He wants it so bad...

It's been a while... I'm sorry I took so long to post again. It's been a VERY crazy few days since my first day on Waseda's campus, so I just got a little behind.

Last Thursday was a pretty fantastic day at Waseda. The weather was gorgeous, the five of us from my team got to campus about half an hour before lunch and so we went out into the park and read the Word together and prayed. Then we decided that we'd go and do a lunch ministry TOGETHER. Now it seems a lot of Japanese students love to speak English, so we decided to all sit together and see who would come. So we got our food and sat down, and for a minute or two, no one came, but then we all started praying for people to come and within five or ten minutes, our table was full.

Ryo sat down two seats from me, so I invited him to sit and speak English with my team and he got excited, saying "I'm very pleased to speak English." But eventually it became a conversation between the two of us for a while. We talked about majors (he's studying business), hometowns (he's from Fukuoka in Kyushu), hobbies (he's in the car club and about to join the cycling club), etc. Then suddenly our talk started going in a completely different direction. By this time, Kris and Christina had joined our little chat and we started going deep. We asked him what he wanted to pursue as a career, and he said that he guessed he was gonna end up working in an office, doing business-related work for the rest of his life. We asked him if that's what he wanted to do and he said "definitely not." He would much rather work with other countries and speak other languages. But this is the major he got into, and he has no faith in his resume, so he thinks he'll just end up in a cubicle job. He was being really hard on himself and his accomplishments. I mean, he goes to WASEDA! Like, one of the two best private uniersities in Japan! And he still thought he wouldn't be good enough. Then as we continued to chat, we discovered why he felt that way...

I asked him about his family, because he's not from Tokyo and I asked if he ever got lonely/homesick. He talked about his older brother who goes to Todai (Tokyo University, best public university in Japan)... it seems his older brother kinda overshadows him... And then Ryo told us why he didn't have a very good relationship with his parents: he'd dropped out of high school after his 2nd year (of 3 in Japan). He said that his parents were "furious." The relationship was very strained and, according to him, "his parents practically cut [him] off." He seemed to be hurting as he talked about it. He was very evidently not used to opening up that much and seemed uncomfortable, but through his heavy emotions, he seemed very willing to share. But anyway he took a sort of high school exit exam which got him an entrance exam at Waseda which got him in. Smart kid. But apparently the bitterness between him and his parents is to where they'll probably never have a relationship. It absolutely broke my heart to see how much this 19 year old was hurting from being rejected by his parents, from having to live in his brother's shadow all his life, and from the meaninglessness and hoopelessness of his career path. It was the perfect chance to share the Gospel with him, but I was scared... I didn't know what to say, I didn't want to hear him reject what I was saying... I had no faith! So I prayed for guidance, and when Ryo finished talking about his parents, God answered me through Christina who turned to me and said, "Hey Gen, didn't your mom send you off to France cuz you were being bad too? You should tell him about it." So I did!

For those of you who don't know, I would say that my time in France when my mom handed me completely over to God is when I finally understood Christ's sacrifice, and decided to make my faith my own. So I shared my testimony, as painful as it was to talk about my past, it was so freeing to share how God has pulled me out of the pit. I got to tell very personal accounts of what God meant to me. I told him that I go through hard times still, but knowing that my Friend is always there for me made it possible for me to go through anything. He was very moved. I asked him what he believed and he explained that in Japan most people don't care about religion. He grew up in a no-God home, so he didn't really think about God much. But I asked him if I could explain further what a relationship with God was about, and he agreed!

So I pulled about a Japanese version of the Four Spiritual Laws pamphlet (the Gospel in a nutshell) and went through it with him, relating things we read to what I had talked about in my testimony and to what he'd talked about just before. He followed it very well and when I talked about Christ's sacrifice, he even said, "So because He did such a nice thing for you, you can't help but love Him!" I was so shocked at his understanding. At the fourth law, which talks about how we can accept Christ by asking Him to come in and take over our lives, has two pictures- one of a circle with dots jumbled all over with a throne on which is seated "self"... a cross sits on the outside of the circle; the other circle has the cross on the throne, "self" at the feet, and the dots in order in a circle around the throne. I explained that the first represented a life without Christ, a life full of chaos and disorder because self is trying to rule, and that the second represented a life led by Christ, centered on His sacrifice. Ryo immediately said that right now, he was definitely the first circle, but that the second sounded really nice. He said he couldn't so quickly make such a big decision, but took the booklet, and said he'd look over it some more and ask me questions if he didn't understand any of it. But as he left he said, "I think I would like this very much." He said it'd be nice to not be lonely anymore and have a better life reigned by God. It was absolutely beautiful! He left and Christina and I were left totally speechless. We immediately praised God and prayed for Ryo, that he would accept Christ's invitation to a fulfilling life. I'm hoping to hang out with him one-on-one this week, because our chat the next day at the English Lunch on Waseda's campus again wasn't conducive to deep conversation since there were a lot of people. But WOW! What an experience!

Please keep him in your prayers...

Sorry about the long post. It was just such an exciting afternoon for me!