Roger W. Lowther's Blog, page 4

Tim Keller, Thank You For My Dorm Room

One Tuesday evening in the fall of 1992, during my first year of college, I attended a “social awareness” seminar (I think that’s what they called it, to present issues on sexuality, women’s rights, world religions, etc.), mandatory for students who wanted a single dorm room in the Juilliard residence hall … and I desperately wanted a single room. I was not in a good situation. My then roommate occasionally partook in illegal recreational drugs and often had girls over to spend the night in our very cramped room. Many times, I resorted to sleeping on the couch in the common room or in the library when it was open.

So it is with selfish desires, I attended this seminar with perhaps 60 others … though, to be honest, I would have much rather been anywhere else practicing. I chose a chair in the very back of the dark room, slouched down, and prepared for a long nap while the speaker was introduced and came to the microphone.

“Good evening. I’m a pastor here in the city,” he began, “and I’ve been invited to speak with you this evening about what the Bible has to say to artists, and why the arts are crucial.” He kind of got my attention, but I kept my eyes closed. I remember a lot of that talk, especially a story about an artist painting a leaf and dying but finding his work finished and perfected in heaven as a full living tree. Now, that opened my eyes! All my striving for perfection on the stage, in front of audiences, in front of judges, in front of teachers and peers … this pastor confirmed that all of it was good, and said it was nothing less than a picture of heaven itself, and that Christ the Artist will accomplish it for us. I had never heard someone talk about music and the arts that way before. I needed to know more.

Before the lights came on, while the MC was explaining how to get credit for attendance, I went up and put my hand on the shoulder of the speaker. I realized my mistake when he visibly jumped. “Please tell me,” I rushed in embarrassment for startling him, “who wrote that story you were talking about and what is it called?”

“Leaf by Niggle. J.R.R. Tolkien.” he said.

I thanked him and rushed back to my seat to write it down. I had never heard of Tolkien. I had not even never heard of The Lord of the Rings.

I forgot to get the pastor’s name and had to go to the student affairs office the next day to see what information they had on him. They told me his name was Timothy Keller and that he had a church called Redeemer. Not long after, I started attending. It was a small church of about 250 on the upper East side that only met in the evenings. (They couldn’t meet in the mornings because of another church that met there.) It was not a good time for me as that was the only time practice rooms were open on Sundays, but I really wanted to hear more about the arts. A number of years after that, I sometimes played the organ in worship in the mornings when they moved to the bigger venue of Hunter College Auditorium. And I invited Keller (with other Intervarsity students) to speak numerous times at Columbia University, the other school I went to. (One Good Friday gathering in the lobby of my dorm, John Jay Hall, was especially powerful! At that time, I was a premed student and he addressed all 40 in the room as premed students, from the viewpoint of Luke as a doctor. I think I can repeat that whole talk to you verbatim…)

Over the years, I gained a vision for world missions and the city and the arts and how the gospel applies to all of life. I read every book he quoted as I rode the 1 and 9 subway lines commuting back and forth between Juilliard and Columbia every day for classes. I heard him speak at NYU and the Columbia Law School and many secular venues in the city. In 2005, because of this background with Redeemer, I got pulled into helping to start a church in downtown Tokyo through City to City.

With Tim’s passing from cancer a month ago, I will never get to tell him, “Thank you! I got my single dorm room!” No doubt, that would have been perplexing. Fortunately, I did get to thank him after one of his talks in Memphis for how he (unknowingly) led me into a life of world missions. His response, “Wow… Thank you… How do you respond to something like that…”

I am so thankful for him and his ministry. I will continue to share what he taught me, sitting under his teaching live for those six years in the 90s and many of his talks and books since. I will continue to encourage artists in far-flung corners of the world as he encouraged me all those years ago as a young and foolish college student.

Christ works in ways far beyond we realize, but one day we will be joined with him in heaven and will find our “leaf” finished and perfected. In the meantime, we can be assured of this. God uses the little things to build his kingdom for the sake of his glory, even speaking to a small group of musicians who would rather be anywhere else practicing.

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48. Sake

Welcome to the Art Life Faith. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Well, a lot of amazing things have been happening here in Tokyo these past few weeks. We’ve had five interns come from different parts of the United States. And we’ve been praying for almost a year that God would work through them, that he would help open up our church again after this horrendously long lockdown of COVID, and also to bring some healing to our church. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen. Stay tuned because I’m looking forward to sharing many of these stories with you in future episodes.

But for now, I’d like to continue this little streak we’ve been having on Japanese food, this time to talk about the quintessential Japanese drink known as sake or rice wine.

Koji Hanabuchi / Getty Images

“Kanpai!”

We called in a loud voice together as we clinked our little ceramic cups. This was my very first experience of sake and I really didn’t know what to make of it. It was strong, but not too strong. It was sweet, but not too sweet. It was cold, but not too cold. And it seemed to match the lightly-fried food of tempura perfectly.

This was also my very first home-cooked meal in a Japanese home. We were on a two-week missions trip giving concerts in various locations, and this was also the first opportunity for me to meet the various friends she had made during her gap year between high school and college. She had lived in Japan for a year and then again the following summer. And so here we were in this home, with a family that knew her very well but didn’t know me at all, and they were extremely welcoming. They served us tempura, rice, miso soup, grated Japanese radishes—in proportions more than we could eat in many meals—and, of course, they served a huge bottle of sake.

The second time I tried sake was while on a trip as the only native English speaker with a local Japanese public school for a weekend camp to teach English. The lead teacher, my host, really wanted me to try amazake, a sweet rice wine that was well-known in that region. You know that one of the rules of being a good missionary is to accept whatever you are offered to eat or drink. Anyway, in this case too, I had never had anything like it. It had the consistency of drinkable yogurt or perhaps even a milkshake. It was pure white with particles of rice in it that reminded me of snow.

Other times, I remember being served sake by my hosts after various concerts I gave, or by friends as we sat having a picnic under cherry trees during the peak of cherry blossom viewing season. Every time, sake was a big part of their hospitality, a drink from large bottles meant to be shared in community.

I find it fascinating that the fermented and distilled drinks in each area of the world so match the raw materials and kinds of yeast that naturally grow in that climate. For example, Japan has rice wine or nihonshu, literally “alcohol of Japan.” Belgium has Belgian beer, which is famous for various styles that come from open-air fermentation with tastes specific to that region. Scotland has scotch and Scottish ale. Portugal has port. Spain has sherry. Mexico has tequila. Russia has vodka. Jamaica has rum. And there are so many more examples. The list is really, really long. There seem to be as many fermented and distilled drinks in the world as there are places, and in many of those cases the nations actually become part of the name because it is so unique to that region.

All of these drinks are a gift from God, a way to celebrate his goodness in creation. Listen to these words from Psalm 104:14–15.

“You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man.”

And how about Isaiah 25:6?

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples, a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.”

Or Matthew 26:29, when Jesus promises to drink wine with his disciples in heaven.

“I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

One of the earliest heresies of Christianity, Gnosticism, taught that the body and the material things of this world were bad. But the second-century Christian leader, Irenaeus, countered this teaching by talking about, among other things, wine. He wrote,

“The days will come when vines come up each with ten thousand branches and on each branch ten thousand twigs and on each twig ten thousand shoots and on each shoot ten thousand grapes, and each grape when pressed will give twenty-five measures of wine. And when one of the saints picks a cluster, another will shout, ‘I am a better cluster; pick me, bless the Lord through me.’”

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book V.33.3, in Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons (New York: Routledge, 1997), 178–179.

Irenaeus lived in the south of France, where grapes and wine were plentiful. I wonder. If he had lived in Japan, would he have described the wonders of heaven through sake instead? When we gather together at the table of heaven, don’t we expect to find not only wine, but all the fermented drinks of this world? And among them, sake will surely have its place with big bottles to be shared with the whole community.

But there’s even more to it, to how sake tells the gospel story. Think about fermentation. Fermentation is about disintegration. The yeast eat away at the sugars in the grains. They digest them until they’re gone. But through this “suffering” of the rice, through this disintegration, the drink tastes better, is better for you, and lasts a long time. And in the end, you have more yeast than when you first started, for the next batch and the next batch. Fermentation is about disintegration and death turned into abundance and flourishing and life.

After the death of my mother last year, I was cleaning out her house and found a bottle of wine that had been hidden in the cool of the basement … for decades. No year was listed, but it very well could have been from her honeymoon since she only kept alcohol from the most special occasions. I considered drinking it but wondered, Was it toxic? Would it kill me? Was it even possible to eat or drink something older than me?

Carefully, I opened the bottle, poured some of the liquid in a glass, and lifted it to my mouth, ready to spit it out in an instant. And you know what? It was good! In fact, after all these years, the wine was probably even better than when it was first made.

By the way, I also found a bottle of Coca-Cola in the basement. It also didn’t have a date, but I recognized it from a trip our family had taken to the Caribbean almost 40 years before. I tried to drink that one as well, but I’m afraid it didn’t age quite so well…

I shared this story recently at one of our gatherings with a woman who is not yet a Christian, and she told me how moving she thought this story was. But you know what I find really moving is the fact that Jesus’s first miracle was to turn water into wine. He turned fresh spring water into a well-aged drink. Jesus chose this symbolism at a wedding to show how he remakes all the disintegration of this world into something better than it was before.

Jesus gives these miraculous pointers to the kingdom of heaven to every nation on this planet. I look forward to that day when in the greatest of all feasts, Jesus will prepare for us some of the best nihonshu, the best sake, in quality and quantity far beyond our wildest imaginations.

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith podcast. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time.”

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47. Nukazuke — A Taste of Grace

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast, bringing this to you live from Tokyo. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

We host Art Life Faith gatherings every month. One reason we started this podcast was so that you could hear some of those stories. Most of the time, we gather in pretty small rooms, so even if you were here with us in Tokyo, only so many of you would be able to fit. Well, the other day, we gathered in a home in the southern part of Tokyo known as Meguro. It was an old home. You know it’s an old home when you have to lean down to pass through the doorways. Unfortunately, one time I didn’t lean down far enough, and I knocked myself clear to the ground. I hit that door frame really hard. In fact, I still have a bruise, now, on the top of my head a couple of weeks later.

The owner of the house gave us a little tour, which was pretty cool, explaining various parts and its history. He grew up in the house when it was surrounded by fields. It’s hard to imagine that now with Tokyo being so full of buildings. But one day developers came in and built up a rectangular grid of new straight streets with homes alongside it, leaving this house buried in the backyard of others. You have to pass through what felt like a secret narrow passageway between two homes in order to get to the house. But it was beautiful, covered in greenery, opening into a well-kept Japanese garden, and then the living room with sliding doors that opened up into the garden.

The home had one of those traditional kotatsu, a dropped floor under a table where you could put a pan of hot coals during the cold winter months and then surround it with a thick blanket to keep in the heat. Of course, nowadays most homes with a kotatsu at all use electricity. The walls had interesting decorations on them with bamboo screens and traditional wall hangings. And you should have seen the staircase to the second floor! It was so steep and narrow. You wouldn’t want to fall down those stairs!

Then he showed us a panel in the floor of the kitchen.

“This is where we keep the nukadoko,” the owner said. “If the whole house was on fire, we had to bring that with us.”

“Nuka…doko?” I asked, shy about not knowing that word.

“Oh, that’s where we keep the haha no aji,” he said with a smile, “the flavor of mom.”

The flavor of mom? That sounded a little sketchy to me. I obviously still had no idea what he was talking about, so he went on to explain. Okay, so apparently, nukadoko is a mixture of rice bran, salt, and water, where cucumbers, carrots, radishes, and other vegetables could be put in to make a specific kind of pickle called nukazuke. It has to be stirred daily to prevent the growth of mold and allow fermentation to continue to happen. And here is the interesting part. It has to be stirred by hand. The yeast in the fermentation comes solely through the hands of mom in the kitchen and can be passed down from generation to generation. This is the reason why it is called haha no aji, the flavor of mom. It is literally the taste of mom, but not only mom, but grand-mom and great grand-mom as well. It is nothing less than the taste of home. And the flavors are unique to every single household. Daughters take part of the yeast culture with them when they marry and start their own households, continuing the tradition of nukadoko.

As he was explaining this to me, I thought, wow, what a great picture of God’s work in our lives. All of us are in a fermentation bed of sorts, stuck in the damp and the dark. Everything around us would quickly mildew and rot if not for God’s daily care in sticking his hands into our mess and stirring. Through his work in our lives, we don’t lose heart, but can be renewed day by day. We are being prepared for an eternal weight of glory through the troubles and challenges we face every day. Each is different, but so are the stories of God’s grace in our lives.

“We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” (2 Corinthians 4:16–17, ESV)

In a nukadoko, vegetables are preserved. They break down. They “suffer,” but this suffering ultimately turns them into something that is healthier, tastes better, and lasts so much longer.

God sticks his hands into a world which is quickly falling apart. He prevents the mold and mildew of anger, bitterness, and despair from taking over our lives. He builds a place where we can flourish in the midst of our brokenness. He cares for us in more ways than we’ll ever know.

God gives us megumi no aji, a taste of grace. He gives us a taste of our heavenly home. And every time we take a bite, we see God delighting in us and rejoicing over us in the midst of his preparation.

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith podcast. Check out my website, www.rogerwlowther.com, to see a picture of nukazuke and a transcription of this episode. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time.”

