The Word Did It
John Hesselink
July 1, 1981
My missionary career in Japan began with less than two years of language school in Tokyo. I was then assigned to the large city of Fukuoka on the southwest island of Kyushu. My principal assignment was student evangelism, but soon I began to pick up other responsibilities.
One was the exciting but formidable task of teaching three Bible classes in the local prison, an equivalent of our state penitentiaries. I was asked to do this for a year by a veteran missionary who was about to leave on furlough. Only as I approached the first session in the fall did it begin to dawn on me that I might have bitten off more than I could chew. My predecessor had been born in Japan and knew well both the Japanese language and culture. I could barely carry on a simple conversation. I had a miniscule biblical and theological vocabulary in Japanese, and could not even give a simple testimony with any fluency. Yet I was going to conduct Bible classes in Japanese with three groups of prisoners, most of whom knew practically nothing about the gospel!
Moreover, two of these three groups were in the wing where the condemned prisoners were kept. "Condemned" means they had committed murder and were waiting for the day when a directive would come from Tokyo that they were to be executed.
Despite these well-founded fears and apprehensions, I kept going to the prison week after week. The excitement soon wore off and discouragement increased. The setting was grim: a small, dark, drab room in which eight to ten men in each group gathered, accompanied by an unsmiling armed guard who sat off in one corner.
As winter set in, the unheated rooms were even more depressing. More important, I became increasingly aware of my ineptitude in reading my meditations on ...
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