Okay. Do it!

9 May 2010

 

Dear Phyllis,

 All my life I have always tried to have as dark a tan as possible. Working on John‘s house has given me the best chance for a tan in many years. For a month I have worked every day with my shirt off and now I am as dark as I have been in a long time. But something has gone wrong. About a week ago my back started to itch like crazy. It was covered with one solid mass of pimples. The skin is so dark there is no problem about it blistering up and peeling. This was much deeper. The only thing that helped was scalding hot showers. For several nights I got up to take HOT showers to relieve the itching. Then my Tee shirts started to get covered with a mass of little dots of puss. My friend John’s wife nearly got sick when she saw my back and went to a pharmacy to get something for it. But the pharmacists told her, “If his back is as bad as you describe, it has gone too far. He will have to go to a doctor, get a shot, and some medicine.” I thought about going to a pharmacy myself to get something for it but then decided, “Why bother? Jesus has promised to heal all my diseases (Ps. 103:3).” He has always kept me in excellent health. I am much better now.

The work on John’s house is coming along quite well. This is the first time I have built a concrete house and we are doing things that I am sure have never been done that way in Thailand. I doubt that anyone would ever follow our example of building, but if they would, I believe it would greatly improve their construction method here.

The other day we talking about concrete and that reminded me of my concrete story in Karuizawa.

 In 1965, because I was Joe Carroll’s responsible man in Japan, I was forced to move into his house in Karuizawa to take care of it. It was one of the finest properties in Japan and a very well built house, but it had no access, and was plagued with many serious problems, making life difficult there. Two families found it too difficult and had moved out. As a single man I was able to manage better and slowly began to solve some of the major problem. But the access was huge one.

The house was built on a hill. Joe had a road dug part way up, which was very steep. But from there, you had to walk up a long flight of steeps. The Lord had given me a vision of putting in a tunnel. After I was married, in our first year, I was able to do that which gave us 110 meters (120 yards) of driveway starting from the bottom, going part way up, and then straight into the bank for 45 feet. It curved around coming out to a covered garage behind the kitchen. It was wonderful. On rainy days we could drive right into the garage and take everything into the house without getting wet. By doing that, we had a wonderful large lawn with the road going under it. This made it one of the most desirable houses in Japan. But the road needed to be paved.

 

The story of the tunnel itself was a huge miracle. I still don’t know how we were able to pull that one off, but to pave it looked like an even larger mountain. For several months in the winter time, with snow and ice, it was extremely difficult to get up that steep slope, but in the spring, with mud, it was impossible. I prayed about that problem for a year when we were in the states for furlough, and decided as soon as we got back to Japan I would go ahead and have it paved.

Our support level was about 1/3 of what would have been required if we were with a mission. We were always the poorest folks in town, and yet we lived in houses that made the wealthy envious. To pave 110 meter driveway with concrete would be a staggering cost which went totally beyond anything we were close to being able to pay for. As fall dragged on and winter approached, I knew it was do or die. If we didn’t get that driveway paved before winter we were in for a real hard time for the next several months. Finally at the beginning of November I decided to take the plunge. I contacted the contractor that had helped me put in the tunnel and got an estimate from him for the driveway. In desperation I said, “Do it!”. His crews started to do the preliminary preparation.

 I was the director of the Japanese language school at the time, and had a morning prayer meeting with the teachers each day before classes. One morning, during the prayer meeting, the gigantic project that I had started overwhelmed me. I panicked. I promised the Lord as soon as the prayer meeting was over I would rush home and stop the work. But before I could get out of the language school there was a phone call. Then someone came to see me. It was terrible. It was late morning before I could get away to run home to stop the construction.

When I got there I told the job foreman, “Please stop.  I don’t have the money and there is no way I can pay for this project.” The foreman told me, “If you had been here two hours ago we might have been able to quit, but the forms are in, and we are putting in the tekkin (steel rebar) now, and we can’t take it out.”

“Okay. Do it!”