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46. Kaiseki Dining

Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, coming to you live from Tokyo. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Well, last week we had a team retreat in the mountains of Karuizawa, about a two-hour drive northwest of Tokyo. It really was a great time to get together before all the busyness of the coming months. As a whole team of artists, we’re always trying to figure out what it means to be team as we live in three different cities, work at different churches, send our kids to different schools, and make different kinds of art. In fact, two people at the retreat had never even met each other in person. So we spent a lot of time just listening to each other, praying for one another, and continuing this process of how best to encourage one another.

At the retreat, we also saw my pastor, Rev. Fukuda. I haven’t said too much about this in the podcast so far, but Fukuda-san, who planted the church that I work at, stepped down from Grace City Church just last month. There’s a lot of reasons he left. His term with the church was over. He was grieving the death of his oldest son. He had some health problems. But probably the most hurtful was some ongoing opposition from just a few very vocal critics asking him to step down. It’s been really hard, not just for the Fukudas, but also for me and my family who’ve been with them planting this church since the very beginning and are good friends with them. I share all this with you because it’s a pretty common story in the mission field and one that’s not easy for missionaries to navigate wisely.

Anyway, he and his wife, Michiru, happened to be in Karuizawa, so we asked them to lead our team in a devotional time. It was so good and encouraging for all of us. He really is a great leader and teacher, and we’re going to continue to miss him dearly.

Now, back in the mountains of Karuizawa, it reminded me of an experience I want to share with you. There’s this restaurant my wife and I were treated to in our very first year of language school in those mountains. Last week when we were there for the retreat, I tried to drive by the restaurant just to see if it was still there. Unfortunately, though, it had closed down. This was 18 years ago after all. It’s too bad, though, because that one night we spent there has haunted me all these years later. It was a restaurant for kaiseki dining, perhaps the most representative of all traditional Japanese meals, but also probably one of the least known to foreigners.

Let me share a scripture verse, and then I’ll share this story with you.

“On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines.” (Isaiah 25:6)

Deep in the shadows of the mountains and autumn leaves, red paper lantern faintly illuminated the entrance to a traditional Japanese restaurant. The roar of a river filled our ears as it plummeted down the cliff next to the road. The air was moist and cold, as was typical for that time of the year.

Entering the restaurant, my young sons ran to the side of a small wooden tank full of large fish. It was placed alongside two small waterfalls and a large stone cistern full of water and a ladle for washing hands. The kimono-clad hostess motioned for us to take off our shoes and leave them by the entrance. And then she led us back to our Japanese “father” and “mother,” an older couple we met during our first year at language school. They had often invited us to enjoy the best of Japanese culture. And this time we were being treated to the heart of Japanese dining known as kaiseki.

We took our seats on zabuton cushions on the floor and pushed our knees just under the edge of the table. There was no menu to look at because today’s selection would be omakase, left to the discretion of the chef. The first dish was sashimi, bite-sized pieces of raw fish, perhaps from one of the fish we saw earlier swimming in the entrance. The sashimi was beautifully arranged on a long slender plate with salmon eggs, edible flowers, and a leaf. The restaurant was not large with few other customers, so I worried what they would do with the rest of the fish, but that also made the experience that much more special.

Plates continued to come out one after another: soup, a different kind of sashimi, a small grilled fish, simmered vegetables, lightly fried tempura, chawan mushi (an egg custard with vegetables, not like the sweet custards I’m used to), rice, tsukemono pickles, miso soup, and a seasonal dessert. We also enjoyed a locally made plum wine.

I wanted to ask about each dish, but I had not been in the country for even a year. My Japanese was simply not good enough. I did have the distinct feeling, though, that everything was chosen for a reason. The flowers, leaves, and mushrooms most likely came from the mountain forest surrounding us. Everything seemed to reflect that fall season.

Dishes came out slowly and in small portions so I could focus on the beauty of each one. There was so much diversity and so many flavors. I learned later that exactly five elements were built into that meal, and each of those was divided into exactly five parts. Let me list them for you. There were five colors: red, yellow, green, black (or purple), and white. There were five flavors: salty, sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy. There were five ways to prepare the meal: raw, simmered, grilled, fried, and steamed. There were five key ingredients: sugar, salt, vinegar, soy sauce, and miso. And lastly, all five of the senses were engaged: taste, texture, sight, sound, and smell.

I’ve often seen sci-fi films showing people swallowing pills for all their nutritional needs, but I can’t imagine that ever happening. Can you? It’s true, food could all be served the same way—same colors, same taste, same textures—but how boring would that be? Our world is filled with an abundance of different kinds of foods and an infinite number of ways to prepare and serve them. And through this limitless variety of food, we get a taste of the limitless abundance of God.

This abundance of food on earth is just a dim reflection of the abundance that we find in heaven. There may be four seasons in most regions of the world, but there are twelve in heaven, for the tree of life bears “twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month” (Revelation 22:2). We will enjoy each crop in turn, wondering at its beauty. And each time we taste that delicious food, we’ll be satisfied, assured of the goodness of God.

The meal my family enjoyed with our Japanese friends was not just delicious, it was glorious. Everything felt good and right with the world.

I was so engaged in the food and the conversation, I didn’t think about anything else, until my wife asked, “Where’s our child?”

“Isn’t he over there . . .” I said, turning to the corner where he had been quietly looking at a book, but he was gone. “I’ll go find him,” I hurriedly continued. I guessed he had gone back to the entrance to look at the fish.

Well, I found him all right, with ladle in hand and an intense look of concentration on his face. You’ll never believe what he was doing. He was carefully pouring water into each of the shoes of the customers by the entrance. And by the look of things, he’d been at it for quite some time.

“Eastin!” I cried a little too loudly, then glanced around to see if anyone was watching. I turned a couple of the shoes over to see if any of the water would come out, but it was too late. The shoe had already soaked all of it up. Not knowing what else to do, I quickly scooped up the little troublemaker, placed the ladle back on top of the stone cistern, and headed back to our table.

“Oh, good. You found him,” my wife said when we returned.

I paused, not sure how best to explain to my Japanese friends the predicament we were in. Finally, I said in English, “He found the stone cistern . . . and the ladle . . . and the shoes. . .”

“What?!” she exclaimed.

Apologizing profusely, I then tried to explain in Japanese, while gesturing with my hands. But rather than responding with shock or anger, my Japanese father and mother burst out laughing. Even if we returned home with feet a lot wetter than when we started, nothing, it seemed, could ruin the mood of that evening.

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45. Cow Pie Water

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast, live from Tokyo. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

This episode, I’d like to take a break from our regularly scheduled program to tell you a strange story from my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail with my wife, Abi. It comes from my book that I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned on this podcast. Actually, it was the first book I tried to self-publish, and strangely, it’s been my most popular book so far. With over 100 reviews on Amazon, a lot of people are reading this book who I’ve never met. I’ve also given it the strangest title of any book I’ve written, called Cow Pie Water. What do you think? Does this title engage you? Does it make you want to read it and open its pages? Probably not, right? Cow Pie Water. Anyway, this book’s a collection of trail journals my wife, Abi, and I wrote as we hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, 2,659 miles through the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington.

During the hike, we wanted people to be able to fall along with us, so we tried to write down some things that happened along the way. There was not a lot of downtime. Mostly we were just hiking, eating, sleeping . . . hiking and eating some more, trying to average 26 miles a day. But one of us ended up writing while the other was cooking. Then when we went into town, we sent the papers to a friend who put the journals up on a website. At one point, that website disappeared, but I still wanted people to be able to read these journals, so I made this book.

Anyway, the following recounts the story from which I named the book. It’s a meditation on thirst and how God provides for us through it.

“They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat down on them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water.” (Isaiah 49:10)

All 40 plastic gallon jugs were completely empty. I lifted each just to be sure. Sweat evaporated from my face so quickly that all I felt were deep layers of salt crusted on my skin. Hot wind blew in my face as if from a hairdryer. Knee-high bushes and cacti did little to provide shade.

Abi and I were hiking across the Mojave Desert, a 37-mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail, famous for its high temperatures and lack of water. Several hikers in the previous town assured us we could depend on this water cache provided by trail angels. But they were wrong. We didn’t carry enough water not because we were foolish, but because we physically couldn’t. The weight of the water alone would have been more than both of our backpacks combined, and we had no practical way of carrying it. I mean, would you carry shopping bags full of water 37 miles through the desert?

Trying not to get discouraged, we kept going, hoping for another water cache not far down the trail. There was one after an hour. Empty. Every single bottle lay on its side, shaking in the wind, held together by a rope that snaked through the handles.

More than a little concerned, we picked up our pace, and pretty soon we passed yet another empty water cash. And then another. And then another. And then we stopped, and I put my backpack down. In this dry heat, we were never going to make it. We were still so weak from dehydration just the week before when we found a dead horse in our only water supply for that day.

“Well, this isn’t good,” I said, trying to be funny at the magnitude of the understatement. But Abi didn’t laugh.

We looked to the horizon in all directions. Not a single building or paved road in sight. Sand, sand, and more sand. Apparently, the name Mojave means “beside the water,” a combination of the Native American word aha meaning water and macave meaning along or beside. This desert definitely needed a new name.

I pulled out my map and found what was labeled as an unreliable water source about a 30-minute hike off the trail. I really didn’t want to add a whole extra hour of hiking, especially not knowing if there was anything there at all. But what choice did I have? I left my backpack with Abi and went in search of it, filter and water bottles in hand.

Why are we so dependent on water? Why are our bodies so weak without it? We usually think of ourselves as stronger, yet I know from this experience and others like it that just a few hours in the sun without water is very debilitating. A few days, and you’re dead. Nothing is more essential to life than water. I have a whole new perspective of stories about thirst in the Bible. When we don’t have water, we don’t just feel thirsty, we feel forsaken. We feel alone. We feel like no one cares.

“The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the Lord will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs.” (Isaiah 41:17–18)

In our current situation, this was the ultimate picture of hope, a perfect picture of heaven. Deserts turned into pools of water. Parched ground turned into springs. We can have this water because Jesus cried on the cross, “I thirst” (John 19:28). We can have this water because Jesus was forsaken (Matthew 27:46). One day, we will never know thirst again.

After walking for what seemed like forever, I heard the faint mooing of cows and saw trees that were actually taller than I was, and my hopes began to rise. Where there’re cows and trees, there is water. But then I saw the cows, and my heart sank. They stood there right in the middle of the water source, really nothing more than a mud puddle filled with cow pies.

Cautiously, I inched forward, trying not to spook the cows or ruin my sneakers in the filth, and stuck my hands into the muck. I really don’t want to give you this visual image, but it was like, actually it was exactly like, sticking my hands into a stopped-up toilet. I put the intake tube of the filter into the muck and started to pump, clogging it almost immediately. It took all my strength just to keep pumping. Then I stopped to stare suspiciously at this yellow water accumulating in my bottle.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said to the cows staring at me. They probably thought the same thing. “Thanks a lot.” And then I took a sip. I’d like to tell you that it really wasn’t that bad, but it was. It was warm and metallic and . . . a little hard to describe, so maybe I’ll just leave the rest up to your imagination. But I can say this. On the trail, I often drank from muddy puddles, but this was different. There was definitely more than just spring water in that bottle.

Trying not to think about it too much, I drank some more. In my distant memory, in a faraway magical land, I had running water at the turn of a faucet. Now, it was hard to imagine that such places ever existed. All I had was cow pie water.

I pumped and pumped and drank as much as I could, bringing back full bottles to Abi. As I described the source of the water to her, she opened the lid to sniff the warm yellow liquid.

“You really drank this?” she asked.

“It won’t kill you,” I said, and then added, “probably.”

“It smells,” she whined, and then drank, downing half a liter before passing it back to me.

We continued our hike with renewed resolve. We hiked all through that night and long into the next day, dehydrated and weak, desperately in search of water.

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith podcast. Check out my website, www.rogerwlowther.com, for a transcription of this episode. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne. See you next time.”

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44. Conversations through Art with Mayuko Shono

This is the Art Life Faith podcast, live from Tokyo, Japan, where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith, especially in the context of foreign missions. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Today, I’d like to share a conversation we had with Mayuko Shono or Mayu for short. Her story is not new to this podcast. In fact, our very first podcast back in July 2020 was about Mayu and her Love Your Neighbor mask project right in the midst of the COVID epidemic. Well, she’s been really busy since creating art, hosting events, and connecting people. This past January, I heard Mayu speak at the IQ Café in Shibuya, one of the coolest hangout places for young people. The front walls of the café were all made of glass and overlooked a really busy intersection. Clearly, in every way, we were downtown amidst the hustle and bustle of the busiest, most populated city on the planet. And there was Mayu in the heart of the heart of the city speaking passionately about her artwork, and speaking passionately about Christ to a group that was mostly not Christian.

To draw people in, Mayu began the time with live painting, including a dramatic toss of glitter onto canvas and into the air. It was pretty cool. Everyone was engaged. Everyone was having a great time. And then she seamlessly went into sharing her faith by talking about her other artwork.

Mayu is really good at talking about God in ways that are engaging in any environment, but especially in really urban settings like that one. Whether it be a café, or street corner where she was handing out her masks, or a really cool mall in Harajuku, where I saw her speak in December. Now, Harajuku is one stop from Shibuya Station, still technically part of Shibuya, and, in my opinion, the coolest part of Shibuya. In Harajuku, she held this pop-up shop for two weeks through Christmas, and it quickly became a hot spot for where God was working in Tokyo during the Christmas season.

