No turning back

When I came to Japan, I had no idea how long I would stay here. My initial plan was to stick it out for two years, and see how I felt after that.

During that time, I started visiting a church in Kobe, and in my second year, there was a seminar on small groups. In one of the seminars, however, the pastor gave a talk on being a missionary in Japan.

During the talk, he said something that’s always stayed with me. He said, “If you’re going to be a missionary in Japan, don’t come with a plan B, only a plan A.”

What he meant by that was to come to Japan with the intention of staying permanently. Don’t come to Japan with the back door of returning available in your mind.

The reason was that in Japan, it takes time to build relationships, and those relationships are vital if people are to become Christians.

Many times, people would say to the pastor, “I’m interested in what you’re saying, but how long are you going to be here? I don’t want to become a Christian only to have you abandon me later.”

I’ve never forgotten those words, and it was shortly thereafter that I made the decision to stay in Japan permanently.

I thought about that as I read the passage in Genesis today. Abraham wanted to find a wife for Isaac, but didn’t want him to marry one of the Canaanites. So Abraham sent a servant back to where his relatives were to find a wife from among them.

But when the servant asked what to do if no one was willing to come back with him, Abraham was adamant that Isaac not go back to live there. Abraham’s last recorded words were, “Don’t take my son back there.”

Why was Abraham so adamant about this? Because God had commanded him to leave his old life behind, and to start a new life with God, and Abraham didn’t want his children to abandon the promises that God had made to him.

Also, Abraham was confident that God would take care of Isaac’s need for a wife, if he would just follow God’s commands. He saw no need to go back.

This was much different from his earlier attitudes when dealing with Pharaoh, Abimelech, and in waiting for Isaac to be born.

Abraham had finally matured in his faith, and his face was set forward to what God had planned for him and his descendants. He refused to look back.

In Hebrews 11, it says,

If they (Abraham and his descendants) had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. (15–16)

God wants us to be the same way.

Sometimes when the Christian life gets hard, or things don’t go as we hope, it’s easy to look back to our old life and say, “I might as well go back to my old way of life. It’s so much easier to do things my way than to do things God’s way.”

And as long as we’re looking back, it’s easy to slip back into our old way of life.

Personally, if I were always focused on my old life in Hawaii, it would be easy to get homesick, and just give up on my life in Japan.

But God doesn’t want us to look back. He wants us to look forward. And he wants us to press on along the path he has for us.

It’s not necessarily the easiest path. But in the end, we’ll find that it is the path of the greatest blessing.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the path I want to take. As the apostle Paul said,

I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.

But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12–14)