It's not always bad to be different...

I am writing this post from Tokyo, Japan.    I am leading a team of media students  who are trying to bring some of Japan back home to the USA through videos about the Japanese church.  Between the camera equipment we are hauling around and our lack of Japanese language skills, we tend to stick out here a little bit.

It is no fun to stick out.  I think there is something in all of us that wants to belong, to be normal.  There is maybe nowhere in the world where this is more true than here in Japan.  I have been told that the worst thing in the world for most Japanese is to be labeled as different.  So imagine how lonely it must be at times to be a Christian in a country where less than 1% of population claim that distinction! 

Today I met a young believer in the local university who attended a Christian high school here in Tokyo.  It is not uncommon to hear of high schools that were begun by Christians decades ago and still go by the name of 'Christian,' so I asked her how many other Christian youth were in her grade at school.  She told me that she and one other girl in the school of more than 200 were Christians!  That's 1% Christian in a 'Christian' school.  She spoke of the privilege she had to study for a year at a public school in Texas and of all the Christians she met there.  She added, "Not all of them were Christians though, so there was more work to be done!"

The challenge of reaching the youth in Japan seems especially daunting.  The pressures and schedules of school make it nearly impossible for even kids who grew up in Christian families to attend church during their high school years.  I have walked through the city these last 5 days and have been burdened with the fact that many of the youth I see have never known a single Christian they could call a friend. 

So how does any of this relate to fatherhood or adoption?

The Tokyo area alone has about 35 million people living in it.  99% of them - 34,965,000 (approx the populations of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky combined) are spiritual orphans waiting to hear of a pursuing Father that wants to adopt them into his family.  It has been great to be working with missionaries and Japanese Christians who are working hard to introduce the Father to these orphans.

Luke 10:2  He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.