Where to next?

Enough people have been asking us this question lately that I figure it's worth a blog post.

The short answer is: we don't know yet! But, okay, that's not really... like, that's not so much the "short answer" as it is the "short and pithy" answer. There isn't really an answer that's that short. I'd love it if we could just say "Back to the USA!" or "To South Korea again!" or something, but I mean, it is true that we don't know yet. It's just that that answer begs the question, "How can you not know yet? Don't you leave Japan in a week?"

We do! Probably. It is true that we currently have plane tickets to Los Angeles on the 25th. But it's also true that they're fully refundable, and that our visas and our apartment are both good for like another week after that, so we have space to pivot. And besides that, if we were to go to Los Angeles, I don't know what we'd do there; we obviously still have friends there, but we asked a lot of them all the last time we were there, I'm not sure we could bring ourselves to ask much more of them. (Even though I'm sure they'd offer more!) We're also putting a lot of conscious effort into remembering the last time we left Japan - how we had plans and then God shifted those plans drastically within like the last 36 hours. We had plane tickets and a hotel in Vietnam booked and then bam we were going to South Korea on our way back to the States instead.

So the upshot is that we're praying a lot. God has made it clear in many ways that he is still in control of our schedule and that our train is still very much on his rails. And since we know he's capable of moving us around safely with very little notice to us, we're trying very hard not to be too bothered by still not knowing what's happening next.

I could tell you a lot of little theories about what could happen next; I can also of course tell you that we're praying very hard for God to somehow, miraculously keep us here in Hakodate instead of us leaving at all. But over the course of this time in Japan, a shift has happened in our mindset.

Before now, we'd been, I dunno... I don't want to imply that it was unwilling, but God's plans for us were definitely, like, unexpected by us. God started doing a lot in our life - and requiring a lot of trust from us - and we were just kind of rolling with it. We were on board - again, definitely not unwilling - but it was stuff that was happening to us without our choice. But some of the things we've learned during the last few months here... I guess you could say God gave us the opportunity to choose to get off this train, and on to one where we could at least see where it was going. And we chose to stay on this one, come what may.

So it's different now. It's still the same as it has been for the last few years - God knows where we're going next, but he doesn't tell us until we actually must know - but now we've chosen the chaos, we've chosen the uncertainty, and so we're... well, we're not more comfortable with it, but we at least can't complain about it anymore.

(That's a lie, of course; we can complain about anything, it's one of our superpowers. But at least now our whining feels unfair to us, too.)

Which is not at all to say that we're just, like, perfect little saints, following Jesus into the storm with our hands clasped and praise on our lips. We are, at times, confused and anxious and scared. We have questions about where we're going, about where we'll stay once we get there, about where our money's going to come from... oh, and we have questions, a lot of questions, about all of our stuff here. Last time we left, we thought we were coming back shortly, and left most of our things behind. But then we spent over a year away, and had to pick up some new clothes, new bags, etc. We brought that with us here this time, so we have, like, six or seven full items of luggage worth of stuff - maybe little enough to move them to one place, but way too much to just lug around with us without knowing where we're going. But we can't ask our friends here to keep so much of it again, can we? But if we're downsizing we really need to get started, but where we're going might affect the types of clothes we keep vs. the ones we get rid of, and and and...

And when we're afraid, we hold on to everything we've learned about how reliable God is, about how good he is and how good he's been to us.

Like today; I woke up at like 5:30am and rather than rolling back over and going back to sleep, I took the hint and got up, had a cup of coffee, and went for a long walk with God. I told him everything I was nervous about and everything I wanted, and I asked him, like, couldn't he please just give me some answers to my questions? If I insisted? What if I, like, refused to stop the walk until he told me something, would that work? Like Jacob wrestling the Angel, or Elisha refusing to leave Elijah's side? And he told me to try it and see. Luckily he only waited a couple miles to say to me, clearly, three times in a row: "I have good plans for you. I have good plans for you. I have good plans for you."

That was enough for me for today.