Let me try to paint the picture for you. You’re walking through a really busy shopping district. There’s nothing Christian anywhere around. Then you suddenly come upon her store in the main place that people are hanging out. There Mayu sat, in a display window, painting and talking with everyone who came by. And there were a lot of people coming into that store, a constant flow of young people. My two youngest boys, ages 9 and 13, helped out for a day by handing out cool gospel tracks that Mayu made. Japanese people usually throw things like that out, but hers were prints of her art and so were very engaging. People held on to them and flipped to the back, where there was a conversation about the true meaning of Christmas. There was a group of young women coming down the hall and they saw my boys and kept saying, “Kawaii! Kawaii!” (“Oh, they’re so cute.”) My boys, as you can imagine, were so embarrassed. They ran away and back into the store, “Mommy!” And the group of women followed them inside. After that, my boys got a lot more bold and better at their job interacting with people.

There’s this image in Japan that Christianity is just for Western people or for old people. But Mayu completely shatters those images. She shatters that image of a boring Christian who’s wearing very serious looking clothes and shouting at people while holding a Bible. There was Mayu, sitting in a display window in the best of what is attractive to young people, making her art and talking about Jesus.

One of the nearby shop owners was first attracted to Mayu’s nativity scene that she had painted and placed in the entrance. “Are you a Christian?” she asked. Well, this question led into many other questions and great conversations in the days that followed. This shop owner was especially interested in the Fruits of the Spirit series from Galatians, asking about the meaning of each of the words. There was also another shop owner who visited Mayu at her gallery across town, Mina-tera, and they’re still in contact today. In fact, Mayu is still in contact with many of the people she met those two weeks at the pop-up shop. God was clearly working through her during that time, building relationships and sharing his good news of light and hope in a world that desperately needs it.

Anyway, I’d like for you to hear from Mayu herself. I’ve invited Alana Essex, a six-month intern we had on the show just a couple of episodes ago, to interact with Mayu about these things.

Alana

All right, Mayu, I have some very important questions for you. I really want to know, what was your favorite part about your recent pop-up shop?

Mayu

Good question. Well, there are many favorite parts about that event, but I think my favorite part was that I got to meet many new people. People kept asking me about the story behind my painting and art. “Why did you create this?” And I got to answer their questions. So I was able to share the purpose and story behind my artwork very naturally. And I was able to share my … How do you say? Something like God has put in your heart? Yeah, God was working during that time.

Alana

Yeah, you also had a design that was on sweatshirts and T-shirts specific to Christmas that included the whole Jesus scene. Can you explain what that looks like?

Mayu

In Japan, Christmas is all about couples and Santa Claus, and people don’t know the real meaning of Christmas. So I wanted to create a space where people get to know and learn about the real purpose and meaning of Christmas. So I created this artwork about… How do you say this? I made a nativity scene drawing, and I displayed it at the pop-up shop. And people walked by and asked, “What’s this?” and, “Oh, is this the baby Jesus?” and I was like, “Yeah, how do you know?” And it just started the conversation. When some people walked by, they even asked me, “Are you Christian? Are you a Christian artist?” and I was like, “Yeah.” And some people told me they used to go to a Christian school when they were students, or that they went to church with their parents when they were little. And it just opened up unexpected conversations.

Alana

Is there any conversation you can think of that really stands out in your mind from all that?

Mayu

Yeah. So there are many different stores around my shop and one of the ladies from the store came to my shop to talk to me and she asked if she could take a picture of the nativity drawing. I was like, sure. And she said, “My mom is Christian and I want to share this with my mom because I’ve never seen a nativity scene in Japan during the Christmas season.” It was rare for her to see that. So she was excited and she took a picture. But she just kept coming to my store every day. And we just got along, and we became friends.

Alana

Was she a Christian too or just her mom?

Mayu

I think she didn’t have a personal relationship with God, but she said she felt at home when she messaged me after the event. It felt like home coming to my store. I think that’s because there were more than just me, but there were many Christians, missionary friends at the store helping me. So she felt at home and peace just being around us and talking to us. So it was very encouraging.

Alana

That’s such a gift, though, that you’re able to make a Japanese person through all your Christian art feel at home and that a Christian influence in their life is something that impacted them so much, to feel like they’re at home in your shop.

Mayu

Yeah. I had these paintings on the wall about the Fruits of the Spirit. Japanese people don’t really know the English words. So she asked me, “What does this mean?” And it was just natural to be able to share the gospel and share the meaning of each word. And she was so interested.

Alana

Yeah. It seemed like a lot of people were coming in there buying things that had Bible verses on them. But it’s just blowing my mind that they’re buying those things and giving them as gifts to people and not even aware that you’ve prayed over those things. That’s your artwork and it displays literally the nativity scene and all those Bible verses that point to Jesus in their heart for them and they’re unaware. One of my roommates bought things for her two friends who were having babies that had Bible verses on them. So many people were going in there buying what you had, and it was just so cool.

Mayu

Yeah, I think art has the power to do that. If my artwork had no color, if it’s a very old style, it wouldn’t attract young people in Japan. But I purposely create things, very colorful things, that attract the younger generation in Japan. I want to change the wrong understanding and impression of Christianity because art helped me to have a better understanding of who God is. I used to think being a Christian is very strict and boring. I thought it was all about following the rules, that you have to be the right person and go to church and everything. So I felt distant from Christianity. But art and music helped me to understand, how do you say…

Alana

Understand the gospel?…

Mayu

Yes, who Jesus is. There are many different types of Christian art and Christian music in America.

Alana

But not a lot in Japan?

Mayu

No.

Alana

Also, how did you get that space? You really got a good spot. It was basically a mall near Shinjuku and Harajuku. How did you even go about getting that space? And then how long did it take you to prep?

Mayu

So I had my first pop-up shop in Shibuya two years ago. And how I got that opportunity was through my online shop that I started during COVID when I started to make masks. In the very beginning, I started this brand called LYN (Love Your Neighbor) during the COVID season. I made a bunch of masks because we didn’t have enough masks here. I had a bunch of fabrics at home so I just started to make a bunch of colorful masks and I started to give them to my neighbors and friends, unconditionally. And I called this project Love Your Neighbor. I also made a little sticker that said, “You are loved.” And so, with this little note, I decided to give this mask to my friends. And I also made an Instagram account for this project because I wanted to post the pictures, and I wanted to give not just to my friends or family member who lived around my house but to anyone who needed a mask. So after I made these social media Instagram and Facebook accounts, people started to message me, “Can you send me this mask? I need two masks. I need five masks. Can you send me 10?” And I made more and more. But during that time, I was not able to go out and do things, so I really enjoyed doing this.

Alana

Was it all free?

Mayu

Yes, but it was hard for me to buy new strings and fabric. So people started to donate their fabrics. My friends who lived around my neighborhood were like, “Mayu, I left a bag in front of your door. You can use that fabric.” And people just started to give me a bunch of fabric and strings. So I was like, “Okay, God, this is my mission. I need to make more masks.” So yeah, that’s how Love Your Neighbor (LYN) started. But after a while, we had enough masks at the store, so I didn’t have to make any more masks. But I still wanted to continue this Love Your Neighbor Ministry. So I was praying, “God, what do you want me to do next?” And the idea just came to me to make T-shirts and mug cups and all different products. When I was living in America, I was working as an artist and selling paintings and prints because it’s common for American people to display artwork at home because houses are big. But in Japan, people don’t really buy big paintings or wall art. So I decided to make T-shirts, something easy for Japanese people to purchase. Because my passion is to share the message about my artwork. So somehow I wanted to…how do you say…Hand out? Yeah, hand out my artwork. So I decided to make an online shop called LYN, Love Your Neighbor, because my passion is to reach out to young Japanese people. And my art style is more…how do you say…a better fit in Laforre, the mall where we met in Harajuku, so I just kept applying but they never responded. I didn’t give up, and I just kept sending emails and kept trying. And then in October, they replied to me and told me, “Come to the office on this day” and I was like…

Alana

Wow, that’s your big break!

Mayu

So I had the first meeting with them in October and they asked me, “Do you think you can do it in December?” and I was like, if it’s the Christmas season then I get to share the real meaning of Christmas, so I said, “Yes, I will do it.” And I started to prepare for this event.

Alana

Wow. So you only had two months?

Mayu

Yeah.

Alana

You were prepping the whole time?

Mayu

Yes, every day. I mean, I rested, but yeah. I wanted to do it professionally. I wanted to do it well because as a creator, as an artist, I think it’s important to…how do you say…think through how you share your artwork. For example, sushi. If your sushi is on a paper plate, it doesn’t look good. But if it’s on the nice Japanese traditional osara plate, it looks delicious. Same food, but depending on how you present it, how you show it, it is completely different. So I wanted to take my time to think about how I want how to set up the space. So I made a theme, color yellow concept for this event, and I started to prepare.

Alana

And it looked so professional. It looked like every other brand that was in there that had probably, I’m sure, done that before. And yours, I think yours stood out because it was so colorful because you love the colors and you made it yellow and bright and still included the Christmas concept and had Christmas-themed things. But your brand, LYN, stands out. It has that…I don’t know…I don’t know if it’s because you have that Christian gospel mindset, but it just shines. I just feels and looks so bright. And it brings in people…Yeah, I just think it looked so good.

Mayu

Yeah. I just want my motivation to be, as I said, to change a wrong understanding and impression, image of Christianity. So I wanted to make it unique and different and colorful. And I wanted to tell people, “Hey, I’m Christian. I’m weird. This is weird art. I’m different, but it’s okay.” Christians, it’s okay to be unique. It’s okay to be you. God still loves you. God created us all uniquely. I used to be very insecure about myself growing up in Japan. I’m tall, I’m big, taller than most of the boys at school. I didn’t like myself. I didn’t know I was beautiful. But when I went to America and heard the gospel, my Christian friend told me how God created us all uniquely and differently. And we’re all beautiful. God purposely made us unique. And we are all God’s beautiful masterpiece. And that really healed my heart and opened my eyes. So I actually made one painting about this story. It’s called Uniqueness. But yeah, I also displayed, exhibited this painting at the pop-up shop so that people could see it. And if people ask me about this painting, I get to share about this story how God healed my heart, how beautiful we are, because a lot of young people in Japan struggle with appearance and insecurity. People try to look like others. We want to become like beautiful American girls — blond hair, big eyes. But I just wanted to encourage people who walked by the pop-up shop that you are beautiful, you are valuable, you are special. You don’t need to look like others. Just be you, and we are loved.

Alana

Can you describe what that painting looks like?

Mayu

I don’t know how to describe the painting…

Alana

Well, there’re some faces on there. They all seem to have long noses…

Mayu

Yes, different shapes.

Alana

Yeah, different colors. It’s all very bright, very your style. Why did you do it?

Mayu

When I create something, I usually make an outline and prepare before I paint. But this piece, I didn’t prepare anything. I just prepared a huge white canvas and had my brush and paint and just went for it. I prayed like, God, I want to paint whatever you want me to paint, so please use me. I felt like I was worshiping. I was communicating, dancing with God while I was painting this piece. I just started with this figure in the middle. I call him boss because he’s the first guy I painted. But everyone is different and unique in different colors. And this artwork is completed together. If it’s just one guy, it’s boring. It’s not interesting. But this art is beautiful because everyone looks different. So all my paintings have a spiritual message behind them.

Alana

You also have one that’s the huge mural of 2022 with all the events of the big things that happened. Can you talk about that?

Mayu

Yes. After I accepted Christ, I became a Christian. I started to pray before I painted. My art style really changed after I became a Christian because then I created what God wanted me to create, not my own selfish desires or my own reasons. But yeah, this new painting that I just did was all the things that happened these past few years. Starting from COVID, and the Tokyo Olympics, and all the arguments. Every day when I turned on the news in Japan, there were always arguments about whether to do the Tokyo Olympics or not. I was so tired of watching all the negative news. Yeah, COVID and people losing jobs, suicide, depression. The recent news was not just in Japan, but shooting at schools in America, natural disasters, the thing that happened in Korea in Itaewon (when 159 people were crushed to death). Yeah, just unexpected crazy things happened these past few years. When I actually started painting this, Mr. Abe, the Prime Minister, he was still alive. But while I was painting, trying to complete this work, he got shot. So I also added that as well. And I just painted all the shocking news, things that happened these past few years. But not only the negative things.

Alana

There were cool things in there, too.

Mayu

Yeah, I mean, all the athletes…

Alana

And you had a big hand in the middle of it, too. Can you explain that?

Mayu

Yes. So this painting is called Chaos because this world is broken and things happen unexpectedly. So we can’t…In Japanese, I always say, “Kono yo niwa kitai dekinai.” Yeah, we can’t depend on anything in this world. This world will disappoint you because it’s broken. And we don’t understand. Even as a believer, I don’t understand why those things happen. It breaks my heart. People are still suffering who lost their kids in Itaewon, Korea, and from the natural disasters and shootings. It’s heartbreaking. But when we look up and when we keep our eyes on God, there is a hope and peace that we can’t explain. It’s indescribable. There is hope and peace in Christ. I experienced that in my personal life, too. I can’t explain by speaking. That’s why I paint. So I painted this strong, powerful hand coming from the sky. And I want people to see that. And even in this broken world, we can still find hope. And there is a hand who is wanting to help you, and unconditionally love you.

Alana

That was so cool. I love that painting.

