Waiting, Sadness, Joy – Three Movements on Place

First Movement: Waiting

I’m out of Japan, but only by a few feet, sitting in the no-man’s-land of an empty terminal, unable to physically leave the country, but equally unable to legally reenter it. This trip to Japan was only possible thanks to God’s provision in opening a way for me to fly cheaply on standby. The only catch is that on days like today when all the planes are full, I have to go back and try again another day. However, because I legally left the country when my passport was stamped at immigration, it’s not as simple as just leaving the airport to go back to the place where I’m staying. Canceling my departure stamp should be an easy enough process, even here in the country of red tape, but apparently one of our number (there are several of us stranded here) never technically entered the country (there’s no entry stamp in his passport). All of us are perplexed at how he managed to leave if he never came. And more to the point, what harm there is in letting him back into a place he obviously couldn’t have left, having never been in (or so they say) in the first place. This dizzying logic has bottlenecked the system, leaving me in international limbo with nothing but a laptop and my thoughts. The interesting dilemma of the situation is that while physically I’m in a very real place (Gate 31, on the fourth floor of the south wing of an airport just outside of the city of Narita on the island of Honshu in Japan) legally, I’m nowhere—not in Japan anymore, but certainly not back in the States.

Second Movement: Sadness

While I have heard spiritual warfare described in terms of a sense of oppression or a foreboding of evil, what I have sensed here in Japan regarding dark spirits is just that: darkness. While they are oppressive against the gospel and bent on the destruction of all that God loves, they do so enshrouded in darkness, hiding even their own existence, and from darkness they blind the eyes and numb the hearts of the people. I have sensed this in various places around the country, but I am coming to sense it most strongly in the temples and shrines. Some of these ancient sites have been under the control of demonic powers for well over a thousand years, and there is great spiritual darkness there. Two days ago I visited Asakusa-jingu, another famous shrine, with my former Japanese tutor, and I began to feel an inkling of this darkness, like a passing shadow over my own spirit. It was not hostility as such, or evil, but simply numbness: the kind of numbness that brings thousands of Japanese to these sacred sites to perform rituals they themselves barely believe in, without stopping to ask why. As we walked through the grounds of the shrine, I found myself praying under my breath, reclaiming that territory for God in the name of Jesus. In the transience of our modern culture, we have come to forget the importance of place, yet I am becoming increasingly convinced that a real geographic place—an island nation in the middle of the Pacific, a hilltop just north of Tokyo, a tiny church in a rice field in Okayama—can become a locus of spiritual power. As we read the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, we do in fact see that God himself is intimately concerned with geography.

Third Movement: Joy

That same evening, I met with three dear sisters and brothers in the Lord for dinner. The four of us represent four different countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the US), yet the Lord brought us together at a tiny church in rural Japan four years ago, and then allowed us a reunion here in Tokyo. As we shared together what God had done for us over the past four years, and then prayed for his continued guidance and provision as we again go our separate ways, I was given a strong sense of a spiritual power that transcends geography. As one of my friends prayed, though we are each going separate directions, we are following the same God, and we are bound together by his love. Or as the Psalmist put it: “Even if I settle on the far side of the sea, you are there.” We serve a God who transcends geographical limitations, and his truth and love are universally imminent.

Coda: Hope

We live in a world of place and time, geography and history, flesh and blood. And in the mystery of God’s economy of the universe, what happens here in the material world truly matters in the spiritual world. Places matter to God, and to the other spirits, because they matter to us, and we are missing out on a blessing when we fail to recognize the spiritual atmosphere of places, whether a church sanctuary or a city street where we pray on the way to work. Yet, as important as location is, its value is determined by a higher authority. The south wing of Narita Airport is only Japan if my passport is stamped by the government. The hilltop of Asakusa is only dark because there, as in places all around the world, mankind has exchanged the glory of God for a lie. Someday even that hilltop will be bathed in radiant light, for a higher authority yet will claim it for himself. Thus, as I am pulled away from my brothers and sisters here to return to the US, I am joyful. Not because the 6,000 miles of earth and sea don’t matter, or the places we will go are unimportant, but because they are very important, and the God whose love echoes from the mountains of Japan to the plains of Illinois goes with each of us and binds us together. We live in a world in which every inch of rock and sea proclaims the glory of God, and Christ plays from a thousand places. And we live in the hope that even the dark places have been reclaimed as Christ’s in his death, and will be fully revealed as his in his return, for even the darkness is as light to him.