Hello friends and family!
Having pretty much settled in to my new home in Japan, I wanted to hit the ground running with this blog/newsletter. I am the first of the three Faeh sisters to make the move over; my older sister Audra will come next in a couple of months or so, and then my younger sister April after she graduates from UNK in December. I have specifically moved to Miyazaki, Japan, where I will soon teach English at a kindergarten. On the ministry side of things, I will come alongside a veteran missionary couple, joining ministry efforts that they have started, or perhaps doing something new. (They have been so incredibly helpful in this transition phase, and I will definitely include more about them in the future.) Because I’ve only gotten a small taste of what teaching and ministry might look like in the coming months, I thought I would start off by answering a common question people have had: How did God call you to Japan?
Though a great question, it is also a difficult one to answer. For me, to answer this question well requires that I give you something of my life story, and even then it’s not exactly a straightforward answer. Also, because I will be giving my story, this post will not answer what has lead my sisters to come to Japan, at least not fully. They are both much more private and much less flowery and long-winded than I am, but I’ll do my best to convince them to share at least some of their stories with you all when they transition as well. Anyway, I better get to it; I promise I will try not to write a novel. =)
Before I left for Japan, I went through all of the stuff that had accumulated in my room since childhood. I noticed with smiles the references to Jesus etched on folders, the little cards with verses written on them, the short prayers tucked in the margins of notebooks. Jesus has been a very real part of my life for a very long time, and I owe much thanks to my parents for that. Because of them, I grew up in church, where I gained much knowledge of God through Sunday school, VBS, Family Night, etc. (I also was blessed to have some great teachers). Even more than that, because of my parents, I grew up in a home were Christ really mattered. My mom came to Christ somewhat later in her life — shortly before entering university — but from the moment she believed her faith in and love for Christ was strong. Though I remember little from my earliest years, something has always stood out in my memory of our “goodnight” routine; I know I was quite young, because I still shared a room at the time. My mom would say, “I love you”, then my sister and I would say, “I love you too”; then she would always finish by smiling even brighter and saying, “And Jesus loves you most.” When someone who evidently loves you tells you so kindly and sincerely that Jesus loves you more than she does, you begin to understand something very important about who Jesus is. It was things like that, and the way my mom would talk about Christ and tell us about people’s lives he had changed and quote verses from the Bible, showing how much they truly impacted her, that helped me understand that following Jesus meant a genuine relationship. It meant growing closer to someone good, loving, powerful — someone really and truly alive.
My dad provided what I’ve come to realize is (unfortunately) a somewhat rare example; he made it a part of his life both to look for opportunities to share about God and the gospel and to act on those opportunities whenever they arose. Not infrequently over the years, I would hear him talking to my mom about different nonbelievers he had come into contact with through farming and life in general and the different spiritual conversations he had with them, many of whom he continued to reach out to over time. I could tell that he shared not out of a sense of obligation or to gain anything for himself, but because he cared about the people he encountered, and especially because he believed the message of who God is and what he’s done is too important not to share. Though I am still not as bold in sharing my faith as he is, I grew to believe the same thing. I haven’t said so nearly as much as I should have, but thank you Mom and Dad. It was a blessing to have been raised in such a home, a home that I will always love. And of course, I love you too! =)
The blessings didn’t stop in my early years. What seeds had been planted and watered in my childhood walk with Christ, God made grow in each new place I landed. In high school my parents sent me to Nebraska Christian, and I loved it. I had some great classmates, great teachers (shout out to a few teachers and friends who made my NC experience especially amazing:), and a great God to learn more about each day. No high school is perfect, but having gotten a taste of many schools through subbing, I feel like it would be very hard to find one with a better environment for students than NC. It was also at NC that I was first introduced to people from quite a few countries in Asia. Thinking back, I can’t recall being even the slightest bit uncomfortable when talking to any of the students, regardless of where they came from or how much English they knew. I didn’t know at the time how those experiences would impact the future, but God still worked in me at NC. By the end of high school, I had grown to feel a much greater sense of Christ’s love, along with a greater desire to love him better and to love other people like he does. So here I would like to say thank you to my NC family, for providing another place for me to grow into God’s call on my life.
When it came time to choose a college, God ended up leading me in ways I didn’t even understand at the time. I had some very good scholarship offers from a few different schools, so I looked into them. Two of those schools would have been entirely, even down to the books, free; one of those free schools was less than an hour from home, so, thinking that such a school would be a responsible and sensible choice, I visited twice. After both visits, however, I told my mom that it felt cold and spiritually dark to me for some reason; knowing many people who have gone there since that time, it seems to me now that it is actually not any different from other schools. Yet it absolutely felt…off to me. The last couple of months I’ve been studying Acts, and I finally realized fully that it was the Holy Spirit saying “no” to that school. And I just realized in writing this a probable reason why: almost no international students went there.