Mayu

A lot of people asked me about that painting, and we all feel the same way as a human living in this world. So a lot of people agreed with what I said. Even people who haven’t accepted Christ or who don’t know God. I think as a human, we naturally seek for joy and hope and peace. So it was cool. I was able to connect deeply with many people. Even though it was my first time meeting them because of my painting and artwork, I was able to connect with them in a deeper way.

Roger

I really like the visual reminder of that big, strong hand. It was the biggest thing in the painting. It was very powerful. It was like God has the power to make things right in the midst of our chaos.

Mayu

Yes. Also in the middle of that painting, there is a baby, a naked baby in the middle. It’s also a reminder, we all start as a baby, no matter where you’re from, what nationality you are, we are family, we are the same human. We start as a baby. And we start to have a different story in life.

Alana

And you can say Jesus also was a baby. He came down and yet he also holds the whole world. He chose to come down and be just like us when he didn’t have to. He’s both.

Roger

He’s the greatest and the weakest in the midst of our chaos. There’s this little baby, and you’re like, “Oh, he’s going to get hurt!”

Mayu

“Help the baby!”

Alana

“Get him out of this world. Why is he in this?” But he did that for us to save us in the chaos. He came down into the chaos to do it when he didn’t have to. Such a cool message.

Roger

Yeah, I think that message that you give of God’s presence in our chaos, in our broken world, is especially powerful in Japan. Just knowing that God is not a foreign God. He’s not only a Western God. He’s not something we have to somehow bring here. But God is reaching down to the people of Japan, into our brokenness here and working. Whether you recognize him or not, he’s there. He wants to help us.

Mayu

What I love about art is if I’m just speaking about this without artwork, people would think I’m just a religious lady who’s trying to…I don’t know…What’s the word in English?

Alana

Trying to lure people in?

Mayu

Yeah. But art creates this natural conversation. When we are talking, we are looking at something and we are in this…bonding?

Alana

Yeah, it’s crazy how just looking at something can even resonate with emotions with someone else. Even if they don’t even understand why you painted it, they can have their own feelings that emerge just because of how they view it. Even looking at the one you did that shows people who all don’t fit the beauty standard and are all ugly in their own way. And it’s just a lovable painting. But someone could also have their own reason why they’re attached to it. And it could have a similar meaning, or it can just be something that they just resonate with in a different way. And it’s such a cool, powerful thing.

Mayu

It’s all by the grace of God. Yeah, I don’t know how he did it. I was surprised what happened during that event. I couldn’t…For a couple of weeks, I was like, God, what did you just do? I needed time to organize my mind and think about all the people I met and all the conversations I had. I felt God was there just using that space to encourage people because he loves ungodly people. He loves both godly and ungodly. It doesn’t matter. People on this Earth, everyone, he loves, he wants to rescue, he wants to take them to a better place. So it was cool and encouraging for me to see that. And it reminded me how much God loves Japan and Japanese people.

Roger

Thank you so much, Mayu, for sharing. That’s great.

Mayu

Thank you for having me.

Roger

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith podcast. Check out my website, www.rogerwlowther.com, to see some of Mayu’s artwork and get a transcription of this conversation. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time.”

https://www.instagram.com/mayukoshono/

https://loveneighbor.thebase.in/

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43. Anniversary of the 2011 Earthquake with Rachel Reese Kollmeyer

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Well, March 11, 2023 is the 12th anniversary of that devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck the nation of Japan, and a day that changed everything for me. During that time, I saw firsthand the power of the arts to bring hope and encouragement during really dark times. The people I worked with in the relief movement had lost everything—family members, friends, homes, jobs, entire towns. And during that time, people responded to the arts in ways I never dreamed possible. We knew people really needed food, water, and supplies. But it turns out they really needed beauty as well.

I’d like to share with you an excerpt from my book, Aroma of Beauty, which tells many stories from that time. This is taken from the audiobook version.

Food just after the tsunami was terrible. Every meal was treated like an emergency situation. Refugees and relief workers alike, we all lived off canned and instant foods. These may keep the body going for a day, but they sure lack the vitamins, nutrients, and life-giving beauty that we so desperately needed.

When we heard from survivors the kind of digestive problems they were now dealing with, our local Tokyo community was galvanized into action and began to plan our first takidashi cookout. Grocers donated rice, meat, and vegetables. Restaurants loaned equipment. My dentist even donated toothbrushes and toothpaste. A dozen people who had never been to the disaster area agreed to go as cooks and volunteers.

My wife Abi led a caravan of trucks and vans to the city of Ishinomaki. They came to a halt in a gravel lot cleared of debris, the telltale sign that people were taking shelter on the upper floors of nearby homes, stores, and buildings.

Fish and seaweed decayed in the sun. Piles of garbage lined roadsides with nowhere to go. Porta-potties and toilets overflowed. The stench was overwhelming, and every time we opened the doors of our trucks, we were overcome by the potency of it.

This must be what hell is like, Abi thought as she began to unload, trying to ignore the stench and not stare at the surrounding devastation.

Noisy generators powered the rice cookers. Industrial-sized propane burners roared underneath large pots of water. The volunteers cut meat and vegetables on plastic portable tables: pork, carrots, daikon radishes, shiitake mushrooms, and konnyaku gelatin strips—all the ingredients needed to make tonjiru soup.

As the food went into the pots, something beautiful began to happen. An aroma began to waft through the air, a pleasing smell unknown since the earthquake.

People began to line up from surrounding buildings—ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred people—and volunteers began to get worried. “What do we do? We still need more time!”

“It’s okay,” Abi said. “There hasn’t been a smell like this here for a very long time. Let’s enjoy it.”

Abi asked the musician who came with the group if he wouldn’t mind playing a bit. “I know it’s not an ideal spot,” she apologized, staring at the blocks of concrete and thick gooey mud. “And your audience isn’t exactly nicely grouped together.” The line of people went as far as they could see.
The musician pulled out his shakuhachi bamboo flute and began to play, slowly picking his way around the puddles and the mud as he walked down the line of people. The melodies of the flute and the aroma of the soup filled the air, washing away the stench, pointing to a world that cannot be overcome by decay and destruction.

The food was more than mere sustenance, and the music was more than mere entertainment, a way to pass the time while waiting in line. It was life-giving. An electrifying sense of hope, almost tangible, wafted through the air. It was the aroma of beauty.

Aroma may be temporary and only last a moment, but the more time we spent in the disaster area, the more urgently we felt its need. The aroma of beauty became a seawall against the black waves of despair that threatened us every day after that tsunami. It brought an unexpected joy with the promise that a better tomorrow would come.

An electrifying sense of hope, almost tangible, wafted through the air. It was the aroma of beauty.

That was a retelling of the story from which I got the title for the book. It really was a powerful time, and that power I witnessed can only come from God. Through the arts, God shared his aroma of beauty, the aroma of his kingdom, where every tear will be wiped away. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, and everything will be made new. God lovingly shares his goodness with us through the arts.

If you’d like to hear more of these stories, you can get them right now in the eBook version on Amazon for just $0.99 this weekend, March 10–13. Even if you already have a paper copy, I encourage you to check it out. You can also check out Pippy the Piano and the Very Big Wave, a children’s book I wrote based on one story from that time, also on sale.

Well, today I have the privilege of sharing a conversation I had with Rachel Reese Kollmeyer, who recently received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Rachel has a lot of experience as a missionary and as a musician, playing the violin in a number of countries. After graduating from college, she moved to the country of Peru, where she was heavily engaged in the musical life there. Among other things, she helped lead a Bach festival and a music competition. When that term ended, she moved to Japan to join our Community Arts missionary team and work in the very same area where the tsunami hit, in those early days when beauty was needed most. She also worked with us for a time in Tokyo and flew down to Kumamoto in southern Japan again to do relief work through the arts.

Now let’s turn to my conversation with Rachel.

Roger

So, Rachel, it’s wonderful having you on this podcast because there are things that you have experienced that I really want our listeners to be able to share in those stories as well. Can we first let’s talk a little bit about that time just after 2011. Huge earthquake, huge tsunami, the fear of radiation. And you moved right into the middle of all that. What was that like?

Rachel

Well, I remember I was so excited because I’m really passionate about the music and how it can bring healing and my faith and how that’s all interconnected. And I remember I thought my dreams had come true. I moved there. I’m doing what I love.

Roger

Did you have any fear of moving into that area that meant you couldn’t protect yourself from all of the destruction? It wasn’t like you were somewhere then coming in for a short time, but to be in the midst of it, living, sleeping every night there, I mean.

Rachel

It was hard because it was dark there. There was a lot of pain and suffering. But I think growing up as a Christian, pain and suffering is part of what we’re promised in this world that’s broken, and we have hope because God became flesh and he experienced that suffering. So I knew I wasn’t going into it alone. I had the Holy Spirit’s presence with me, and I worked with a group of people there. But yeah, there was definitely some fear.

Roger

What was your living situation like? Were you in one of those homes that were kind of being repaired or you in something like a prefab thing?

Rachel

Yeah. When I think back on that, I sometimes wonder, like, how you live through it. I stayed in a home that was partially repaired from the tsunami. For example, the bathroom door was made of plywood. Right. There was no central heating or electricity. So in the winter, I remember it was like October and people had my roommates had left and it was getting really cold. I was like, I don’t know how to keep warm in this place. And I raided the closets and found some huge it looked like a heating device, but I didn’t know how to use it. And I kind of missionary was like, okay, I’ll take you in my truck to buy some kerosene to put in there. And he taught me how to use it. But it was tough at first, I’m sure.

Roger

Yeah. And you mentioned darkness too. I mean, physically it’s a dark place because it’s so far northright, isn’t like dark. Most of it quite the day hard too.

Rachel

The sun sets at like 330 or four in the winter, and then you come home to a freezing cold house because there’s no central heat.

Roger

And I know you like sunlight. I love sunlight. I’m sure that could not have been easy. So and here you are. You’re moving into this and you’re moving in as a musician, as an artist. Was there really a role for music in that situation? Or was it more like this? Need people to rebuild homes and, you know, help make sure that getting food where it needed to go and things like that?

Rachel

At this point, people had learned they were living in temporary housing. A lot of people had food. I think there was fear that they would be forgotten. They themselves didn’t really know what the next step was. So going in as a musician was so powerful because, especially for Japanese, the value placed on beauty is so high. And to live in these places that were only supposed to last for one year, the houses weren’t very nice. It was plastic. And of course, the people had lost everything, so they didn’t have their own maybe memories or photos or things that brought them joy.

Roger

Right. And they were basically like living in parking lot looking things, right. These things are just lined up in rows and let’s park our house here, sort of thing.

Rachel

Oh, yeah. And so when you go in, music just takes you to another realm. It takes the listener there. It takes you there. So it kind of transported us. I would go there with a friend, maybe, or at the local pastor. We’d set up our keyboard and I’d get out my violin and suddenly those little rooms would be changed in some way. It was like we weren’t sitting in this place of destruction and pain anymore. There was suddenly hope.

Roger

That’s beautiful. So the music you played in these rooms, it was like a different you said transport people in a different world, almost. How did the room change when music was played?

Rachel

At the time, I was still getting to know Japanese culture, so I couldn’t read body language very well, and I was just starting to learn the language. But you saw smiles and laughs and people were happy to be there. At this concert, I remember playing with a friend, Julianne, a violinist, and we were just full of joy playing together. And I think that transmits to the audience too. Oh, we’re playing music we love. We both grew up playing the Suzuki method, and then we met in this area and played together the things that we grew up playing.

Roger

Yeah, I bet that brought energy into that situation. Because there were often common rooms, right, that people in the temporary homes, they could leave and kind of meet and there was nothing else going on. These people had no jobs because everything was gone. And so to have music was one way to bring life into that situation, for sure.

Rachel

And a lot of these people were retired, so they didn’t have a job to go to, or maybe a lot of their community was gone. I remember talking to some people, and they may have lived in a certain neighborhood with those neighbors. And then once the tsunami came, maybe half of people weren’t living anymore. And then they were displaced. They were just put in this government assigned housing with a totally different group of people they didn’t know. So trying to have these community events to help people get to know each other was also so important.

Roger

Yeah, that’s good. What specific stories do you have of how music helped you personally connect with people there?

Rachel

Well, in Japan, the culture that is so private, I was really struck after concerts that people were willing to talk to me and tell me some of their stories. Some people, of course, were very quiet, and they seemed still traumatized, like they didn’t want to talk, but they were there, and I think that was powerful. But then other people, it was like when they retold their story, in a way, that person was still alive in their memory and the memory of someone else. For example, one person I talked to, and I made a mistake. Honestly, I asked her. I was trying to connect with her. I was like, do you have any children? And she was like, Well, I had a daughter, and she was pregnant, but she was washed away in the tsunami.

Roger

Wow. Yeah, that’d be hard. Yeah, I remember. Fortunately, this story ended better, but after one of my concerts, a man was telling me about how he was upstairs when the wave hit, but didn’t realize that his wife was downstairs. Like, she was able to make it home just as the wave hit, and it was filling the downstairs, and there was nothing she could do but climb on top of the refrigerator. And when he came down in the morning, he found her up there, extremely cold, because it was like snowing outside, and she was soaking wet, and she was injured, but she was alive. And he’s, like, just telling me that story. Wow. Stories of survival like that are just hard to believe, to imagine.

Rachel

It’s incredible.

Roger

I know that you were teaching a young lady. Can you tell me about that?

