ねこ

Yesterday I was walking on the campus across the street from my house. It wasn't very busy and in fact there were very few students there at the time because this is the start of "Golden Week", a Japanese holiday week where many offices and some teachers take off. It's a big shopping week too, so all of the stores in Tenjin, the main shopping district, were full of people.
There were a few students there on campus. Some were dressed up in business suits because they were there taking special exams. Others were there just to hang out because school has only been in session for three weeks and I guess they just don't know where else to go to meet up with people yet. (Though I suspect they know pretty well where the bars and drinking joints are because I've already been invited to go a couple of times.)
I was looking for a way to naturally start a conversation with some students. I really want my conversations to be REAL. I try to be as real as possible in that I don't have any ulterior motive for merely talking to someone. Of course I want to share Christ's love, but If I do that without actually showing love first then I would feel no better than some Mormon who is sharing out of some selfish desire. Christ shared his living water out of love. OF course this doesn't mean I am not here to tell about Christ! Usually one of the first things I tell people when I meet them is that I am here as a missionary and as a language student. Both of those are true.
SO back to yesterday. I was walking around praying for the campus and for the students. When I turned around a corner I saw this awesome cat laying in front of a doorway, simply basking in the sunlight. It was obvious that he was loving the sun. I really love cats and miss ours from back home so whenever I see one here, no matter how mangy and stray it may look I have the urge to go up and pet it. Usually they always run away from me in fear, probably because I look like a freaky foreigner. I cautiously walked up to this cat and it just lay there and squinted at me from the ground. It didn't move a centimeter. (Heh heh they use the metric system here.)
This may seem really crazy, but I've kind of gone crazy being here for three weeks, but I prayed "Dear God help this cat to stay still so that I can pet it." Ha ha! I really did pray that. So I leaned down and the cat still didn't move. So I started petting it, and the cat loved it, of course. It even started to play with me and wrestle with my hand, which is something that I love doing with cats. So I was pretty much on the ground playing with some stray cat in front of, what I later found out was, the law school.
A girl stepped outside to speak on the phone and saw me there. She and I started talking and I found out that she knows German and a little English. She got excited when she found out I was learning Japanese and called some more of her friends to come out and talk to me. A dude came outside and we introduced ourselves to each other. Then some other guys came walking up to go inside and we started talking. There was very little English spoken. It was really hard to carry a conversation on with them.
Then some Japanese dude who had just spent most of his life living in London came outside. He was excited to see a westerner and I was excited to see someone who spoke fluent English. I was kind of surprised to see that despite being Japanese he was going through some of the same cultural shock experiences I was. The law school had a shorter holiday than the rest of the campus for Golden Week, that is why all of these law students were still on campus. Altogether I had a good conversation with all of them, and look forward to maybe getting to know them and some more of their friends a bit better.
And I think back now and realize that if God hadn't of answered that simple prayer about letting me pet that cat then I probably wouldn't have met all of these people. Also the cat disappeared mysteriously and we all couldn't find it after we realized it was gone.

By the way, ねこis the hiragana for neko, which is Japanese for cat.