Last June, when I was accepted as a missionary with SEND international, it was one of the most exciting events in my life. I suppose it was what graduating from college should have felt like; I could see exactly where God was calling me, and what He wanted me to do with my life. He was sending me to Japan to be in full time ministry as a missionary. That calling rang true with all the desires God had been cultivating in my life up till that point. My anticipation and excitement at the thought of going to Japan as a missionary could not have been any higher.
At least that’s what I thought until about a week ago, when I proposed to my girlfriend, Tomo, and she said she’d marry me. Now I’ll be going to Japan, married to a godly young woman who shares my desire to serve God and reach out to the Japanese, a young woman I love, respect, and enjoy every second of time that I spend I’m around her. I mean, come on, how could things possibly get any better than that? I guess I’ll have to wait and see; God’s proven to be infinitely more creative than I am.
I met Tomo almost five years ago, on my very first trip to Japan. If you haven’t already figured it out, she is Japanese, and normally lives in Tokyo with her family. Her father is the pastor of the church that we went to work with, and my brother Jon and I stayed with their family for six weeks. Oddly enough Tomo’s older sister Maki was also living there, and my brother is marrying her next month. So, in the summer of 2003 Jon and I both met our fiances at pretty much exactly the same time. I swear, neither of us had any idea at the time. Especially not me. I didn’t even think that was an option. Tomo was a senior in Highschool, and I had just graduated college. I wasn’t planning on going back to Japan, and as far as I knew, I would never see her again. Still we became very good friends over the course of our stay there, Tomo has a real gift when it comes to languages, and speaks amazingly good english, which meant that we dragged her along everywhere we went and she spent a lot of time with our team.
That trip was a real turning point in my life, and God used many aspects of it to instill in me a desire to serve Him in ways I hadn’t previously considered possible. I went home no longer trying to see what I could do for God, but rather what God wanted to do through me. He began to show me. One thing He did was bring me back to Japan. A lot. In fact I’ve been to Japan once a year ever since that first trip. Which meant I got to see Tomo at least once a year. Not only that, she came and visited here a couple of times as well. And I really started to like her. Still, it didn’t seem like anything could come of it. She wasn’t going to be moving to the US, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. So I just set it aside to wait and see what God would do. And then I got accepted with SEND.
Once that happened, and I knew I was going to wind up in Japan, I started to think about Tomo a lot more. Two months after that, she came to the US to spend ten months attending UCI as a foreign exchange student, living a half hour away from me. I would classify that as “God doing something.” Tomo was pretty helpless over here, since she didn’t have a drivers license, which meant that I got to spend a lot of time with her. And I couldn’t have been happier. We started dating after she’d been here about two months, and things have been awesome ever since.
We’ve still got a bit of a journey ahead of us. Tomo has to go back to Japan to finish her last year of college. She graduates in March of 2009, so we hope to get married shortly after that. Also she will be joining SEND, and so we’ll have to raise significantly more support, which will mean that Tomo will probably have to move to the US for a short time while we raise the rest of it. Getting a Visa is not an easy process. Still, God has made it so evident that He is the One who has brought things this far, and I can’t wait to see what He does in the coming year.