Singing a Sojourner's Song

There's that feeling again. Being a missionary brings it around just a little more frequently. It's the sense of discomfort, the awareness of incongruities in my fit with my surroundings. It's a feeling of not belonging. Not being completely home. It comes every time I travel back to the States or back to Japan. Returning just recently from 5 weeks in Chicagoland, the realization that I am indeed a foreigner in either culture is once again fresh.

Buddy Greene said it best in song: "I don't belong. I'm a foreigner here just singing a sojourner's song. I've always known. This place ain't home. And I don't belong."

It didn't used to be that way. Up until we left for Japan in 1999, I was decidedly American in my outlook, cultural identity and sensibilities. But things change when you remove yourself from that cultural milieu for any long stretch of time. Things no longer look the same when you return to them. You're different. People are different. The environment and culture are different. And you sense a lack of fit with a people and places you really were eager to call home again. That's disappointing, surprising and frustrating all at once.

Two Years Later -- Hope in Christ Alone

Two years after Japan's darkest day since the end of WWII, the memory of 311's earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis is still the somber backdrop for most conversations. Twenty thousand dead or missing in a moment of time. The disaster was so big it echoed to the edge of space. The loss was so much bigger that it echoes in the human heart in every dream and hope, challenge and concern. And there are many of them. Today new worries abound.

What about the next big quake? Don't tell my mother this, but the respected Tokyo University Earthquake Research Institute reported there's a 70% chance that a 7.0-magnitude or higher quake will strike Japan's capital by 2016. Such an event, the scientists said, could mean a death toll of up to 11,000 people and $1 trillion in damages!