A letter from Bill Geppert in Japan
November 2010
Dear Friends,
Finally it is beginning to turn to fall here in Japan. In most places it is not a New England kind of fall, but there is some color. I have Japanese maples surrounding my house; when the bottom branches finally turn color, the tops have already turned brown. At this point everything is still green, but the mornings and evenings are cool. Typhoon 14 (the Japanese number the storms rather than name them) has just passed by to the south of Honshu. We got plenty of rain but no wind. It is very late for typhoons to make it this far north.
Yesterday I attended a memorial service at the university chapel. Every year they hold a service to remember those who graduated from the university or high school and have passed away during the past year. The earliest was a 1931 graduate of high school; the most recent was in the 2005 class. There were some 75 in all. I found it very meaningful to take time to sit down and think about the passage of life into death. How sad if there are only a few short memorial services and funerals. Yet this is the way it is for human beings. At the same time, there is joy in knowing that lives have been lived in fullness, whatever they have done.
As a missionary and a Christian, I often wonder how people can go through life without feeling the need for God. Many Japanese seem to share a vague hope that there is something beyond as they approach the end of life. The Shinto ritual of sending off the departed with gifts at the altar, including food and drink for the journey, and the ritual honoring of ancestors as if they are alive and well in the beyond has led many to keep the Christian religion at arms length. Most know about it but are unwilling to pursue the hope of eternal life that Jesus offers.
So I often find myself praying that the difficulties that they encounter will help nudge them to seek after God in Jesus Christ. True, this happens only rarely, but it is wonderful when it does. Why do I feel this way? The love of God through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were the catalysts for creating this world in the first place. Each and every person ever born was created (save Jesus) as a unique and special person. Jesus of course was begotten, not made. But all the rest of us were made to be in fellowship with God in a loving relationship. This love is beyond compare, and human love simply can’t compare. No one knows every fiber of our being like God does. No one cares for us the way God does. His love is beyond what we experience in this life and was always meant to be the foundation for all that we would encounter in this life.
There is simply no way to receive salvation except through Jesus Christ our Lord. This salvation is absolutely unique in that it is offered to every single person who has ever lived, regardless of birth, race, creed or color, not to mention economic status, mistakes, sins, failures and the ups and downs of life experiences we all go through. This salvation is also unique in that we cannot earn it, buy it, bribe our way into it, or store up enough merits doing good deeds that God expects us to do as our duty as human beings. This salvation through Jesus costs only one thing, our very pride and ego.
As I work in this country I see in so many people what I saw in America — pride, ego and the unwillingness to admit their total need for God. God cries out to be at the center of every human. But so many humans resist, fight and harden their hearts against God. Perfectly wonderful people, generous, kind and filled with love, manage to keep their pride, and their determination to avoid God at all costs, intact. And so they live and die. But perhaps there is hope in the events that are slowly crushing people. The hope is that people will finally admit defeat, abandon their pride and seek after God. Jesus said it best, “What good does it do for a person to gain the whole world but lose his soul?” Even if the world collapsed economically or warmed up to an average 100° F and flooded to a thousand feet, God’s love and our hope in this love would only increase. Our soul, our very being, would be perfectly safe, kept by Him who could never lose us. But for those who are too tied to this world and too wrapped up in their own pride and desires, there will be only hopelessness.
Bill Geppert
The 2010 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 141
