fishes and bread

This week I experienced grace.  Again.  It's a hard thing to explain to someone what it feels like to feel full of power and potential and to be the strongest you've ever been in your life, but simultaneously feel helpless, weak, so humbled that everything in your life, down to the very crumbs from the piece of toast you eat for breakfast is a blessing, and a gift and not something for you to claim as your own.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I've never been good with money.  When I have money I only want to give it away, and when I don't have it, I'm happy enough not to bother getting any.  I don't mind living paycheck to paycheck, it's never been a stressful environment for me.  However, the past few weeks, maybe the past month, and probably continuing for the next month, I have been living on a budget of less than paycheck to paycheck.  I am living from day to day.  Some days I wake up and have literally no idea how I will buy food or how to afford transportation to work for that day.  I work a lot of hours at night and on weekends, but my paychecks are once a month and come at the end of the month after the month I'm getting paid for, so on Feb 25, I got paid for January's work, on  March 25, I'll get paid for February.  Because of the current conversion rate for dollars to yen and because of unavoidable one time fees that came up during my first few weeks here I was out of the money that I had raised to come in a much shorter time than I originally anticipated.

Every day I laugh at myself as a slew of you're so poor jokes go across my mind.  I'm so poor, no one had to tell me that in Japan people are expected to eat every grain of rice, I have never left a grain of rice uneaten.  I'm so poor that even in the snow and rain on days where the temperature hovers around 0 degrees Celcius, I ride my room mate's bike or walk the 4 km each way to work.  I'm so poor that I dropped an egg on the ground and scooped it back up with a spoon and cooked it for breakfast because it was the only food I had left.  Okay, so those aren't very good jokes, but they make me laugh.

And I think that's the point of today's blog.  Well, that and the other thing I'm going to get to in a little bit.  The first point, though, being that even though I'm in a less than desirous situation, or at least what would seem one to most people, I can't help but have joy outside of anything I've ever known.  I've been here for two months almost.  Two months and I can't help but smile every time I see people on the street, I walk home in the literally blistering cold (you should see my hands - disgusting) and by the time I get home my lips are chapped and my cheeks are sore because I was grinning for the last 40 minutes.  Even though I don't know how I'll eat next week, I'm so happy because I know that I will eat next week.  I'm so happy because I am constantly watching as God works in my life.  It's stunning, really.

And there it was, did you see it?  The other point of today's blog.

Even though I can't always pay for food, God has fed me.  Last time I wrote about the church up the street.  I wrote about traveling with them to feed the homeless.  What I didn't read about was how they fed me, also.  The day I met the people from that church was also the day that I completely ran out of money and food.  I had nothing left to eat and no promise of money coming in for quite a while.  I only had a little bit of money left on my train pass, but I decided to go with them anyway.  The day I went was a bad day.  It was cold, it was rainy, and there weren't many homeless people that were willing to go the park on a day like that and sit through a message, even if there was the promise of food.  So at the end of the day there was a lot of extra food that was going to get thrown away.  Like I said before, I couldn't communicate with anyone, so even if I wanted to, I couldn't have asked for them to give me any food.  But the woman I met from the church kept giving me the extra food to take home with me, and I couldn't say no (mostly because I don't know how to still). 

I know that this story, that this entry seems strange, maybe it seems irresponsible.  I realize what my life looks like to a lot of people.  The point isn't how crazy stupid I am, though.  The point is how crazy awesome God is.  Each day I witness his mercy both in how he provides for me, and through his love for someone as broken as I am.  Every day he is teaching me how to love by showing me his incredible love.  He's giving me strength through the knowledge of his power.  I'm being taught to serve by realizing how little I deserve the things he gives me and experiencing how much he loves those around me.  I'm being molded, I can feel it.  Some days it hurts, those days I have to suck up my pride and accept the 2000yen offered to me by the pastor of a church across town because otherwise I wouldn't be able to get back home or eat dinner, or every day I have to decline going to dinner on my break at work because I can't afford to eat fast food.  Those are the days that I also feel the presence of the Lord the strongest, so I can't help but smile.

It's a hard thing to explain to someone what it feels like to be helpless, weak, so humbled that everything in your life is a blessing, and a gift and not something for you to claim as your own but simultaneously feel full of power and potential and to be the strongest you've ever been in your life.