Japlasian

RIght now is Friday night. In approximately 36 hours I'll be standing in front of a Japanese sized congregation giving my testimony. Normally that's not a problem. Most of the time I don't plan what I'm going to say and just trust for God to give me the words as I open my mouth. That's because most of the time I don't know I'm doing it until five minutes before. But I've known about this one for about three weeks. I'm a procrastinator so of course I'm just writing it now. There's one thing that throws me off about it and makes it harder than any I've done before...it's in Japanese. What a gong show. What a need for God's grace and ability to think like a Japanese.

None of my testimonies end up being real testimonies, as in telling specific time periods in my life or how I became a Christian. I always just end up preaching and throwing random bits of my life in for details. This time is no different. I'm talking about God's love, and apparently his guidance. I didn't plan to, it just happened. I had no idea where to start, not even in English. So I prayed and then started writing and Japanese came out...kind of. Half of it was real Japanese, half of it was Erika-ese. I talk like a two year old, not even. But I guess that's really what God wants from us, to be like children, to have childlike faith. These people on Sunday will definitely be hearing childlike faith because I don't have the vocabulary or sentence structure to talk like an adult. I suppose that's fine with me if it's okay with God.

I finished writing my testimony today and had one of my Japanese friends check it. What a humbling experience. I realized that you can have like a whole language in your head, but nobody else may be able to understand it. (I think it would be fun to make up a language and then teach it to your children; your family could have their own secret code language...might mess them up for their first year of school though...) But that's a little what it felt like. Or like that whole stereotypical situation where you hand in a paper and it comes back bleeding red and has arrows pointing everywhere except in the direction you thought was right. Only about half of my sentences made it through unscathed. But that doesn't really matter. The only thing I hope for is that the message of God's love and guidance will come through. It doesn't matter if they hear all of it or not, just the fact that God loves them individually, and that my life has been changed by God enough to get up there and speak to them about this amazing love I've received...in another language, their language...one I'm definitely not fluent in. But by God's grace He will speak to them through it.

That will be the other challenge though: actually getting it out, reading Japanese in front of a bunch of year-weathered failing ears in a voice that allows them to hear. I need to install a microphone into my voice box. Maybe God will do that for me, if not for just the ten minutes I'm speaking on Sunday.
This is definitely a stretching experience for me, this whole Japan thing is...but it's all an experience I wouldn't trade for the world.
And please pray for the people hearing my God-given words of a child on Sunday.