JUST A MINUTE; I'M COMING!

I wasn't sure about posting this one. I posted a similar one a few days ago.

I started drawing this picture, but after I got done with the hardest part--my stepmother's portrait, I was exhausted. I colored it in, showed my sisters, and they thought I could leave it and see how I felt. It was fine by itself, they felt.

But the longer I left it alone, as they say in Japanese, やっぱり I had to finish it...so this is the rest of it.

My sister Joyce lived on F1 of the house in Okinawa my Dad built. When my stepmother was well enough to live at home, she often phoned her from F2. Joyce ran up those stairs in the picture to tend to her needs. The picture I drew suggests that her next meeting with our stepmother will be a little higher than at the room at the top of the stairs. The lilies? We found a placard our stepmother kept on her study desk as a reminder to pray for a Bible Study in mainland Japan (Marunouchi) she led in 1970, called the "Sayuri Kai" (Lilies). Yes, she now has a resurrected body by given to her by the Lord Himself.

I wonder what it's like.

"Satoko, Satoko" (Joyce's Japanese Name)

D------------------y

I realized I never finished the story of the little baby on her sister's back.

She won an award for her sewing abilities and found herself working in Shuri, Okinawa. A co-worker invited her to a church nearby, where she found the Lord. Quiet in personality, Kiyo did not make it apparent that Christ has taken over her entire life. She was baptized, left for Bible School, and was the first person to return to the island to work at one of our evangelism points.

She had one set of nice clothes which she wore every Sunday for church.

She came over to our house every once in awhile to babysit so Mommy could get out for prayer meetings--I still remember her as one of our favorite babysitters.

We will skip the many years that intervened here. We had no way of knowing that, when Mommy went to be with the Lord about 20 years later, she would say,

"Roy, with the kind of work God has given you here in Okinawa, you're going to need a helpmeet. What about Kiyo?" (And I can't help but imagine that it was followed with the thoughts: she knows our work inside out, has prayed and shed tears for our young people, even knows our girls!)

When Daddy approached Janice and me on Christmas several months after Mommy had passed away and asked about Kiyo becoming the new "Mrs. Oshiro", God had already prepared our hearts--that is, He had prepared mine. I could think of nobody better, and it brought sheer joy to my heart.

I still remember after Mommy died, Daddy was like a deflated balloon, like a person who looked into a mirror and couldn't see a reflection. Something was so wrong. I didn't tell anybody, but he signed his mail with "D, a, d. d. y"; and before that, when he was okay, he used to just sign it with "D------y". His sermons, to me, sounded so mechanical and lifeless.

But after that Christmas, when plans started to get underway about getting together with Kiyo and getting back to the work in Okinawa and going forward again--I noticed --again, I didn't tell anybody, but his letters started being signed "D-------y" again! I didn't tell anybody why I was happy.

When I had my first real bad spat with Mother (Kiyo)--was that in 2018? I forget what year that was--and we were "making up", I told her about those signatures.

"You know you gave Daddy that second life, don't you?" I remember telling her.

I wonder if she's gotten it confirmed up in Heaven? Well--it wouldn't really matter now, would it?

ON SISSY'S BACK

My stepmother told me when she was just a baby, her mother was so busy, she would strap her to her 7-yr-old sister’s back and go out to the fields to work. One day, she lost her balance and fell smack on her back—in other words, on the infant’s face—and couldn’t right herself. She lay there on the ground like an upturned turtle--for hours until someone came along and helped her up. By then, the baby had stopped breathing and was turning purple. The older sister was sure she had murdered her baby sister.

But God had other plans for this baby and couldn’t let it die just yet. When the grandmother saw it, she held it upside down by the legs and gave it several firm whacks in the fanny as a physician might do, and a strong cry brought relief to the parents...and the sister.