Hope for Japan

In Edinburgh there is a famous meeting point on the Royal Mile, where for hundreds of years people have gathered to hear a caller deliver the news. But for as long as this mini-news-tower has been around, it has had one obvious flaw: the news is 3 days old. It's kind of like the Newspapers of today, it's yesterdays news (or in this case, yesterdays old news). The 3 day delay used to be because the news was carried from London and would, of course, take 3 days. Today it's 3 days late just to observe tradition. 


If you can imagine how a person in 18th Edinburgh may have felt about their knowledge of world events, than you have a clearer picture of my feelings. You'd think with 5 BBC channels running 24-7 commercial free news, I'd have some idea what's going on around me. Sadly, if work isn't taking up most of my time, Teen Mom is (if you don't know what Teen Mom is, than you're not wasting your life). Long story short, I rarely catch the news. Recently I've been trying to stay informed. The first piece of world news to reach us, as it happened, was unfortunately the earthquake in Japan. I'm sure back home you're all up-to-date on the situation. I'm learning now there are all sorts of problems associated with it to worry about, most prominently the exposed radiation towers in Sendai. 


So, while I have no new thoughts or information to report on the situation, I thought I would share a brief email exchange with a Japanese friend I made here. I enjoy reading her emails for their oddly formal phrases and awkward english. Im pretty sure she just puts Japanese into Translator.com or something, lol. 


Her name is Nobuko and she is a Peace Studies student at the University of Bradford. Apparently there are only something like 5 masters programs for Peace Studies in the world, and Bradford is one of the best. While the students are from all over the world, and of every different political and religious background, many of the ones I have met have been Christians. They make up most of the non-traditional church service I go to called "Soul Space." Nobuko and I first met a couple months ago on the Soul Space retreat. Nobuko is Christian, a minority in her country, which is mostly made up of Shinto Buddhists.  You can see her in the random video I took that weekend. Since then we have been exchanging emails. After I heard about the quake I wrote her just to make sure her family was ok. 


She wrote: "Fortunately, all of my relatives are in safe area at that moment. But many Japanese are still suffering from their broken lives, so I just keep on praying for unbroken hope arriving on their darkness."


What a powerful statement. And the way she wrote it (intentionally or not) forms a picture in my brain; like some kind of bird flying above a destroyed city... and instead of flying on to some other landscape, the bird swoops down and makes its home among the wreckage.  And this bird is light and peace and hope. The arrival of a hope that says, "This. What has and is happening here; is not the end. Trust me."


A few days after the email I was looking back through my journal and found an entry about hope I had written around Christmas. I don't remember writing it, but I'm glad I did.

"I sometimes feel like hope is a luxury for the naive. But hope takes determination, consistency, fortitude and courage... to believe through ALL things that Christ is still on the throne. God, I don't know what this next year will bring for me, but you gave your son so that we might have hope." 

My prayer is that the people of Japan might have an unbroken hope, which descends like a bird who makes it's home among the wreckage... because its wings first carried it high enough to see the sunrise that's coming.