Rachel

Yes. Cynatron was a piece of light. Every week when she came for her lesson, her family lost everything in the tsunami. They lived on the beach, and they couldn’t afford to buy an instrument after they had lost everything they were trying to replace, like even school clothes or books. So we gave her violin and she started lessons, and she was extremely shy at first, and I took it as my personal goal to try to make her laugh and smile and I wanted her to enjoy violin. So eventually I taught her a Miyazaki theme and also a beloved Japanese song called Fudosato, which is very nostalgic, like a coming home song. And she played that a lot. It’s really sweet.

Roger

Yeah. I remember you introduced me to her once to accompany both of you. And I remember she was very shy.

Rachel

Yes.

Roger

So how did she get the violin and then what did she do with that?

Rachel

Well, we had an arts program for kids there. We also went and taught gospel choir at the middle school. So we had a few instruments. Some people, some supporting churches sent me their kids old instruments that they weren’t using anymore. And I brought them to Japan with me. And she started playing. And I think she inspired some other kids in the area. They also started to take violin. So I had like, maybe eight students after a while.

Roger

And why was that important during that time?

Rachel

Well, it’s important for a lot of reasons. It’s important because music connects people like that. I couldn’t learn violin unless I was teaching her, and then because then I played and told her friends about it, they were excited. So it created this little community of I think it was mostly girls, and they could talk about it and play together. And also important because music uses both parts of the brain, and it can be really powerful. When you experience trauma and depression, you have trouble focusing. And when you play music, you can’t think about that. It requires you to focus deeply, and in that way it helps you move on or forget some of those harmful things.

Roger

Interesting, I hadn’t thought about it that way. So it’s like almost reprogramming your brain to think about positive things, light and beauty. Yeah, that’s cool. I know those relationships, too, because they didn’t really have a lot of afterschool activities at that time. So to have something because then you told me before we started talking that John went on to become a doctor. Is that right?

Rachel

Yes, she went to a special boarding school for kids who wanted to become doctors. I guess it was like a specialized program to get you on the fast track.

Roger

I wonder if the tsunami kind of inspired you to do that, just seeing so many hurt people and wanting to help.

Rachel

Yeah, I really wonder about that.

Roger

That’s cool, though. Some music kind of gave her, though, helped her drive and hope for the future and create a new future.

Rachel

For sure.

Roger

That’s really cool. So you worked in Peru as a missionary using the arts. Then you worked in Japan using the arts as a missionary, and now you’re here in Baton Rouge. And what have you been thinking about during this time of COVID and the role of the arts during that?

Rachel

Well, one of the things that’s been hurtful to me about this pandemic is the division and just the harsh judgment that I feel we as a people kind of pass on people who make different decisions than us. And I’ve thought a lot about it and want to give other people the freedom to make their own decisions and to believe that people are really thinking and praying about what they’re doing. And I think as artists, we have something powerful. There’s not really places that I’ve seen for people to mourn the things that they lost in the pandemic. And as artists, I think we can provide spaces for that. We can talk about the loss we’ve experienced or those parties we couldn’t go to, or those funerals. That was a huge deal. So many people couldn’t go to funerals of their loved ones. And to think about that and provide a space. Music also provides a space to just be and to breathe and to sit still and to do nothing. In a world where I know as a student, being on the computer all the time, I would just get in such a frenzy because this world is kind of fake and it always feels like you have so many things and you’re going to forget all your deadlines.

Rachel

And so for me, playing music, being away from a screen, calm down and was very special. I needed it so much more during this pandemic.

Roger

Yeah, it’s well put. I know. We had a you hosted a house party on Saturday night here, and that was so much fun. Two of us played together some things, but there was a man who played guitar and sang for a while. It was so beautiful. It just felt like the community being built through that time was something special and worth embracing.

Rachel

Well, and it was a fulfillment of a dream of mine. My husband and I bought this house. It has a big open living room and dining room, and we want to do house concerts. I even wrote a paper on how I would design the concerts and I wanted them to be like a monthly basis and how I was going to treat the musicians who came. Musicians often I find that maybe they overwork and don’t take care of themselves well, they don’t eat meals on time. And so trying to be a space that also gives musicians a healthy space to be like, we don’t have to rehearse without taking breaks or without eating, just so we can get this music the way we want it.

Roger

Yeah, I’ve certainly been guilty of that too. It’s hard because you are so driven to get a certain quality and it takes everything to do that.

Rachel

It’s very hard. And I actually reinjured a little bit this fall. I did a new music thing and we didn’t take breaks. And it’s curious to me also how musicians don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about how we care for our bodies or if anyone has a twinge or is in pain. It’s just like you don’t talk about it.

Roger

Yeah, just buck up, practice harder, push through.

Rachel

Right. But I actually found out when I mentioned I was like, let’s finish this rehearsal, I said, I’m in so much pain. We still have a performance that the other violinist opened up. I was like, yeah, actually, I’m not doing so well either. And then the clarinetist was telling me, oh, yeah, these are all these strategies you can do for this is what I do after. This is what my boyfriend does. And I was so moved that just by sharing that I was struggling, it provided this whole other platform for us to connect and to help each other.

Roger

That’s really cool. Thank you, Rachel. It’s really good talking with you.

Rachel

Thank you, Roger. This has been a pleasure.

Roger

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. Check out my website, www.rogerwlowther.com, for a transcription of this podcast and various links. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time!”

The post 43. Anniversary of the 2011 Earthquake with Rachel Reese Kollmeyer appeared first on Roger W. Lowther.

42. Art Internships in Tokyo

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Well, I got back late last night from a three-week trip to the US and I really pushed probably a little too hard, so I’m pretty tired, but glad to be back and looking forward to continuing the stories about how God is working here in Japan. I first made a trip to Boston where I gave an organ concert for a new organ installation. I met a lot of people during my time there, and also spoke at a college.

Then I traveled to Memphis, where I spoke and played in a foreign missions conference and was interviewed by a radio station. I had the privilege of being one of the main speakers for the conference. The theme was arts, worship, and missions. For the Sunday morning service, I spoke about the role of worship in the call to missions. And in the evening service, I spoke about the role of the arts in the call to missions. In case you’re interested, I’ve included links to both in the show notes for this episode on my YouTube channel.

One of the fun elements of the conference was a collaborative art project. The idea was to be able to create something that we could bring back to Japan and use in the ministries here. There were three large banners where people could write prayers for the Japanese people on Japanese origami paper, tear them into small pieces, and paste them onto the banners. It was a tangible way to show prayers and encouragement from America for the people of Japan. The art project also had additional symbolism of brokenness. By tearing the paper, we were symbolically showing our own brokenness, and in the hands of the artist, this brokenness comes together to make a beautiful picture. In this case, it was a scenic picture of Mount Fuji with a rainbow behind it and Christ carrying the cross at the base of the mountain. And all this was designed by our intern, Mayako.

There was also a campaign to raise money for Community Arts Tokyo. This summer, we’re going to have lots of events with interns and short-term missionaries who are planning to come to Japan. Japan has really been closed down lately. In America, COVID may seem like something that’s in the past, but not so here. People are still pretty fearful. I live on the 22nd floor of an apartment building, which means I have to ride an elevator many times a day. And believe me, if I forget to put a mask on, there will be consequences. Others will furiously go for the buttons to get off at the next floor. We also still have large plastic dividers on tables at restaurants and still have to sanitize our hands going into many buildings along with temperature checks. Restrictions for worship services were just lifted in December, only two months ago, so people are still really fearful of getting together. We tried a few small events, but they really weren’t well attended. But the idea is that by this summer, through the activities of Community Arts Tokyo, by renting spaces, providing food, and giving music and art events people would be willing to overcome their fears and gather together again and form community around beauty. And we pray that God is going to use these efforts for the sake of his glory in the building of his church.

There are many interns and short-term trips coming this summer, not just with our team, but with all the other missionary teams as well because last year, the country was still pretty much locked down. And people have been waiting. Now they’re ready and raring to go. And we sure can use their excitement and energy.

So for this episode, I thought it’d be fun for a change to interview two interns who were here last month to give them an opportunity to share their perspective of their time in Japan. The first I’d like to introduce you to is Zoe Phillips. She’s planning to graduate from university this May with a degree in composition and singing, and so came on a two-week vision trip to decide what to do next. And she’s considering missions full-time. Boy, we kept her busy, probably too busy! I think we wore her out. She met person after person, did event after event, and most of the travel was by train or on foot. As a singer and composer, she sang in many places, accompanied by herself on the guitar or by me on the piano. Well, without further ado, here’s Zoe Phillips.

Zoe, I wanted to sit down with you for a second. By the way, your singing today was beautiful. Thank you so much for doing that.

[Zoe]

Of course.

[Roger]

It’s really a privilege for me to be talking to a musician and a student now. You are trying to decide what to do with your life, and here you are on this vision trip to Japan trying to figure out if you want to be a missionary as an artist. Just after hearing you share a little bit this Art Life Faith event tonight, I wanted to ask you more questions about that and let our listeners know some of your stories. First, let’s go back and say, why are you in Japan? How did you get here in the first place?

[Zoe]

How did I get to Japan? Well, I grew up basically watching anime my entire life. The culture of Japan, as much as anime can portray, was just always super interesting. Then when I got to college and I joined a campus ministry, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can go to Japan and do missions.” Then I get to senior year and my parents are like, “Okay, time to be realistic. Being a musician is a dumb idea probably. Being a musician in missions is an even dumber idea. You need to get an actual job.”

[Roger]

How do you explain that to your parents?

[Zoe]

It was hard. Especially with missions. You have to raise money and getting right out of college and not making money but having to ask people for money is just mind-blowing to them. I decided to just go ahead and do it anyway. Last fall, I decided to look up, just on my computer, missions in Japan. The first thing that popped up was MTW (Mission to the World). I clicked on it, and I got in contact with a woman named Theresa Webber. We had our little discussion, our little talk, and she was like, “Okay, where are you interested in?” I was like, “Well, I’ll go anywhere the Lord tells me to go, but if there’s somewhere in Japan, I would absolutely love that.” She was like, “Okay, cool. We have some people there.” She was like, “What ministry are you interested in?” I was like, “Well, anything that the Lord says, I know I’ll do, but if there’s something in music, that’d be even better.” And she was like, “Oh, that’s so crazy. We have a ministry there in Tokyo, and they do music, arts, and stuff like that in Japan.” I was like, “Wow.”

[Roger]

That’s so cool.

[Zoe]

I was like, “Okay, what’s the next step? How can I actually do this?” And she was like, “Okay, the next step would be to go on a vision trip. And just so you can go out, meet them, get to see all the stuff they do.” I guess there was something going on with the scheduling and stuff like that. So she was like, “Okay, how about this? We’re going to send you to a conference where they’re going to be at CPI and you’re going to be helping with the children, but maybe at some point you’ll be able to sneak away and get to meet Roger and Abi.” I was like, “Cool, that sounds awesome.” But then when I actually got to Japan, this was in November, I just totally forgot about the secret mission because I was so scared about being around hundreds of kids and teaching them the Bible.

[Roger]

CPI, Church Planting Institute, is a huge conference. It’s actually the biggest conference we have of mission leaders and church leaders all over the country. And so there were hundreds of kids there.

[Zoe]

Weren’t there? Yeah, it was overwhelming, actually. I was like, “I’m not sure I even like kids all that much.” I’m like, dealing with so many of them and their parents are just leaving them here.

[Roger]

Thank you for your sacrifice and doing it. My kids were in that program too, so I know they really enjoyed it.

[Zoe]

Anyway, got there, totally forgot about the secret mission. And so I’m talking to a few of the other people on the team, and I’m like, “Yeah, I do music. And so if I came back and did missions, full-time missions, and I wanted to do music…” and she was like, “You have to meet Roger and Abi Lowther.” And I was like, “Okay, if there’s time, whatever, whatever…” I talked to multiple other people, and they all said the exact same thing. And so one thing led to another and I finally got to meet you one time when you were checking in your kids. And I was super distracted trying to make name badges for the children. And you were like, “I’m Roger.” I was like, “Oh, my gosh.”

[Roger]

Someone had texted me and told me about you and said, “You need to go find Zoe.” I’m like, “Okay, all right.” And so, that was the first time we had met.

[Zoe]

Yeah. And so we met and I got your contact information and all that stuff. And the conference went and passed. And so this past semester was my last official semester of college. And I was like, “Okay, so now it’s time to do the vision trip with you guys.” And so we emailed, did other stuff, and I was honestly not sure it was going to happen because it was so last minute. I was like, “I have to raise money again and I’m still not working. My parents think this is crazy. I’m going back, and it’s only been three months since I’ve been there.” But anyway, we still would go through with it. I’d already raised all the money, and now I’m here.

[Roger]

And we are so glad you are. I mean, while you’ve been here, we’ve done do a lot of great things together. We went down to Nagoya. We gave some concerts in a café. We visited a private high school about a future concert. We met a lot of people, various ministries around the city. It’s been really cool to have you be able to join in and see what those are. How has the trip been for you, though?

[Zoe]

It’s been really good. Honestly, a little bit exhausting meeting so many people every day. I love meeting and talking to people, but it’s just like I’m trying to process if I want to come back. And so meeting them and having those discussions, and then at the same time trying to process how I feel and if I want to come back for it, it’s just super exhausting. And then I’m not fluent in Japanese. And so it’s constantly just hearing Japanese and not understanding anything and trying my best to. And it’s just not happening. And so that’s also super exhausting.

[Roger]

Yeah, it’s not easy.

