Some wandered in desert wastelands,
Finding no way to a city where they could settle.
They were hungry and thirsty,
and their lives ebbed away.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He led them by a straight way
to a city where they could settle.
Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
for he satisfies the thirsty
and fills the hungry with good things.
(Psalm 107:4-9)
Healing as a Reciprocal Process of a Community
“What I learned from this in verses 4-9 is that I needed to keep crying out to God and ask him what I should do. And then I cried out and listened to God. I felt that God was speaking to me that I should live together with others. And it was not about doing anything special, but spending time together with the lonely and the distressed; eating together, reading the word of God together and praying together. [now at the forum four months later] Reflecting that experience of living together, I realized what healed us was because of the fact that we were also affected by the disaster as our house was shaken by the earthquake and it was in a total chaos and in an unlivable condition. We realized that we were the same as the disaster affected. God showed us that we were not alone. We had fellow evacuees [also believers] among us to overcome this problem together.
We also realized we were all in God’s family and we sensed God’s presence here [by living with others] together. That reminded me of those who started living in the temporary housing as their relationships have been cut off from others, so we must remember those who are made lonely. Loneliness and isolation is the most difficult issue for people. Living and spending time together gave us much consolation. It began the healing process.
A month after the disaster when the situation became a bit more stable, these families returned to their places. In the meanwhile, some church members started feeling that we as a congregation needed to do something to respond to this disaster. We started praying after Sunday service. After praying, our church members felt we should serve by what we have in our hands.”
Reverend Kuba and his family encountered God’s grace of building His family through their own experience of being affected by the earthquake. They didn’t have much time to plan anything but moved into the church building with two families who were desperately seeking a refuge after having to move out of the 20 KM zone. During that month of living together, Rev. Kuba reflected deeply on the word of God wherever it speaks about building communities as he continued to ‘cry out’ to God.
One experience led to another situation which deepened further Rev. Kuba’s perspectives on God’s community building and his salvation. The first two families left after staying with Kuba’s family for a month in the church building together, a church member introduced a family who desperately needed help of a community to surround them with love. This time, it was a non Christian family whose one and only son has a serious condition called “hikikomori.”
Hikikomori, translated as social withdrawal, is a psychosocial condition of a person that withdraws from society and spends most of his or her life in a small space (in the house) doing self-destructive activities, often too violent for other family members to live together. Currently in Japan there are more than 500,000 hikikomoris. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori )
This family with a hikikomori teenage boy moved into the church and they started joining prayer meetings and bible studies voluntarily (nothing was imposed on them). Gradually the parents started feeling more peace as they knew they had support they needed in the church, and the son’s violent behaviors gradually started decreasing. Rev. Kuba and the church members quietly witnessed these changes in emotional and mental conditions of the boy and also of the parents. Rev. Kuba started sensing that God might have a greater purpose of using his church for building a new kind of community in Fukushima City especially after they found out one of the largest temporary housing complex would be located near the church building.
When Midori and I visited last Tuesday, Rev. Kuba told us the progress of the family. Just that morning, the boy requested that he would like to apologize to his parents for his destructive behavior and wanted to reconcile with them. And they were going to start a formal reconciliation process in the church with help of the Pastor and church members.
Fukushima city alone has about 16 blocks of temporary housing units of various sizes: some are less than 20 housing units and others are over 200 housing units as you can see on the photo.
The Kubas and Hokushin Calvary Church is now carefully listening to God and discerning how God wants them to move to a next level of building community with evacuees moving into the temporary housing complex near their church. They feel this is a great opportunity from God for them to live out the call on their church as a small mustard seed to build a new community. Rev. Kuba elaborates his reflection on the triune God’s love as the most vital foundation for building a loving community.
Trinity as the Foundation of Community Building
After the evacuates left our church [after spending one month together as evacuees], another new families were sent to us by God. They were not directly affected by this disaster. I had an idea that spending time together in prayer and reading the word of God will reveal the love of God. That will be a critical healing process I thought but I had never practiced before. Because of this disaster, we have experienced what it means to live together. I realized it is possible to live together with others here in the church; worshiping and spending the time together, sharing life together, then people have been healed. Things started happening spontaneously.
Our church volunteers [who were busy serving at the shelters] started interacting with the parents [of the boy] who were staying in the church building. These parents were cooking food for the church volunteers and they started sharing life naturally that way.
This was not our intentional plan, but God led us in each moment, through our prayers. God sent people. In the end we realized that God’s bigger story is going on [beyond what we were experiencing.] We have seen God in action.
The most important learning for this time is that not making an event, but sharing time together. Sharing the life together with prayer and God’s word, then a process of healing naturally begins. In this fellowship, God is in the center and we who believe in Jesus are invited to this [the circle of love]. As the triune God is in fellowship, there is a fellowship of love, starting from the trinity. Into that fellowship of love, I am invited to participate, and [for me] that is the meaning of salvation. Now I am part of God’s family. In this God’s family, other people are sent to this fellowship and those persons will be healed in this fellowship of triune love. In the perfect fellowship of love between Father, Son and the Spirit, I am now part of God’s family with fellow believers, then others, who don’t know Jesus yet, are also invited to join this family. The fellowship of love grows and that’s the [true] healing process.
This deep theological reflection by Rev. Kuba has significant implication for Japanese context, and the wider Confucian culture – China and Korea included. In the Confucian culture, an ideal man is a moral man who fulfills all his duties in his various relationships, set by the social hierarchy. Most importantly this relationship is defined in a family, education and political systems (The prime Confucian concept is “King, Teacher and Father is one” – the most important three positions in the social hierarchy). Loving neighbors in this context is a moral duty for a good man, and the highest honor in society is to seek the interest of society (community and family) over one’s self-interest. This is where Japanese cultural value of group-oriented mindset comes from and the root of ‘serving the nation by giving up one’s personal gain’ (i.e. honorable suicide, kamikaje soldiers, and so on). This traditional Confucian values are what the secularized modern Japanese society is trying to go back to as this devastating triple disaster has shaken the foundations of modern life and economy in Japan.
However, loving neighbors and loving God is inseparable in Christianity, not because it is moral checklist of salvation, but because the triune God is in loving community and loves the fallen humanity deeply enough to give up the Son’s life. That love creates freedom and choice. Everyone is invited, but the choice is on the individual.
In a culture where loving neighbor is embedded in the traditional values of moral duties, it is easy to slip into a checklist of doing good work and marry that checklist to belief systems that are not compatible to God of the Bible. And more importantly for Christians who are trying to expand the horizon of their faith by practical application, it is not simply about “evangelism and social actions” as most contemporary evangelical leaders may preach what the holistic ministry is about and how to go about doing it. The danger for us in creating holistic relief work by local churches is this: Simply adding “Another checklist of doing activities with Bible verses to support.”
Rev. Kuba is on to something that goes much deeper than doing activities or merely ‘recovering Japanese traditional values.’ The love of triune God and the invitation open to all humanity is the fundamental building blocks of society and new humanity.
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