 The day we poured the concrete was miserable. It was snowing. We had a pump truck to pump the concrete up to the top which was a good 30 meter (100 feet) rise. Starting from the top we worked down pouring the concrete in the forms and screeding it down. It was almost dark when the last meter was poured and the job was finished. If concrete freezes, it ruins it, and we were right at 0 C (32F). There is a certain amount of self-generated heat in concrete which kept it above freezing the first night. For the next three days it warmed up to stay just above freezing and then I dropped down below freezing for the rest of the winter. We had done that job on the last possible day that year. Had we tried it a week later, it certainly would have frozen the concrete and been one huge mess.

I was so busy working on that project and running the language school that I scarcely had time to worry about how I was going to pay for it. But just as we finished the job, on the 5^th of December, I had a phone call from a friend in the states. There was a major problem and they were pleading with me to come to the states immediately to try to help them, and sent me a round trip ticket to fly to Denver for a week.  

I made no promise that I could solve their problem but I did stay with them for a week and gave it my best shot. The Lord did more than I expected, but I still left there with that mondai (problem) unsettled. But while I was in the states, I flew on east to see my mother in Pennsylvania, and down to Greenville, SC where we had stayed during our furlough. While in the states, money poured in like water. Wherever I went there were major offerings. It had only been four months since we had left America to return to Japan, and the Lord had done astounding miracles during that time. It was wonderful to be able to share with believers in America of the amazing thing the Lord did for us in keeping Rosemary up and allowing us to return to our home in Japan. I may have talked about the driveway project, but I don’t recall it. But money poured in. I was able to spend Christmas with my sister, Dorie, in Los Angeles.

 On the 28^th of December I arrived back home in Karuizawa. It was wonderful to be able to drive all the way to the house on our new beautiful concrete driveway. But I had caught a bad cold while in the states. That greatly impaired my joy. My attaché case was filled with money but it had to be converted to Japanese yen. I was too sick to go to Tokyo. My niece, Pam, and her friend were staying with us at the time. I gave them the US dollars that the Lord had given me two weeks before and asked them to go to our bank in Tokyo to convert the dollars to yen. She came home with a huge roll of 10,000 yen notes that would choke a cow.

 The next day was my birthday, December 30^th, but I was flat in bed. Around ten that morning the contractor came with the bill and wanted to be paid for the concrete job. It was Y1,100,000 (about $10,000). I was so sick I didn’t bother to count the money out. I just handed him the roll Pam had gotten from the bank. He counted out Y1,100,000 and handed me a receipt “paid in full”. Oh my goodness, that was the greatest financial miracle of my life that far. I had never stuck my neck out so far with nothing to back me up except the Word of God and our faithful Father who has promised to meet our needs. And all that money came in after we poured the driveway. But I was like the walking dead. Somehow it just didn’t register. I could scarcely thank the Lord for that miracle. The bill had been paid and there was still a stack of 10,000 yen bills left over.

  I went back to bed and twenty minutes later there was a phone call from the bank in Tokyo. It was the politest man I had ever talked to. He explained that a new teller was working there, and she had made a big mistake in over paying Pam the day before. Would I please send the money back?

“Of course. How much is it?”

“Y180, 000.”

I went back and got the envelope with all the money in it and found exactly 18 Y10, 000 notes. I sent that back to the bank and we were dead even. The money the Lord gave me for the project came out exactly to the dime.

That was 35 years ago. Concrete that is poured in cold weather, where it cures slowly, is very hard. That concrete is like granite. There has never been one crack in it.

 Stories like that sound good. The Lord has been extremely good to me. I am not a man of faith. In most cases the Lord has had to take me by the scuff of the neck and drag me through the major things He has wanted to do for me.

If we can trust Jesus to forgive our sin and get us into heaven, maybe I can trust Him to heal my back, and maybe He will continue to meet my financial needs in spite of my abysmal unbelief. What can I say? Jesus is amazing! What a savior!

                                                                                            bill