[Zoe]

But I’ve also met a lot of people, and it’s like one thing to read about all the ministries that are happening in Japan. But it was just life-changing and completely changed my heart for Japan. Actually being here, actually meeting native Japanese people, actually getting to see the ministries that are happening with the arts and seeing that it has an impact on people. I was there when Ayaka did her interview for your podcast, and I was listening to that and just hearing her testimony and how the arts and how music impacted her life. It was just like, “Whoa, this is actually making a difference.”

[Roger]

Yeah, it’s how she became a Christian.

[Zoe]

Yeah. That’s really been making me get up every day and be like, “This is worth it.” I’m here in Japan. I’m only here for a short time. I need to put my best foot forward. And even though it’s tiring sometimes, to see what’s out there and continue meeting people because it’s important.

[Roger]

So what would you say to college students who are listening to this show and are like, as an artist…being in missions…that doesn’t sound like it fits for me. What have you learned through this trip? What would you say to them?

[Zoe]

Honestly, I would say it’s just not about you, really. It’s about people. And it’s like, no matter what gift you have, whether it’s art, whether it’s singing, whether it’s some instrument or something like dancing, even. God didn’t give you those things so that you could honor yourself. It’s to honor him. And there’s no better way to use your gifts than in missions and literally having that directly impact people. And no hate against people who want to go out and pursue a music career. That’s amazing. But it’s just like, there’s nothing wrong with it. You wouldn’t lose any part of yourself by doing missions and whatever arts that you love. It’s even more so, I feel like it makes it deeper. It makes it more meaningful.

[Roger]

Yeah, I mean, the way it was sold to me is that you can do this in America as well, but there are fewer Christians in Japan, and so there are ways that God can use you. It’s more strategic because there are less Christians here. And to have that inroad that is so effective here in Japan and many countries around the world of using music, using the arts to reach people. It really has been a blessing to us being here these many years. What do you think is next for you?

[Zoe]

I was talking to the people that I’m staying with, and I was like, I need to just take a week and pray and fast and just take that time to be away from Japan to really look through all my notes and stuff and what happened.

[Roger]

I’ve noticed you were taking a lot of notes, doing a lot of journaling…

[Zoe]

It’s so much. I think the next step is to just tie up loose ends back at home and talk to Theresa Webber and see what that would look like, coming back. I know for sure that I want to come back, but same deal as always. It’s like, God, your will be done. That’s first priority. But if your will be for me to come back, I would absolutely love that.

[Roger]

Well, I know that whatever you end up doing, that God is going to bless you as we’ve already seen during this trip. And so we look expectantly to see how God continues to work through you in the years ahead. So thank you so much.

[Zoe]

Of course. Thank you for having me.

[Roger]

Well, it really was fun having Zoe here. She probably doesn’t really know how much she impacted the ministry here. When people come, even if it’s just for two weeks, it’s a catalyst to build so many new relationships and to deepen others. It infuses everything that we’re doing with energy and excitement, and that just makes church planting all that more fun.

Next, I’d like to introduce you to Alana Essex. Now, Alana has been here for quite some time, for six months, serving with the Tokyo City team on the other side of Tokyo. She recently graduated from college and is planning to move to Nashville to make her mark as a singer and songwriter. But before that, God called her to come to Japan for just a little while to use music to help with church planting efforts here. She was so effective as a missionary, and I think she was really sad about leaving and having to say goodbye to her new community here. Mission to the World recently released an article about her which tells more of her story. So I’d love to have you check that out as well in the show notes.

Now, let’s listen to the interview with Alana.

I’m sitting here with Alana Essex, and we just had an Art Life Faith event here in downtown Tokyo. And Alana was one of our main speakers talking about her dreams for the future. Alana, thank you so much for being here today.

[Alana]

Mm-hmm.

[Roger]

When I heard you speak at the event today, I was like, “Oh, man, we have to get this story out to everyone else as well.” I wonder if you’d be willing to retell some of that story to our folks?

[Alana]

Yeah, of course.

[Roger]

All right, so first of all, why don’t you just take us back to the beginning? Why are you in Japan?

[Alana]

So it all starts back in my senior year of college, and I had no intention of doing missions or going to Japan. I was doing a Bible study with some of my roommates that talked about missions and just God’s heart for the world. But there was nothing specific about Japan. It was solely just learning about God’s heart for the nations. After that study, I was doing my own quiet time in my room and was reading something that had nothing to even do with missions. I just remember specifically the word Japan just popping in my head.

[Roger]

Wow. Yeah, I can’t think of the word “Japan” in the Bible…

[Alana]

So random. Literally no correlation to whatever I was reading at the moment. I don’t even know what part or passage it was in scripture, but I just remember thinking, “That was not my own thought.” And I had a feeling I was going to hear it again. And it basically repeated in my mind, no matter what I was doing, just throughout the next few weeks, I just kept thinking about Japan and not knowing why. And I didn’t know if that meant I was supposed to go to Japan, if I was supposed to meet students on my campus. I just felt so confused because I was so set on going to do music in Nashville and being a songwriter. That rocked my world. Then after a while of the continued thought, even at church, I would just randomly think about Japan during the service and the worship and just feeling this odd call I never felt before. So finally, I decided I was going to Google missions to Japan. And the first thing that came up was MTW (Mission to the World). And I found the group that I ended up staying with now for the last six months. And yeah, it was like nothing else I’d ever planned for or expected.

[Roger]

So you’ve been here for six months now?

[Alana]

Yeah.

[Roger]

And when do you go back?

[Alana]

I go back February 9th.

[Roger]

Okay, so that’s like two weeks from now? Wow. And so where are you going from here?

[Alana]

From here, I will be going back to Dallas. But before that, I will be going to Germany for two weeks with my roommate and then visiting my brother. But the plan really is to go back to Dallas and then hopefully head over to Nashville to do what I had planned to do all along and do music in Nashville and be a songwriter.

[Roger]

Okay. Actually, there was an article out about you recently that you have this dream for Nashville, and yet you came to Japan instead. Do you want to tell us more about your dream in Nashville? And then also this tension that you felt inside about coming to Japan and how that may kill that dream.

[Alana]

Originally, when I first thought about Japan and the idea of just doing missions, I wanted to just close the door right away on it because my thought was that if I came to Japan, music would end and I couldn’t do that here. And even though I even saw there was an arts team in Tokyo, in my mind, I still just thought, well, if I want to be a music artist and I want to be a serious songwriter, I have to go to Nashville or some big city in America, and I couldn’t do music and also be doing missions at the same time. I felt like before I came here, I really had to repent the thought of, “Okay, music is no longer in my plan. God has some other plan for me.” And the idea of going overseas is really dying to myself and letting go of all my desires and everything that I had wanted in the past and saying, “Okay, God, I’m going to just throw it all away and just know that you’re better. I have to get over that idea of doing what I had wanted.”

[Roger]

So let me emphasize that point. You really thought you were going to have to throw out everything: your dreams, your passions, your talent in music. You thought, I’m going to have to give it up because I’m going to Japan, right?

[Alana]

Yeah.

[Roger]

Okay, so then what happened once you got here?

[Alana]

So then immediately the first week I get here, I didn’t bring my guitar and I just thought, no music for the next six months. I am solely doing college ministry, church planting, and that’s it. And I won’t be writing any songs on here. And within the first week, I was talking to some of my team members who happened to have a guitar they weren’t using. And me not knowing that, I just made the comment, “Oh, I wish I had my guitar here. I would have loved that.” And they immediately were like, “Well, why don’t you just take ours?” And just gave it to me. I’ve gotten to use it this whole time. I’ve written so many songs, and I’ve just already had so many opportunities here, even though I’m not even on the arts team to get to do music. And so that’s been such an eye-opening thing this whole time, realizing that God did not want me to stop doing music. And he proved that in my first week here just by literally giving me a guitar to have for the next six months in Tokyo.

[Roger]

That’s so cool. And then you shared just in the event tonight with your beautiful singing, by the way. I wish I could share that with the listeners.

There were certain people that you met, you just felt like, man, God was really leading me to be in this place at this time. Can you share a little bit more about that, the way God continued to lead you through?

[Alana]

Yeah, I think the entire time I just thought because I had no connection to Japan, I just wasn’t sure why God placed me here. I didn’t really feel like there would be anything in a time period of just six months where anything super impactful could happen or any relationships that could really have any lasting impact on many people. I don’t even speak Japanese. Just coming here, it was like, I don’t know the culture. I didn’t even know that you don’t wear your shoes in the house. I learned that the first night I got here.

[Roger]

Are you shared, too, how the food was a little challenging for you in the beginning?

[Alana]

Yeah, I’m also a picky eater. I quickly realized that my life was going to change a little bit. But yeah, I think from right away, I just ended up living in a share house with no other Christians. It was actually a last-minute thing. My team leader told me that the place I wanted to be living in was no longer available. He had to ask a friend that he knew if there was any extra space in the share house and there happened to be a room. I ended up living with all Japanese people and one French guy. It’s honestly been such a cool experience because I’ve been able to be a missionary living in a house with a bunch of non-Christians. And through that, I’ve met so many people that I’ve been able to just have some great conversations with and just getting to live with them and even just share my life. I think a lot of it has been even just the day to day and getting to know them, especially my roommate, Julie, who I’ll be going to Europe with that I mentioned, never ever would have thought that after I’d be leaving here, I’d be stopping in Europe with this new friend that I’ve made just to get to continue to share the gospel with her and just go through a study that explains God’s heart for her.

It’s just so wild to me to learn how the people here don’t know anything about God, and not even that they had some bad experience with church or that they had a religion they left, but they just literally have never heard about Jesus or the gospel. It’s just so sweet to get to play my songs for them in the share house and hear that it inspires them. Even if they don’t understand what the words mean, even if they don’t have perfect English and they don’t even understand all the lyrics, they still will say, “Wow, that’s so great.” That’s inspiring. It has shown me that music, one, is so impactful, but also even just being in the presence of other people here and being a Christian does have an impact, whether I’m singing songs that are about Jesus or just songs that I’ve written about heartbreak or life or whatever I’m sharing. Music just bonds people, and people here love it. I think it’s something that is so easy to bond with. It’s just been such a cool, powerful tool in all my relationships here that has led me to just continually be inspired by what God is doing with music in Japan and even what will become after this.

[Roger]

That’s so true. That’s so true. I know God is going to bless you in Nashville as you take your experiences from here. So thank you so much for sharing this story with us.

[Alana]

Thank you so much.

[Roger]

Well, there you have it. The stories of a two-week missionary and a six-month intern.

I first came to Japan on a two-week missions trip, and now here I am, still in Japan, 18 years later. So I certainly believe that mission strips and internships are powerful ways to help people discover their paths.

We’re going to have many more stories to share with you this summer when summer interns come for two months. We pray that God will use their sacrifice and their willingness to come serve and help the church planting efforts here in Japan.

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the “Art Life Faith” podcast. Check out my website www.rogerwlowther.com for a transcription of this podcast and various links. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time.”

The post 42. Art Internships in Tokyo appeared first on Roger W. Lowther.

41. On Being A Japanese Christian – Ayaka Uchida

Immanuel: NOT ALONE

Welcome to the Art Life Faith Podcast. This is the show where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Well, we’ve taken a little break from making podcasts over the New Year’s, but now we’re back and excited to share more stories with you. My family spent a little time up in the snowy mountains of Japan in Nagano, which is where the Winter Olympics were held back in 1998, and there was a lot of snow! We had to put on snow chains just to get around and did some skiing, and had fun in the snow with the family and friends. Just yesterday, I got back from a trip to Nagoya, Japan, which is a city about two hours south of us. God is doing amazing things there. I was visiting one of my missionary teammates who lives down there and runs an art gallery and was meeting new people as well.

We have an intern with us here for two weeks about to graduate from college as a musician, and she’s trying to decide what to do with her life. One of her questions is whether she should become a full-time missionary or not starting this summer. So yesterday we gave a concert in Nagoya at a cafe. She sang and played the guitar, and I played some things on the piano and accompanied her. We just had a great time meeting people and encouraging the ministry down there.

We also visited a private Japanese girl’s school started by Presbyterian missionaries back in the day, like 100 years ago, and they have a big hall with a pipe organ. So I had fun trying out the instrument and meeting the principal of the school with the music teacher, chaplain, and other teachers. The idea is that when I come back, I’ll give an organ concert for the whole student body. That school is extremely well respected by the neighbors. So actually, our missionary friends with Mission to the World who are down there, they started working there as teachers at the request of their Japanese pastor and partners in order to get a stamp of approval from people in the area as they begin planting a church. Whereas before their activities would have been seen as suspicious, as possibly part of some kind of cult, now everyone says, “Ah, well, they’re okay. They work at that school.” And so the hope is that a concert by me will help give further legitimacy to their church-planting work there. I’m looking forward to it.

Actually, I put a short clip of my time on the organ on TikTok, something I just started doing. TikTok was kind of a New Year’s resolution in my desire to recruit more and more people into a life in missions as an artist. It shares various aspects of my life as a musical missionary in Japan in ways that I really can’t share in other ways like newsletters, books, or other social media. So, anyway, please check it out and subscribe!

Today, I’m excited to share with you an interview I had with Ayaka Uchida. She paints in the traditional Japanese art of nihonga. She was born and raised in Tokyo but became a Christian during her time in the States and has spent quite a few years trying to figure out what it means to be Japanese and a Christian. It’s her faith in God that’s really brought her through some hard times.And through her artwork, she’s been able to praise God and give back to him and share the presence of God with others in ways that they may know him as well. So in the show notes for this podcast and on my website, www.rogerwlowther.com, you can see a picture of her and some of her artwork we talk about it. So, without further ado, I’d like to bring Ayaka onto the program. Ayaka, thank you so much for being here today.

