I’ve noticed many prayer requests for the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on our prayer site.
I was about to add my own, but then I got to thinking how in all prayer situations, I find prayer comes more easily when I can picture someone. In Japan I have someone in mind.
Naomi was just a teenager, my little sister’s age, when she came from Japan to live with my family and attend American high school. She had a quick laugh and a good command of English, and she threw herself into all the Hamlin activities: church, tennis, fighting over the comics. She even embroidered a picture of “the Happy Hamlins,” as the called us, a piece that still hangs on a wall at Mom’s house.
Back in Japan she married, had two daughters, taught high school English and eventually became a school administrator. All the while she has kept in touch. When her mother died last year, she was determined to come to California at Christmas to see Mom and Dad. That’s when this picture was taken. At Dad’s funeral we kept thinking, How fortunate that she made that trip.
The quake hit and she was immediately in our thoughts. She lives in the town of Moka, north of Tokyo. Within a day we got her e-mail: “It’s terrible… Most of the schools were badly damaged… The wall around my house was torn down and the roof came partly off… Electricity came back on after 24 hours… Water is still stopped.”
Prayer is about compassion, and I feel waves of compassion when I see images of houses flattened and people praying over the bodies of their loved ones. But prayer comes more quickly if I can envision one specific person in one place with a name. So now I post my prayer: “God, be with Naomi, who brought so much joy to our lives. Be with her neighbors, her friends and her suffering country. Let them never forget they are not alone in this crisis. No one in a world as small as ours should ever feel alone.”
