6 Made Just Right

Thus my dream of higher education was granted because I had accepted God's choice for me: missionary service.

However, the college's missions program included a requirement in science. I browsed through electives listed in the school catalogue.

Astronomy...limitless exploration. Microbiology...I could lose myself in its intricacies. Physics...challenging, intriguing. Zoology...pulsating life--my favorite.

Then, Botany. Plants. The least inviting of all the sciences.
Safe, I thought. I wouldn't get wrapped up in such a dull course that I would forget my calling as a missionary. For my science elective, I decided to take botany.

But, by the end of the semester, Botany had taken me. I found I thoroughly enjoyed the class that had looked uninteresting only a few months earlier.

Oh, God, you made me all wrong, I prayed bitterly. If you wanted me to be a missionary, why did you give me such a love for science?

"Nay but, O man, who are thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?" Romans 9:20

I could spend an entire day locked up in a laboratory staring down into a microscope. Microorganisms on the other end never challenged me, never talked back to me. But people? Well, people are people are people, I'd always maintained. People were what made life difficult.

Another battle ensued.

Perhaps, I argued, instead of becoming a missionary and working full time with people, I could teach science on the mission field. Wasn't that better for someone like me?

But I had no rest until I had surrendered unconditionally.

All right, Lord. Anything. Anywhere.

Treaty conditions were not what I expected: God gave me complete peace in pursuing further studies in science!

"Pursued" is precisely what I did, earning a reputation for being quiet, studious, and rather serious-minded.

College studies wouldn't be complete, however, without the experience of campus pranks.

One day's lab work included a frog dissection. Instead of disposing of the body when the period was over, I rinsed out the skin and took it back to my dorm.

Cotton stuffing, careful stitching, and neat folding of the legs into squatting position gave me the perfect gag. I placed it in one of the girls' shower stalls.

Bedlam.

The next day a special hunt was made for the culprit. All women enrolled in the previous day's zoology classes were approached.

Oh, no; Kimiko wouldn't do a thing like that," I heard fellow students whispering. And no one questioned me.

Even my roommate couldn't bring herself to ask me--such a sweet, earnest, introverted person--about the matter.

So I graduated from college with a clean sheet, and with a bachelor of science degree in botany.

At the end of the war came MacArthur's cry: "Send a thousand missionaries to Japan!" Not a few servicemen--unable to forget the devastation, desolation, and disillusionment they had witnessed there--returned as missionaries, carrying a message of sure hope in Jesus Christ.

After receiving a master's degree in religious education, I too, crossed the ocean to Japan. There, in a Bible School in Tokyo, I taught Christian education and made rounds of churches holding teachers' training sessions. What free time remained, I could often be found reading a good book...much like days back in Hawaii.
But some things had changed since then.

Near the end of my first term (five years), the Bible School administrator approached me with a request.

"Kimiko, the believers here in Japan have a real problem with evolution," he began. "When you go Stateside for furlough, why don't you get your masters in science? Then you can come back and teach the Christian viewpoint of evolution."

I could almost see the Lord smiling at me. "Kimiko, isn't this what you wanted?"

I suppose I should have been thrilled--thrilled that God was finally opening the door for me to do the very thing I had wanted in the first place.

Instead, I turned down the teaching position.

For, after five years of losing myself in teaching the Word and in working directly with the believers, I found that science lost its former appeal.

Instead of seeking the field of my "first love," I honestly desired full-time church work.

God had "made me right," after all.

Thus, my heart's second desire--of becoming a scientist--was cast aside for the gaining of a greater desire, one that I hadn't been aware of myself.

With this happy discovery, I left Japan for my first furlough.

During my stopover in Hawaii, Mother cornered me with the inevitable question: "Kimiko, you're past thirty; aren't you ever going to get married?"

"I have nothing against the institution of marriage;" I assured her; "but Mother, there is nobody."

There had been two attractive suitors in my past, but neither of them had missions work in their futures, so....

About the same time, another Nisei crossed the Pacific for his first term of missionary service, not in mainland Japan, but on the island of Okinawa.

He had heard about me--my background, my missionary service, my marital status. And he wrote me a long, involved letter telling me all about himself.

Sounds like an interesting character, I thought...but what a character.

The letter had no signature and no return address!