole experience would be much easier as we knew what to expect, but about Saturday night when we were still caught up in the frantic exuberance of the day I fully recognized that there really is no escaping from HTC craziness.

This year I was on the food committee, a true recipe for madness. I ended up as the responsible person for the drinks and snacks. So it was that late into the night I ended up frying up a Cameroonian snack called chin chin, which is unfortunately a colorful slang word in Japanese (think spotted dick). We ended up using a little over 10 kg of flour and the whole process took two days. Thankfully it’s quite tasty and the naughty nickname helped sell out both Saturday and Sunday.

Jane from Cameroon makes Chin Chin with me.

We had so many delicious and wonderful foods. This year we especially had some pyromaniacs and both Friday and Saturday there was a marathon all night barbecue party. Phon, a participant from Laos, made this coconut sticky rice that was cooked in bamboo over the fire. It was so delicious.

Arati from Bangladesh cooked so much chicken curry that it overflowed our biggest pots and then she commanded a small army to make chapatti (like tortillas) up until the last moment. The next day she was sorting 5 kg of lentils to make a thick, spicy soup. She had this spoon that she waved at her helping volunteers like a baton and it reminded me so much of Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia.

Andy was on the worship committee and served as the English facilitator for the Opening Ceremony. This was a really beautiful moment for us both, especially as Bishop Udea from Tokyo gave the message. Andy ended up also emceeing the performance show as nobody else volunteered, so he was very busy with the stage all weekend.

Opening Worship crowd.

The audio tent where Andy spent most of the weekend.

And knowing what to expect this year, we both organized a little something for the culture show. And what’s more American than country line dancing, I ask you? We looked up a lot of steps on the Internet and ended up dancing two numbers to “Achy Breaky Heart” and Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine”. It was sensational! I got a dozen people to get up on stage and shake their thing with me and by the time practice was over I think the guys from Mindanao and Bali were going to start learning more.

Andy used his mad lyrical flow to come up with a funny song that is now a 2007 ARI classic. We used the song from a jaunty drinking song titled “It’s All Part of Being a Pirate” – only we changed pirates for farmers and sang about pulling weeds and harvesting… but everybody’s favorite is the one about cleaning out the cow shed:

Now being a farmer is all fun and games ‘till somebody has to clean poop.
They call it manure, but it smells like a sewer,
And it fills up a big heavy scoop.
But it helps all the plants grow. They say, “Arigato!”
And it’s easy to do with your group!
Oh, being a farmer is all fun and games ‘till somebody has to clean poop!

Absolutely exhausted and dazed on Monday morning, we cleaned up our mess and congratulated ourselves on surviving another year. We give thanks for our many blessings, but we also give thanks for our trials that God may help our hearts grow in all adversity. We have had both in abundance this year, but it was a very good learning experience for all. Sitting in our evaluation sessions I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Ooh! Maybe I could try to make funnel cakes next year…”

Other pictures:

Jones draws the mural for this year’s HTC.

Underneath the big tent.

Shariff from Tanzania with a TV personality who came to cover the event! We got two short but nice features on Japanese television.

Even the staff’s children get roped into selling cookies and jam. Please, sir, won’t you buy some more? How could you refuse…

One of Arati’s food tents in full swing.

Jones from Solomon Islands and Myar from Myanmar.
Myanmar dance!

This is the guys from Sri Lanka doing a funny dance where one of them dresses as a woman. No surprise, it brought the house down.

The kids also had a lot of fun. Check out our new bamboo house in the background! Fred from the Philippines and a lot of others helped build it in about 6 days.

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Right, so. Our official year as members in the Young Adult Service Corps is ending pretty quickly. Only, we’re not going home yet. We have decided to extend for an extra three months to see the participants through the whole program and return home in time for Christmas.

It’s such a short time to extend, but it was a pretty hard decision for us to make. On one hand, it’s going to be very hard to give this ministry up and return back to Indiana. On the other, we are anxious to return home to family and friends. There is no easy answer, but we’ve found a good middle ground to return home for a reality check in December. Still, it took a lot of prayers to decide to stay and then muscle through the hocus-pocus of bureaucracy to let the Japanese government let us stay.

Before we got here we did a lot of thinking about our calling and if we were just fooling ourselves or abusing the church’s generosity in coming to Japan. We had the best jobs that we ever had, were on track for most things that we are supposed to want and still somehow found the faith (or pigheaded stupidity) to put it on hold. I thought that was calling.

Only, I don’t think I really knew at all what the calling was until I got here. About two months in and we the warm comfort of how right it felt to be serving at ARI. All the misgivings and fearsome worries evaporated with this strong sense of knowing that it was alright. Calling nothing - it was like being struck upside the head with God’s “get a clue already!” stick.

We both found our path to living out the kingdom of God while participating in YASC. While this ministry has been rewarding and grand, I hope that it will continue to open other ways for us to respond to other calls in the future. We are so thankful to all the people who helped support us these past months. You are our every blessing made real.