Ayaka

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Roger

I’m really happy to be able to share your story with all these people. I first met you at a conference we did last year, our Aroma of Beauty conference. And after that, you sent me a note, so I wanted to start with that and let you respond. You said,

“I got saved in college in 2000 in the USA, where the pastor told me to ‘put off your old life of sin, everything Japanese, and put on the new life in Christ.’ I tried very hard to do that for 18 years in the States through marriage, childbirth, my husband’s affair, separation, single mothering, running a social enterprise, and my art. And now I’m trying to find Christ in Japanese culture.”

Can you tell me more about that? What were you thinking when you wrote that to me?

Ayaka

Yes. When I attended the conference, I think that’s when all that memory came back to me, because when I got saved, I was in college. It was sometime before my senior year, and my friend invited me to church. I went, and it was one of those Paul getting knocked off the horse type encounters. I experienced God, and I started attending the church, but there was no other Japanese Christian in the church, so they would somehow associate all my old thinking to Japan. And they would say, “Oh, you’ve never touched the Bible,” or “You’re from the godless nation,” or things like that. I would just take that as a college kid and believe it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry.” Then the pastor would say, “You have to put off your old self. You think like a Japanese person. You respond like a Japanese person, but you have to become a Christian.” And they said I needed to cut off my family, and I did cut off my family for years.

Roger

Wow.

Ayaka

Which I’m sad about, but I’m being reconciled to them now. And I threw away all my Japanese cookbooks, all my Japanese books, all the mamori. There were some things that were Shinto based, and I took it all as bad. But there were days that I would sit outside and receive things from nature. I wasn’t worshipping an idol god. It truly was my time with Christ. And I would draw or paint and say, “I felt the Holy Spirit whisper this to me when I was looking at the birds,” or something like that, and they would say, “Oh no, you’re doing it again.”

Roger

Oh, no.

Ayaka

I feel like my Japanese-ness was very tied to my art, using the five senses and loving nature. When I’m with nature, I connect deeply with the Lord and not the god of water or the god of…you know…but yeah, using all the senses was viewed as very Japanese.

Roger

So at that time, you really had trouble seeing what it meant to be a Japanese person and a Christian, right? As if the two couldn’t be reconciled?

Ayaka

Yeah, it was truly presented as, “if I remain as a Japanese person, I cannot be a Christian.”

Roger

Wow. How has your thinking, then, changed over the years?

Ayaka

Yeah, so now that I’m look back, it was actually through tragedy, like personal suffering, when God showed me that he’s with me as I am. And it wasn’t that I had to become more Westernized in my thinking or had to act like an American. I had to laugh at American jokes and not Japanese jokes. And I couldn’t speak Japanese. So my Christian experience was only in the context of English, so I had never seen a Japanese Bible. And then my father passed away, so I went to Japan and someone gifted me a Japanese Bible. And when I read it for the first time, that moved my heart completely differently. One that touched me was “love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul.” But the way the Japanese Bible put it was “love God with your heart spent 100%, your mind spent !00%, your soul spent 100%. And I was like, oh, this is what it means to love God. It was the Japanese words that really touched me. So then I realized, “Wait a minute, maybe I can be a Christian while embracing my Japanese-ness.”

Roger

That’s really cool. So hearing or thinking about the gospel in the Japanese language helped you see it in a new way, a different way.

Ayaka

Yeah, very different. I think it just moved me in a different way maybe because it’s my mother language, even though I was living in the US for, like, 20 years. But, yeah, something about that moved me. So then I started reading the Bible in Japanese, which felt like a taboo thing. I was like, “Oh no, Lord, please don’t destroy my faith.” I actually did pray this a lot. Like, “God, I am scared. The Japanese Bible touches me so much, but if I keep reading this, will I lose my faith in you?” And I was like, “Jesus, I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to go back.” Because for me, the life before Christ and after Christ was black and white. So I was like, “Please, I don’t want to go back to life without the way, the truth, and the life.” So I remember praying that a lot. But then when I do open the scriptures and read them…yeah, I don’t know…it was more vivid or some verses became more clear, like, the nuances made sense to me.

Roger

Yeah, well, I feel that too. I mean, I became a Christian in English in America. And it really has helped me so much to worship God more by being here in Japan and praising him in Japanese and reading the Bible in Japanese and talking about him in Japanese. There’s just something…it’s like you get a different perspective that gives you a deeper understanding of who he is and how he is working in this world.

Ayaka

Yes, it is fascinating.

Roger

What brought you to our conference, the Aroma of Beauty conference?

Ayaka

So actually, I found your book on Amazon. I bought it after I moved back to Japan in 2018, and I really wanted to start searching for a way to see the Lord, to see Christ through things in Japan. And then I found your book, and I was just blown away. Thank you!

Roger

Wow!

Ayaka

Because each chapter I read, I was like, “Yes, in Japanese culture, in the things that are very Japanese, we can see God.” And I really appreciated the way you wrote it. It wasn’t, “Even in Japanese things, we can see the Western God.” It wasn’t like that. I’ve read that before somewhere else. But here, you are writing that we see different sides of Christ that we didn’t see before. And that was very, I think, affirming and comforting for me as I was starting the journey of, “Oh, I’m scared. I’m back in Japan once again.” I thought I was a good Christian in the US. Can I be still here or would I get thrown and eaten by Japanese culture? So, I really appreciated that. And when I went to the conference too, it was very affirming for me that it’s okay to be here. Like, oh, maybe God can use me for his kingdom here. Yeah, thank you for that.

Roger

Yeah, no, thank you! Well, let’s go back a little bit further now. So how did you become a Christian?

Ayaka

It was a summer before my senior year, and I had an internship. I was in university in Pennsylvania, but I had an internship in New Jersey with Johnson and Johnson, and a friend there said, “Hey Ayaka, I have friends on your campus, and they all belong in this campus ministry.” I was like, “There’s no such thing on my campus. I’ve never seen that.” But when we went back to visit the campus, obviously they existed, and they invited me to a car wash event on Saturday. And I think that was the first time I witnessed joy. So I asked him, “Why are you guys so happy for washing someone else’s car? I don’t understand this.” And they all say, “Oh, we do this with Jesus. We love him so much.” I was like, “Where is this guy? He’s not even here and you guys are doing this? He must be really something.” And then they’re all like, “Oh no,” and then they said, “Why don’t you come to church with us on Sunday?” The next day I went to church with them.

And it was during the worship, the music. There was something about the music that really stirred my heart. But it was a charismatic church, so people were putting their hands out, jumping and singing, and that was a little bit scary for me. So I closed my eyes and I just listened to the music. And then I received a vision of a seed falling from the sky, hitting the ground, and grass sprouting. And I felt my body, like, jump. So then I was like, “Church is quite interesting. I could come to this again.” Then the pastor gave a message, and my heart was stirred again to want to know what he was talking about when he mentioned Christ, because that’s the part that I didn’t understand at all. Then they said, if you want to receive a prayer, come to the front. And I went up, and that’s when they prayed for me. And I just started weeping and weeping. I hadn’t cried since age nine, like 13 years. I had not shed a single tear to that point because I had, I guess, closed my heart to numb the pain of life. I was a Disney fan, so I wanted to be in the happiest place on Earth all the time, and I didn’t know how to embrace pain.

So that was that. I started weeping and weeping, and they said, “Do you want to accept Christ today?” And my mind said, “Who is this guy? He’s not here again. He wasn’t at the car wash. He’s not here either today.” But in my heart, I was yelling. I was really yelling, like, “Yes, yes!” And they said, “Okay, say the salvation prayer.” And I was like, “I don’t know what that is.” And they said, “Okay, repeat after us.” So I repeated the prayer, and they all hugged me. They celebrated, but we had to drive back to Jersey. So the rest of the summer I was thinking, what was that? What happened to me that Sunday? But I had joy. I had this new feeling in my heart, so I just said, “Okay, I’ll find them again when the new semester begins.” So that was how I got saved and I started my Christian walk. And I was a senior in college that fall, but I joined a freshman small group because I was a new believer.

Roger

Car wash? That’s the way to go!

Ayaka

Car wash and worship music.

Roger

Oh, that’s so cool that music played a role. You are a painter, so tell me a little bit about that. Especially…I went to your exhibit last month. That’s the reason that we’re talking right now. I really wanted people to hear that story. Can you tell me a little bit about the exhibit last month?

Ayaka

Yes. So it was an exhibit by eight Christian artists in Japan, Japanese and Chinese artists, and I was the only Americanized person…but I am Japanese. And we got together from different churches. We wanted to do something for Christmas and especially for the people who wouldn’t come to church for the season, so that was how it started. And pretty much the theme was just Christmas, so it was very open ended. One guy was a sculptor. Another was a photographer. There were painters of different styles…

Roger

Your theme was Immanuel Sky? Can you tell us a little bit about that series?

Immanuel: LOOK UP

Ayaka

Yeah, so when we were brainstorming this exhibit, a lot of them said I’m going to do the Song of Mary or maybe the scene of the Nativity. And when I was sitting on it on the train, I realized, you know what? The special thing for me personally about Christmas is that Jesus is Immanuel, he became flesh for us, and God is with me all the time. To me, that was the most exciting thing about Christmas. So that’s where the idea began. And then I started recalling the times since I moved back to Japan in 2018 when I really felt God’s presence. When I found I had uterine cancer, and I was walking back from the clinic, I looked up at the sky and the sunset was beautiful, and I realized, our story doesn’t end when the sun sets. I’m okay. God is with me. So I started thinking that’s what I wanted to paint. So it became a series of sunset skies in Tokyo.

My non-Christian mom and my sister were like, “Isn’t it supposed to be about Christmas?” But it was about Christmas.

Roger

Yeah. And the color you used for the sky was golden, which reminded me of the art hundreds of years ago where they used gold to represent heaven, sacred art that revealed the beauty of heaven on Earth. Was that part of what you were thinking?

Immanuel: ALWAYS

Ayaka

Actually, it just so happened when I was crushing the pigments, I truly feel like it was the Holy Spirit doing it because I just wanted to paint the sunset sky in the nihonga-style, which is pulverized minerals and jewels mixed with hide glue, everything natural, from the Earth. And I was kneading the minerals to create pink or orange. The thing about minerals is that they change depending on the humidity of that day and the temperature and even the different amounts of the glue. It just so happened that on that day it became very golden. So, yeah, I was just like, oh, this is interesting, but I’ll just go with it. And when I was painting, I kept praying all the verses that has the word Immanuel and yeah, it was really a prayerful time of kneading very yellow, orange, warm pink, really happy colors.

Roger

And then in the Earth part, it’s a bluish color, isn’t it? What mineral do you use for that? And what does it represent?

Ayaka

Blue is the most precious, expensive mineral, lapis. I had this feeling that when God is with us on Earth, he doesn’t consider it cheap. It’s the sense of God coming to Earth on Christmas. I wanted to honor that with blue. So I purposely painted anything on Earth with blue. And then it ended up being a good contrast to the sky.

Roger

Yeah, it is. It stands out. It was clear it had meaning to it. Usually when I think of God’s presence, I think of things like a mountain, starry sky, ocean, or something like that. But God’s presence is here in the city, in the normal scenes we see every day. Right now as we’re recording, we can look out the window and see the city. But people tend to look at it as a man-made thing so not as good. But no, this is a God thing, and God is present here. I really appreciated that. When I am tired and riding on the train, to remember that God is present here in this train is so cool, that image.

You were telling me before we started recording, just how you started painting this too, during a hard time in your life, and you shared that testimony. And they’re like, no, that’s too much, that’s too dark. But then your paintings are so happy. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Immanuel: WITH ME

Ayaka

Yes, when the artists got together, so we were praying every week before the exhibit, and we decided to write our testimony for the website. So I said, “The reason I’m doing this is because I’m going through a divorce. And this is ten years after the initial affair, separation, single mothering, and reconciliation. It was a culmination of my worst fear coming to true. I had to wrestle with this: Is reconciling my marriage my hope or is Christ my hope? It was in the midst of that I knew God was with me. So that’s what I wanted to paint. I wrote that and they said, “It’s too much. You can’t say that. That would scare people away, and we don’t want to scare people away.” I think I was really struggling. I understand the point, but in Japan, it’s so hard to talk about, or no one talks about personal suffering. But isn’t Christ the very reason why we can? Because now we have a sovereign God who walked into the mess of our lives and is able to save us.

But I said, “Okay, I will write a nicer paragraph.” But after they saw my painting, they said, “Wait, your paragraphs and your painting don’t go together at all.” And I said, “No, they do.” Then they were okay, and I put that on the wall at the exhibit as well. I could tell by watching the visitors, they would look at the painting first and then read my paragraph and go, “Oh!”

Roger

As you just described it, too, about getting the colors from crushing the minerals. I think even that just in the very medium itself, the idea that Christ was crushed so that we could have beauty in this world coming across. The more they are crushed, the brighter they are. You know, in the gallery the lights were shining down, and as I went around the side of the painting, I could see the minerals sparkling because of the way you crushed them. Just you saying, “I have this pain in my life, but I’m able to paint this beauty because of what Christ has done for me,” I thought was cool. Even in the very medium itself of nihonga, the message came through.

