Kimiko's Travel Agent

(This is not a normal blog, in which the first entry is made at the bottom, and newer entries are added on above it. The whole story, written originally in 1989, was put in here at once (one chapter per page), so if you want to read it chronologically correctly, don't treat it as a blog, click on the "Readings" links at left to read them!)

About Me

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Location: Tengan, Uruma-Shi, Okinawa-ken, Japan

I am an MK (missionary kid) and mother. I grew up in Okinawa to missionary parents, a Japanese Canadian and a Japanese American from Hawaii. My mother began missionary service in 1950, Dad in 1955. So I grew up speaking in Japanese in church but studying in English in a school started for missionary kids. My husband is Japanese (from Koriyama), and both of my children, born in Koriyama, speak only Japanese. We moved to Saitama after the earthquake of 2011. My parents have gone to Glory, and my daughter is now a mother--which makes me a grandmother! We (me, my husband, my son) moved down to Okinawa in September 2024.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

from a Daughter

But what if I were single today?" Mother would often add when giving her testimony at deputation meetings. "Could I still say God granted me the desires of my heart?" And she would pause for emphasis.

"Yes, I believe I could. For when I truly delight myself in Him, He becomes my desire, and my satisfaction is complete in Him alone."

Mother knew of true satisfaction. Scholastic achievement, human approval, and material gain paled in comparison to the joy radiating through her being. My sisters and I saw her, a genuine human, apologize for her failings, perhaps, yet exult in God's power to overrule them. No one needed to tell us; we could see: a person is truly happiest in the center of God's perfect will. Dreams, interests, and yearnings were eclipsed by her enthrallment with her Saviour.

After thirty years of missionary service, Mother was diagnosed to have stomach cancer, and several months later, she was to gaze into the eyes of Him whom she had loved so intensely. By the time of Mother's Homegoing, my sisters and I had, individually, and at different times in our lives, surrendered our lives fully to God's leading. We were determined to follow in her footsteps, to know for ourselves the same thrill she had known, to say with the same conviction she had:

"Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy"
Psalm 16:11a



Kimiko in Backyard Garden, Okinawa, 1980

© 2007 by June Saito