The Words of the Kanagy Family
|
|
The Words of the Kanagy Family |
My father, Lee Kanagy, grew up Amish' in Belleville, a small town in central Pennsylvania. When he was a child, he was once playing "church" with other children when he suddenly heard a voice telling him that one day he would become a preacher. He never forgot that experience, which came true when he and my mother, Adella Brunk, volunteered to be missionaries in the Mennonite Church. They initially thought they would be sent to China, but because of the recent communist take over, they were instead sent to Japan in 1951.
In those days, missionaries underwent two years of language instruction in Tokyo before going to their mission town. In my parents' case, they went to Nakashibetsu, a rural town in eastern Hokkaido, where I was born in 1955 as their third child. There were other Mennonite missionary families in the area, including in the cities of Kushiro and Obihiro. When the missionaries got together for church meetings and such, it was always exciting for us MKs (missionary kids) to be able to play together. As MKs, we were loved by the members of the church, but we were also treated as a novelty by the Japanese society for being the only foreigners in town.
My parents went on furlough (to the U.S.) every five years, and when they returned to Japan they were sometimes assigned to a different town, depending on the growth and needs of the mission work. Our family lived in three different towns in Hokkaido as my siblings and I were growing up. For primary school, we went to local Japanese public schools, but for my second and third grades of elementary school, I was in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the U.S., where our family was on furlough. For secondary schools, we boarded in Christian schools in Sapporo and Tokyo.
Even though I am American by nationality, growing up in Japan made me identify with Japanese culture as well, and I was always torn over which country to call home. Spiritually as well, a tension was building in me, as I grew older. I could not reconcile the contradiction I felt in my faith, between my belief in God's love and the supposed fact that none of my Japanese friends and teachers would be saved because they were not Christian.
In 1973, our family returned to the U.S., finishing twenty-two years of mission work in Japan. For my part, I could not settle down, I was searching for a deeper truth. I left college and traveled, visiting different religious groups. I finally ended up in San Francisco, California. In 1978, I heard the Divine Principle and joined the Unification Church. It was then that I understood I had been searching for God's true love and truth.
In 1982, I was matched and blessed by True Parents to my Japanese wife, Miyake Takeuchi. We are one of the forty-three ocean-business-pioneering couples sent out by True Father in 1989 to different countries to develop the ocean providence. As my parents had, we are now living in a mission country, which is Panama. We have lived here for eighteen years and have one son.
In April 2008, while we were preparing for Hyun-jin Moon's visit to Panama, I had a question about the name "Yeon-ah nim," which is pronounced the same for both Hyo-jin nim's wife and Hyung-jin nim's wife. My wife searched the internet and found their names {Choi Yeon-ah and Lee Yeon-ah], respectively} on the web site of our church in Kushiro, Japan.
She wrote a note thanking them for the information, in which she mentioned that her husband was the son of missionaries and had been born in Nakashibetsu, not far from the city of Kushiro. The Kushiro Unification Church pastor, Rev. Kousuke Hayade, wrote back to my wife asking if perhaps she knew a Mr. Mi-ne, an important Ambassador for Peace from that district and a former Mennonite pastor. From that simple e-mail exchange came an incredible discovery. When my wife asked me if I knew a "Mr. Mi-ne," the name brought back a flood of memories of my childhood in Japan where my parents diligently taught Christ's message.
I remembered a "Mi-ne san," as we called him, a young, fervent Christian, who was always kind to us, the missionary children. I was only six years old when our family left for the States on a two-year furlough.
When we returned to Japan, we went to another town. I did not see Mt Mi-ne anymore, but I always remembered his kindness and sincere Christian faith. Now it turned out that this important ambassador for peace in Kushiro was the very same Mi-ne san of my childhood memories!
I immediately sent him a letter reintroducing myself after all these years. His reply letter surprised me even more. He had graduated from Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia in 1965 and had served as a pastor to a church in Hokkaido. He wrote that he remembered me from my childhood in Nakashibetsu and that we had also met in the U.S. around 1974, when he visited my parents in Fairfax, Virginia and spoke at a Japanese church in Washington D.C. I had completely forgotten that incident, but it turned out that through our separate ways we would later both come to follow True Parents.
He told me that after I had joined the Unification Church, my parents had contacted him out of their concern for me and that he had assured them it was a very good movement and they should not worry about their son. I felt very relieved to hear this, because it showed me that people were supporting me even when I didn't know it. For my part, I had at times thought of Mi-ne san after I had joined the Unification movement and wished that I could witness to him, however, I did not know where he was or what he was doing. Never could I have imagined he was already actively working as an Ambassador for Peace. I realized, as never before, that God truly is working in each person's life to guide him or her to a higher path. I have been witnessing to my parents for many years, but this amazing development gave me hope that my parents as well as other Christians in Japan could someday attend True Parents.
A second part to this story also confirmed to me that God is working in our lives in ways that we don't imagine.
When my parents were missionaries in Japan and 1 was only two-and-a-half years old, my year-and-a-half old brother John drowned in a pond in our backyard. It was a great shock to my parents, but as Christians, they accepted it with faith as part of God's will. Because of the loss of their son, they eventually opened their hearts to adopting a baby boy from Japan and two years later a baby girl from Korea, my younger brother and sister.
John's grave is in Nakashibetsu, the town where we first lived. Every year at the time of his passing, my parents remind us of him in their letters. My parents told me that he had been my close playmate as a child and that I often asked them where he had gone. Even though I have only vague memories of his passing, in my heart I always felt that John must be close to me. In 2001, I was grateful that I could liberate him in Chung Pyung.
My wife mentioned in the Kushiro church web site that her husband's younger brother's grave was in Nakashibetsu. On May 14, a Kushiro church elder who happened to be in that town went to the cemetery, where he found the mausoleum that had been built by the local Mennonite Church and the inscription of John's name and date of his passing. On May 20, which was exactly fifty years to the day of his passing, Rev. Hayade's family and several elder church members visited the grave site. They cleaned the site and read from the Cheon Seong Gyeong.
It was lightly raining that day, but the cherry blossoms were blooming around the site. They mentioned that they felt that the passing of this young child had been a pure offering to God.
My wife and I felt it is truly a miracle that after fifty years God could send Unification Church members to visit and honor the site of John's grave on the very day of his passing without us having requested them to do so. I can't help feeling that God is behind all these events and that the indemnity of John's passing is connected to the special course of the life and work of Mr. Mi-ne and our inter-religious work with Christians in the area.
All this happened around the time of Hyun-jin nim's visit to Panama, our mission country. His arrival in Panama on April 17, 2008 also coincided with the eighteenth anniversary of our arrival to Panama on April 17, 1990. It is clear that God works through time periods, though we tend to forget this when we are only thinking day-to-day. Truly, God has prepared each of us, through our ancestry and our experiences in life, to one day attend the living Messiah and the True Family on the earth and realize God's dream of one family under God, aju!
Mr. Kanagy and his wife were blessed among the 2,075 couples.