Ayaka

Yes, the funny thing about nihonga is that this practice is so tied to Shinto art. My classmates, my teacher, are used to seeing nihonga painting of Shinto-related things or spiritual things that are not of Christ. But for me, I realized this is very fit to worship God, the creator God, because everything I’m touching is from the Earth. All the colors are the colors that God created, and they’re crushed like the Lord. I get to paint it to worship back to him, and I think I feel like it’s a full circle.

Roger

Yeah, a lot of people apparently did, because when I visited the gallery and came in, you had a crowd of people around you, and they were asking a lot of good questions. I was trying to overhear to see what they were asking. It was really cool to see so many people engaged with your artwork.

Ayaka

Yeah, I was actually surprised because my paintings were the smallest compared to others. I thought about making them big, but it was really just my prayer for the whole series to keep them humble and small, with no frames, like how Jesus is. Even the way that Jesus was born on Christmas had nothing decorative. I purposely expressed that. I wasn’t sure if people would even be drawn to it because there are other paintings that were big and covered in gold. But I was actually very surprised. So many people came, and I think they related to the train window one the most.

Roger

I really like that one.

Ayaka

I was very surprised because that was the last piece I did right before the exhibit. And I didn’t think I would finish, but that was a scene that kept coming to my mind. A lot of viewers asked me, “Is this Nihonga? When I think of Nihonga, I don’t think about this.”

Roger

Right!

Ayaka

And I was like, well, the style, the technique is nihonga. So that’s why the conversation started. And they said, “Okay, wait, but this…” and I have to explain. The thing about nihonga is that it’s a slow art. So for me to start painting, I can’t just get on the canvas right away. I have to do the double boiler to melt the hide glue. I have to knit the paint, crush it, make it smooth, mix it up, check the temperature, check the humidity…This is crazy process. And that hour to me is my time with the Lord, a heart check. Because sometimes I find myself really rushed and impatient, and it actually shows in the quality of the pigment when I’m rushed and mixing. And when I start painting, it doesn’t glide as well. And I realize “Oh, Lord, am I worried today. Oh, I have this undeveloped issue in my heart. God, can you purify me now as I’m doing this really meticulous, tedious thing?” And that’s how the painting starts. And also, it doesn’t paint like watercolors. If I just brush across the paper, all the colors will move to the side of the paper.

So the way it works is that I have to place the pigment almost like sand art, and then I wait for it to dry. And then I put the next layer and the next layer. You can actually see through all the layers. That’s something we have to think about ahead of time. If you want to paint, say, a red flower, some people put green underlay on purpose to play with the contrast, stuff like that. I was explaining to the people that, yes, this is just a window view, but there’s a lot of layers of prayer that I prayed over this painting. And there’s, like, 30 layers of different color on it. And then so many people said, “This brings tears to my eyes,” or a businessman said, “You know, this brought me back 30 years ago when I first moved to Tokyo from the countryside, and I’ve lost that pure heart as a businessman.” So he was tearing up, and I was like, “Oh, I’m glad.” And then another lady said she had been battling depression the last two years. But when she came into the gallery and saw that painting, something left her, the heaviness was lifted. So she was just crying, saying, “I’m healed. I’m healed by this light.” Praise the Lord Jesus.

Roger

That’s really cool. Clearly, God is working through you and your art. And that what you said about slow art…the idea of praying through even the process of preparation, I think I and other musicians can learn from that. We have to warm up the fingers to be able to practice some of the harder things and can give that to God as well.

So I noticed that your group was called Bezalel. You want to tell us why?

Ayaka

Yes, the lead artist came up with that name. It’s the person that God chose to create highly artistic and beautiful tools for worship. It was in Exodus 31, I think. And she prayed over us, saying, “May we be the artists in Tokyo today that receive from the Lord the wisdom, the skill, the ideas, everything, and create something excellent to help other people worship.” So that was the idea. It’s kind of unique. Not in your face Christian.

Roger

And it so fits. God gave Bezalel those gifts to build the temple so that people could connect with him. And that was the whole point of your exhibit last month, as you even showed during the conversations, the way people responded to what you were saying, to share God’s presence. And you have an exciting story to share too, right? About the owner of the gallery?

Ayaka

Yes, so the owner of this tiny gallery in Nihombashi, through the time that we were preparing and interacting a week before our exhibit, she shared that she wanted to know Christ and she wanted to accept Christ. And we were all like, what is happening? She said our group was very different than any other artist group who have showcased at her gallery. It was very precious because she was always in the corner of the gallery watching during the setup, during our conversations, and even during the week of our exhibit. One or few of us were always in the gallery, and we had our gospel musicians come play music. And through that, she decided to accept Christ. And speaking of this week, she’s starting a class on baptism to get baptized.

Roger

Wow, that’s so cool! There’s this image that art is about self-expression or trying to make a mark by saying something new or something like that. But the fact that God would work so powerfully through the arts, through your exhibit, to help people is really encouraging.

Ayaka

Yeah, I feel like art is a familiar language in Japan. I don’t know why, but art is everywhere in this culture, and it’s very accepted. People know the need for it, even the government. They spend so much money on art, and they don’t mind because they think it’s important. It’s almost like, in daily life, it’s as important as food and transportation. So, in that sense, art is not excess, but part of life, I think.

Roger

Yeah, I think in general Americans like the idea of debating—we were talking about that earlier—debating someone into the kingdom or something like that. But in Japan, it’s different. It starts with the heart, not with the mind. And so it makes it particularly effective to use the arts to share Christ here.

Ayaka

Yeah, and the mind battle is so hard here, too. Sometimes I am reminded that even though the US may not be viewed as a Christian country, there’s a familiarity. There are Bibles in the hotels, like in little drawers, or there’s a sense that Christianity is part of everyday life. But in Japan, it’s not like that. It’s a foreign thing. And a lot of people have a weird understanding or it’s scary or it’s forceful or some old book says it smells like butter. It’s a foreign thing. Like the Western missionaries brought this to Japan. But I feel like, in art, people can know that this is the Creator God who created Japan as well.

Roger

Definitely. Well, thank you so much for sharing today. I pray that God will continue to bless you and your art and use you to share more about him and his kingdom, as he already has been. So exciting. Thank you for sharing today.

Ayaka

Thank you so much.

Roger

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the “Art Life Faith” podcast. Check out my website www.rogerwlowther.com for a transcription of this podcast and various links. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time.”

(Visit Ayaka Uchida on the web at www.ayakauchida.com and on Instagram.)

The post 41. On Being A Japanese Christian – Ayaka Uchida appeared first on Roger W. Lowther.

40. Great Festival of Heaven

Merry Christmas everyone! Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, where we talk about art, what it has to do with your life, and what it has to do with the Christian faith. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Every month, I send out newsletters telling stories of missions through the arts—what’s happening here in Japan, how the arts are playing a role in church planting, and how the arts are connecting us to people in the city. You can sign up for these newsletters by going to my website, www.rogerwlowther.com, and clicking Contact at the bottom of the page. In these podcasts, I try to tell other stories, the ones that usually don’t make it into the newsletters. In the last episode, I began to share some stories from a Christmas event at a gallery I visited. I told you a little bit about an artist who was so thankful for the opportunity to share her faith publicly for the first time when she led one of our Art Life Faith discussions, which is what this podcast is named after. Because of that experience, she’s been sharing her faith with more and more people.

And guess what? Last week, I got a message from her. She was sharing the gospel with the owner of that gallery, and then the owner of the gallery became a Christian. What a tremendous Christmas present, right? The artist told me how excited she was. It’s just so cool that all she was doing was sharing the love of God in her context, which was an art gallery. It was not out of place at all because that particular exhibit was about the love of God and Christmas.

I also want to tell you about another artist who was exhibiting at that gallery. Her name is Ayaka Uchida. She paints in the traditional Japanese art of nihonga, which uses crushed minerals and glue to paint layer after layer over each other and create a beautiful effect you really can’t get any other way. The whole painting sparkles in the light, especially under the bright lights of the gallery.

I was particularly drawn to a series of paintings she calls Immanuel Sky. One in particular showed her house surrounded by what you usually find in a neighborhood in the suburbs of Tokyo—lots of other houses, power lines, streetlights, etc. They were all painted with a beautiful blue color, which Ayaka explained was a particularly expensive mineral. These were all placed under a broad golden sky. The artist told me that she painted this scene after a really difficult day to show that God is always with us.

IMMANUEL: WITH ME by Ayaka Uchida
“God became human to be with us in every moment of life”

God is Immanuel, “God with us.” He is not only present in beautiful scenes of nature, like mountains and ocean and starry skies, but he is also present in the cities and the neighborhoods where we live. Under the lights of the gallery, her ordinary scene came to life with a magical glow. Our drab, ordinary world shined with expensive minerals to show the value of our lives and the things in our lives. It was nothing less than a picture of heaven come to earth.

And in that sense as well, it was a picture of the Christmas story. This message of the presence of God and the glory of heaven shining through into our ordinary world is exactly the message I’ll be sharing in a solo organ Christmas concert this weekend where I’ve been asked to give a Christmas message. I’ll be sharing from a passage of the Bible not usually associated with Christmas, from the Book of Leviticus 23:1–2.

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Speak to the Israelites and say to them these are my appointed festivals, the appointed festivals of the Lord which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies.’”

It’s fascinating to me that God gave the Israelites festivals. There are seven festivals listed in this chapter: the Sabbath, the Feast of Passover, the Feast of First Fruits, the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Booths.

Let’s consider for a moment. What is a festival? In festivals, people celebrate together using the best of their art and culture. The festivals are celebrated with their own distinctive foods music, dress, decorations, gifts, and games. Sometimes balloons or fireworks fill the sky. There’s excitement in the air. And so by giving the Israelites festivals, God was forming the identity of the nation and the people of that nation.

Every nation on the planet has festivals. Probably every person has strong memories of some holiday or celebration they had as a child. These kinds of celebrations are an important part of who we are as humans. They’re part of our identity as families and as communities. In America, perhaps the biggest festival of all is Christmas.

I have so many fond memories of Christmas. The lights, the decorations, the presents, the food, and, of course, the music. They’re all tied to art in some way, aren’t they? Every year when I was in junior high and in high school, I participated as a musician in a play our church put on. It was a pretty big church, and we had about twelve performances every year, always completely packed, every seat taken. And everyone loved it. Christmas was always a day off from school. Since Christmas falls on a Sunday this year my kids are really happy they don’t have to go to school on Christmas this year.

My dad had a really nice train set, not a toy one made for children that he’d spend much of Christmas Eve setting up, so that when my sister and I woke in the morning, the room was magically transformed. There was the moving train and a mountain of presence and stockings full of goodies above the fireplace. We had special clothes like a silly red sweater with reindeer or snowmen or snowflakes and hats like Santa and his elves. We played special games. We watched special movies on TV. And a sense of wonder and magic surrounded everything.

Growing up in Boston, we almost always had a white Christmas. My dad told me it’s already been snowing this year in Boston! So after opening my presents, I’d go outside and play in the snow and then come back in for hot chocolate or eggnog. My grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, cousins, and guests would all come over later for lunch and dinner. It was a whole day event.

I’ll be sharing some of these stories in the concert because people here in Japan are really fascinated by the American way of celebrating Christmas. It’s just not a big deal here. Some people go and get Kentucky Fried Chicken…I guess Colonel Sanders does look a little bit like Santa…and there’s a special white Christmas cake you can buy. Children still go to school when it’s not a Sunday, and people still go to work. From the window of my living room, I can see the living rooms of probably 100,000 people, and we are the only apartment with Christmas lights on our porch and window. Yet, with all these memories, we never forget the real meaning of Christmas. God came to be with us. He came as a little child.

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light on those living in the land of deep darkness, a light is dawned. For to us a child is born. To us a son is given. And the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called wonderful Counselor, mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:2, 6)

Then in the first chapter of the New Testament, Matthew connects the birth of Jesus to the prophecies when he writes,

“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel,’ (which means ‘God with us’).” (Matthew 1:22–23)

God came as a little baby to be with us, to share his presence with us. The All-Powerful became vulnerable. The infinite became finite. The transcendent became imminent. Heaven itself came to earth and the government was on the shoulders of this child, bringing heaven itself to the earth.

Everything is being made new. Every tear will be wiped away. You see…Christmas doesn’t just celebrate the coming of Jesus. There is a deeper meaning to Christmas, what I like to call the “magic” of Christmas, where the glory of heaven peaks through into our drab and ordinary world. This is the beauty and wonder and excitement that leaks into our lives and communities.

Light into darkness. Hope from despair. Life from death. Everything sad is going to come untrue and will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost. Christmas is not just about Christmas. When we celebrate the festival of Christmas with our favorite food and favorite music and favorite clothes, we’re celebrating something big, a place where Christmas will never stop and will never grow old. Christmas is a picture of heaven. Heaven is a festival, a feast for the senses.

There will be a feeling of excitement with crowds of people we’ve never met before, as we share special foods, listen to special music, and wear special clothes. There will be dancing, gifts, and games. There will be decorations with lights and glass balls and bells beyond our wildest imaginations. And so in this season, we celebrate this amazing God, the giver of every good and perfect gift. God gives festivals to point to the kingdom he is bringing. He’s giving us the means to celebrate him.

Everything we delight in now in the festival of Christmas is but a taste of that ultimate beauty and joy we find in the Great Festival of Heaven.

This is Roger Lowther, and you’ve been listening to the “Art Life Faith” podcast. Check out my website www.rogerwlowther.com for a transcription of this podcast and various links. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne! See you next time.”

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