4 Ramifications
The speaker's message that night was from Mark 8:36: "For what shall it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
That night, I heard that God loved me and gave His Son Jesus Christ to die on the Cross to pay the penalty of my sin; I heard that all I had to do was acknowledge all this and merely ask Him to forgive me and save me. And the preacher asserted that "accepting Christ as personal Saviour"--the same words I had heard from the teacher--was the way to ensure eternal life, the way not to "lose one's own soul".
The values that I had held and taught up until then looked different all of a sudden. I had been emphasizing building character, contributing to society, etc..., but what if the most important issue of all was the eternal destiny of the soul? Didn't that have to be taken care of first?
At the altar call, I hesitated. Some of my own students were there at the meeting. What would they think? But a pastor nearby offered to go foward with me. I would not "gain the whole world" and "lose my own soul," I decided. That meeting, I went forward and asked Jesus Christ to be my Saviour.
But it was not enough that I be on my way to Heaven; it was not enough that I had escaped hell. I had visited my relatives in Okinawa as a boy, spent grades 4 & 5 with them. They had never heard any of this. They had to be told!
"If I don't go tell them, who will?"
Leaving behind teaching to reach my relatives in Okinawa...well, that was something that came to me as a matter of course; it was a pretty automatic response. And reading of the Word only strengthened the conviction that I had to take the Gospel to Okinawa.
But when I told my parents what I had decided, they opposed pretty strongly. After all, their son's becoming a teacher had been a real accomplishment and source of pride. Quit to become a missionary to Japan? My parents didn't want me to even consider the idea. They asked close friends to come talk me out of it, and one came several hours by rail to do so.
I decided to continue teaching for a year to see if they would change their minds. Change their minds, they did not, but their opposition slackened. So after that year was over, I left my teaching post to get missionary training at the Millar Memorial Bible Institute in Pambrun (Sasketchewan), a small school out on vast flatland, where its students described it as "a hole in the ground, 40 miles from nowhere."
No longer was I out on a self-determined trek to build character or teach good citizenship; those things had paled in comparison with the value of soul's destiny. No, rather, I had embarked on a journey merely to find what had already been mapped out for my life--mapped out by the ETERNAL NAVIGATOR Whom I now knew personally.
That night, I heard that God loved me and gave His Son Jesus Christ to die on the Cross to pay the penalty of my sin; I heard that all I had to do was acknowledge all this and merely ask Him to forgive me and save me. And the preacher asserted that "accepting Christ as personal Saviour"--the same words I had heard from the teacher--was the way to ensure eternal life, the way not to "lose one's own soul".
The values that I had held and taught up until then looked different all of a sudden. I had been emphasizing building character, contributing to society, etc..., but what if the most important issue of all was the eternal destiny of the soul? Didn't that have to be taken care of first?
At the altar call, I hesitated. Some of my own students were there at the meeting. What would they think? But a pastor nearby offered to go foward with me. I would not "gain the whole world" and "lose my own soul," I decided. That meeting, I went forward and asked Jesus Christ to be my Saviour.
But it was not enough that I be on my way to Heaven; it was not enough that I had escaped hell. I had visited my relatives in Okinawa as a boy, spent grades 4 & 5 with them. They had never heard any of this. They had to be told!
"If I don't go tell them, who will?"
Leaving behind teaching to reach my relatives in Okinawa...well, that was something that came to me as a matter of course; it was a pretty automatic response. And reading of the Word only strengthened the conviction that I had to take the Gospel to Okinawa.
But when I told my parents what I had decided, they opposed pretty strongly. After all, their son's becoming a teacher had been a real accomplishment and source of pride. Quit to become a missionary to Japan? My parents didn't want me to even consider the idea. They asked close friends to come talk me out of it, and one came several hours by rail to do so.
I decided to continue teaching for a year to see if they would change their minds. Change their minds, they did not, but their opposition slackened. So after that year was over, I left my teaching post to get missionary training at the Millar Memorial Bible Institute in Pambrun (Sasketchewan), a small school out on vast flatland, where its students described it as "a hole in the ground, 40 miles from nowhere."
No longer was I out on a self-determined trek to build character or teach good citizenship; those things had paled in comparison with the value of soul's destiny. No, rather, I had embarked on a journey merely to find what had already been mapped out for my life--mapped out by the ETERNAL NAVIGATOR Whom I now knew personally.
© 2005 by June Saito
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