Where Everybody's Crazy

Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?

As a mission, we at WEC say that we go "where the need is". Not where it's easy, or where it's personally convenient, but where the need is. And, well, I could be cynical but for the most part we do that pretty well. I keep forgetting how well we do it.

A few months after coming to Japan, I joined the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association. I had this thing about professional development and joining relevant organisations and reading the professional journals, and... that's another story for another time. Anyway, every month or so JEMA sends me an email about the events that they put on, which are nearly all in Tokyo. Of course they are; if you live in Tokyo, you're never really sure if people have electricity or running water yet outside of Tokyo. And besides, everyone in Japan commutes into Tokyo every day, right?

Anyway, those events that aren't in Tokyo are in a place called Higashi Kurume. Which is technically Tokyo, but is a city in its own right at the north end of Tokyo near Saitama. I just looked that up, because I had never heard of it before getting all this JEMA spam about stuff going on there. Higashi Kurume. Higashi Kurume. What the heck's going on in Higashi Kurume?

At the CPI conference, I met a bunch of missionaries from Higashi Kurume, and I asked them. What is going on there? Is there a big revival happening? Coversely, is it a particularly difficult place to evangelise so we need lots of stuff going on there? And to a man, they all gave me the same answer.

"We're there because there's a good Christian school there."

A woman comes across a man crawling under a street lamp. "I've lost my car keys," he explains.
The woman tries to help the man find his keys. After a few minutes of searching, she asks "Where exactly did you drop them?"
"Down the street, next to my car."
Puzzled, she asks "Then why aren't you looking over there?"
"The light is better here."