Mirgration

When Nozomi-chan was born we had to go to the immigration office to get her visa.  There was some bad communication and nobody in the Japanese church office was able to come with us to the office.  It was very frustrating.  We packed up our little baby, got on a train and then a bus to go to the office.  Thankfully, the Japanese pastor was able to go with us to help.

Once at the immigration office we were given the runaround.  We went to several different windows.  Then we waited for over two hours for our number to be called.  The room we waited in was filthy.  The floors were dirty with old gum, the walls were stained and the bathrooms had toilet paper all over the floor.  This was the dirtiest place I had ever been to in Tokyo.

After the longer than two hour wait, we were finally called, and then told we were missing a paper.

It took two more trips and two more long waits before we finally got her visa.

I never really thought much about being an immigrant or how immigrants are treated until this last week at the Summer Missionary Conference. Until then I usually associated the word "migration" with Hispanics or Canadian Geese.  But like many of my ancestors, I have also migrated to a new land.  We are a world of people constantly on the move.  Moving across town, moving to a new job, moving up a grade, and sometimes moving across the world.  There are different reasons that we move: family, education, work, economics.

Being a foreigner is very humbling.  I've always thought of myself as a highly intelligent independent person, but in a new land, I'm illiterate and needy.  We needed help to do simple things, like get a cellphone.  Simple things like going to the grocery store took extra time as I had to search extra hard among new items for those things I actually knew how to cook.

The Bible is a book full of people on the move.  One of my favorite stories is the book of Ruth.  The story starts with a famine and the family leaves their homeland to go live with the enemy for their own survival.  Ruth lives among strangers and they welcome her.  Boaz literally takes her under his wing to care for her.  We as a mobile people, and especially a Christian people, need to remember what it's like to be strangers in a new place.  We need to remember those that helped us and be ready to help those.  We need to embrace the strangers that are crossing our boarders, because they're not very different from us.