My call to be a Missionary

God calls each of us in individual ways, and what I share here will be particularly how God has dealt with me, and should not be considered as a method by which God will call everyone. However, in sharing these experiences, my hope is that we will learn something of God - that He does lead, that He is concerned about the details of our lives, and particularly His patience in His dealings with us when we so often try and go our own way or do our own thing.

The second thing I want to say at the outset is that my call to Japan was not because my parents were missionaries to Japan and I was just following in their foot steps, nor because I grew up in Japan, spending the first 17-18 years of my life there. My call was a definite call of God to go to Japan because that was where God wanted me to be, not because I wanted to be there. In fact, when I left Japan, I had no desire or thought of wanting to be a missionary, and when I did feel the ‘call’ of God, it was not to Japan, but rather to Africa. So how did I end up back in Japan?

I attended the Canadian Academy in Kobe, Japan for most of my school years. One thing the school encouraged and arranged was for the students in the final year of high school to go on an educational trip for about ten days to some part of Japan. Our year decided on a trip to western Japan and the Japan Sea coast, taking in many of the interesting places such as Hagi, Izumo, Matsue and Tottori. The Japan Sea coast line is a beautiful area to visit with pottery, ancient temples and places full of history. However, because it is rural, many of the places we visited did not have much going on in the evenings. Such was the case on our last night in Tottori. Autumn in Japan is a pleasant time of the year, and so a walk around Tottori in the cool of that October evening was quite an enjoyable thing to do. However, it was to have a lasting impact on my life, though at the time I was not aware that this would be so.

As we walked about the town, a very strong sense of the spiritual darkness came over me, so much so, I thought to myself, “When my parents return from furlough this needs to be where they should come. I knew that they had been thinking about whether to move from Kobe when they returned to Japan following my graduation and one year in UK. I didn’t think anything more of it, nor did I say anything to my parents, and promptly forgot about it. I was on my way to the UK. The future was before me and the big world was waiting for me! I was looking forward to it and had been investigating various possible careers that I might enter.

God, in his infinite wisdom, arranged in a rather remarkable way for me to start physiotherapy training the autumn I graduated. This was quite amazing, because most of the schools that I had applied to could not take me until the following year. I ended up at the West Middlesex School of Physiotherapy in Isleworth, Middlesex, and was not all that far from Mill Hill, North London, where my parents were based during their furlough. It meant I was able to get home a number of times, and even managed to be there for a midweek report meeting one November day. A missionary male nurse who was serving in Ethiopia was sharing his experiences on that occasion. That night I felt what I can only describe as ‘a call’ of God to serve Him as a missionary. Rather than pray about it as I should have done, I began to think and plan how I thought I could serve God as a missionary. Because my ‘call’ had come through a missionary using nursing skills to reach out to the people, and because of my situation as a student of physiotherapy, I thought the logical option was to consider medical missions. Most of the people that I knew who were involved in any way in medical missions were in Africa, and so my focus was in that direction, and more particularly towards Ethiopia. Physiotherapy on the mission field up until that point did not exist, so I realized that I would be moving very much in a new direction as far as medical missions was concerned.

However, these thoughts were placed on the back burner for the first two years or so of my training. I did not really pray too much about it, or give it much thought during that time. However, as I entered my third year, I realized I would need to begin to think and pray seriously about what I would do after I had finished training. Firstly, I would have to fulfil my obligations of two years service in the National Health Service as part of my commitment for having received a bursary to study. However, this requirement was discontinued just before I finished, so was no longer a constraint as to the timing of my departure.

Several things happened during that final year that were to have big influences on what I would finally decide to do. The first was that I began to read my Bible in a way I had not done before, and read through the whole Bible in three months leading up to the summer. This had a tremendous impact on my spiritual life and was noticed by others. The second thing was that I read Watchman Nee’s little book, Release of the Spirit, which was a great help to me. The third thing was that I felt that I should try and do an exploratory trip to Ethiopia to see how a physiotherapist might fit into the work. Because of the cost of flights, I looked into the possibility of charter flights. However, that did not work out or coincide with my holidays. The fourth thing to happen was that a retired senior missionary from North Africa came to our church to speak. He spoke at the evening service and then at the young people’s group. I cannot remember anything in particular from what he said but I know that it affected me to the extent that I read through John 13-17 that night. As a result of all of this, I entered into a correspondence about my missionary call with him which continued from the September through to the New Year.

The outcome of that correspondence led me to realize that I was making a big mistake in respect to missionary thoughts and plans. What I had been doing was offering to God my qualifications of physiotherapy but what God was wanting was me! I confessed my mistake to God and prayed, offering myself to Him for whatever, wherever He wanted to send me. Within three days, I felt vividly as if it had been the night before, the sense of spiritual darkness and oppression that I had felt three and half years earlier in Tottori, Japan. This was too coincidental to be chance and I began to pray fervently asking God to show me what He was meaning by this. It gradually became clear that God wanted me to return to Japan.
That spring, I approached the church elders about all this and they concurred with me believing this was of God too. Several questions were asked, including what would I do with my physiotherapy training. A letter I had received shortly before from a senior missionary in Japan helped me to see all of this in perspective. God never wastes our experiences, and the purpose for which I had gone into physiotherapy might now be coming to an end, or it might still play a part in the work God had for me to do. One thing was clear though, and it was that God had used it to get me thinking about missions. Furthermore, while in Ube, Japan some nine years later, we had a lot of contact with the doctors at the University of Yamaguchi medical school, and having a background in the medical field enabled me to relate more meaningfully.

Over the next few months as preparations continued several concerns arose, one of which was my lack of experience of missionary work and inability to do what I had seen missionaries in Japan do. However, how God reassured me on that issue will have to be the topic for another blog.

About eight years after that initial experience in Tottori, my wife and I boarded a plane for Japan to begin service for God there.

I believe that God had made his initial ‘call’ to me in Tottori, but my life was too full of other things, and so did not give it any thought. However, God, in His mercy, was patient with me, and got my attention through the medical missions route. God is like that sometimes. God can still get us to the place He wants us even though we may not respond how God would like us to. God is not interested in what we can do or not do. Our gifts or qualifications are all received from Him anyway. What he wants is us, wholly given to Him for His use in whatever way He wants to use us. We can leave the rest to Him. Just as God called Moses there at the burning bush, inviting him to join Him in His work of delivering the people from their bondage, so too God is inviting us to share in His work. All Moses needed to be was the vessel God could use to fulfil His purposes. That is what God is still wanting of us today. Will you let God invite you to be involved in His work wherever it might be?