In the end UNK won out, and wouldn’t you know it, I loved it there too. I went with Audra, who had transferred in from the community college in Grand Island. Living in dorms, navigating a big campus, being around so many people — all of it was new to us. One feature of the campus struck us as oddly comforting though; walking around the first couple of days, we both saw some international students, and I remember us literally having a conversation where we both expressed our positive feelings about that (something to the effect of us saying that we were inwardly like, “Ooh, yay, international students! =D”). Our first Sunday in Kearney we were still clueless about everything, so we went to a church service on campus for just such clueless students. After the service, we started talking to three Korean girls who had come to check it out, and soon an eager-looking woman came to join us. She ended up being a wonderful mentor and friend throughout my college years, so here I would like to say thank you, Jayne, for sharing the good news about Jesus with so many who have never heard it before and for giving me such an amazing example of what international ministry can look like. That Sunday she invited us to come to a meeting of International Christian Student Fellowship, a branch of CSF designed for international students to come and learn, most for the first time, about the story of the Bible. So we did. And the rest is history. :)
Well, not exactly history (I know I promised to try not to write a novel…). God’s movement in my life landed me in some other places as well. A short time after entering university, I began to feel the weight of sheer numbers of lost people in the world, and it broke my heart. I wanted even more to love and follow Jesus, and to love others like him. The summer after my freshman year, this desire lead me to Jacksonville, Florida for a summer training program with The Navigators. I was a mess that summer, but in a way I’m so thankful for, the Isaiah 6 kind of way. I was broken not only by the lost world’s need for Christ, but also by the state of my weak and sinful self before a holy God. Feeling the condition of the world and myself so acutely while growing closer to Christ than I ever had before resulted in forceful, painful, but beautiful clarity about who must ever increase. So with absolute sincerity I repeated after Isaiah, “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” That summer confirmed what I still know today: any people, any place, any amount of time, whether safe or dangerous, whether closed or open — even if someday I must go alone — I will go where God sends me. Thank you, Navs, for everything that an amazing staff put in place that summer that helped draw me so much closer to Christ and his call.
I (and my sisters) continued on at UNK, leading Bible studies for ICSF, hosting game/movie nights at our Kearney home, and acting as student leaders on group trips. Semesters went on, and I prayed specifically and earnestly for so many people and ministries and big things whenever I made time (I’m sadly terrible at establishing good routines). Eventually Audra, April, and I started researching various aspects of different Asian countries, came up with a list of questions for missionary contacts in these countries, talked with these contacts via email/Skype, and began to narrow the country options down. Last summer we had narrowed it down to four: Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, or Japan. We used a volunteer website called Workaway to spend some time teaching and experiencing life in each country, in addition to meeting up with different friends and missionaries along the way.
After all was said and done, our perhaps somewhat uncommon, methodical approach to everything made the decision easy enough to hammer out in a five-minute discussion. For whatever reason, the Spirit gave me (and April) a clear “no” on Thailand, and though I love the Korean people and know how much they need freedom in Christ in their intensely pressured, performance-obsessed culture, I knew that was a “maybe someday, but not now”. So we were left with Vietnam or Japan, two very different countries in some ways, but both similar in a way that resonates with the three of us; each of these countries has something contemplative about the culture, an inclination of many of the people to think carefully and deeply about life’s most important questions. So why Japan? Well, a lot of it came down to considering what it would look like to teach and reach students, especially college students, in each country. We went with what seemed most sensible for our current stages of life. We decided that we would want to be a little older with more life experience to work and minister as teachers in Vietnam, since young people get married, start families, and ultimately grapple with the complexities of full-fledged adult life much earlier there than in Japan. Japan, then, is where we would go.
Soon after that decision was reached, I headed off to Summit Christian College in Scottsbluff, a small Bible school largely staffed by former missionaries, to take as many classes as I could before starting a job in Japan (Audra, meanwhile, took time to complete some graduate courses at UNK). Looking ahead to what future ministry might be like, I wanted to take the time to fill in gaps in my knowledge and understanding of Scripture, both because of my desire to know God more deeply, and because I know that the better you understand something, the better you can teach it. Though I regrettably had to leave the school early because of the job that opened in Miyazaki, I learned so much from the time I spent there. I was also able to go with the college, along with Audra and April, to the International Conference on Missions, which gave the three of us clarity, energy, and some great things to think about regarding methods in cross-cultural ministry that we had not really considered before. So I would like to say thank you, Summit faculty and staff, for the many years you have spent serving God around the world and in Nebraska, and for all the opportunities, fantastic resources, and enriching instruction you gave me.
In the midst of taking classes, Audra and I contacted about a dozen missionaries, schools, and organizations in Japan looking for potential jobs. Several doors opened that ended up shutting later on, but in February we heard from one of our contacts that a kindergarten in Miyazaki was hiring, and everything after that started moving incredibly quickly. Now, less than two months later, I am here, ready to be an ambassador for Christ amongst the Japanese people in whatever capacity he wants me to be.
What called me to Japan? As anyone who has made it this far (and kudos to you if you have) can see, I had no specific spiritual experience indicating Japan was where I should be. Instead, I would say that what lead me here was nothing more, and absolutely nothing less, than God’s work in my life. Wherever my parents sent me growing up, wherever I chose to go as a young adult, God went before me. He has been an ever-present source of purpose and growth in my life. He has been my good and gracious Father, and he has shown me more and more what it means to serve him. He has given me blessing after blessing after blessing. Looking back at it all, I think there is one very good reason I have loved every place I’ve ever landed: my King has always been with me. Thank you, Lord, for everything you have done in my life. You have said that to whom much is given, much will be asked. Some might think that leaving friends and family to reach the lost in another country is asking much. But I know, Lord, that it can never compare, not even close, to how much you have given. Thank you, Lord, that you know me and guide my steps. Because you will always be with me, I know I can look forward to loving Miyazaki, Japan, and anywhere else in this world you lead me, until the day you call me home. I love you, Lord. Thank you again for all you’ve done, and all that you will do, in and through my life. In Jesus’ name — name above all names — I pray. Amen.
Notes/Prayer Requests:
Thank you so much for your support! I plan to send out (hopefully much shorter) updates of life and ministry in Japan every 1-2 months. Until next time, then. =)
In Christ, with much love, Anna Faeh
Things Hoped For