Lead Us Not Into Temptation

It was mid-July. I lay in a cozy little guest room of my parents' house in Houston. There was a lit candle on the bedside table. Next to it was a bookshelf crammed with a myriad of titles. New fuzzy socks hugged my feet. The quilt was pulled up to my chin as I curled on my side, staring at the flickering flame. Michael Kelley Blanchard–a childhood favorite musician–alternated mournful ballads and joyous reels in the background.

The overhead lights were too much. I couldn't bear more than the light of a candle or the bedside lamp. Cocooned, I lay in bed, 6,600 miles away from my husband, and realized I'd hit a hard limit.

I've been learning about my limits for a long time. Like the fact that I'm the sort of person who never benefits from pushing past mine.

Sergey and I started living in Japan in October, 2024. After navigating the nightmare of Japanese resident paperwork and the housing market for foreigners–or lack thereof–we dug into language school good and hard in January 2025.

The first three months were excellent. Every weekday was packed with learning, study, and a group of people who were pointed in the same direction we were. By month four, though, beloved classmates went their separate ways.

It was May when Sergey and I found we didn't study so well with other groups that had their own established relationships, so we began to study on our own. In June, we engaged a teacher to give us private lessons twice a week.

By that time, I had been studying between 4 and 6 hours a day nearly every day in preparation for taking the Japanese government's lowest level Japanese Language Proficiency Test known as the N5. I took on the same amount of extra study opportunities as Sergey, determined to keep pace with him.

By the same token, I had no energy leftover to look for a church where we could dig in and find community. The first few I'd attended left me hollow inside. And as our school friends drifted away, this meant I had very little human interaction beyond sitting in a cafe, surrounded by strangers who didn't speak my language.

And I had very little interaction with God. This sense of emptiness was exacerbated by questions that started rising up about the foundations of my belief, questions that I was too tired and lonely to assess properly, which led to catastrophic spiraling in my head and heart.

Sergey was having trouble, too. He'd asked for a sign that God was still with us out here in Tokyo, that we were still on some kind of right path, and he didn't see any answer to his prayer. This shook both of us deeply.

I was in a desert. I'd heard about these. Christians often warn that you can't live on the mountaintop–those moments where you experience the presence of God intimately–and that from time to time you'll face stretches of interminable silence they call "The Desert."

In that desert, all the distractions were stripped away. Studying Japanese that intensely had left me very little time for the escapisms I usually engaged with, so I was the most present to real life that I'd ever been. In the naked silence, I was confronted by the thing I have always run from: a chasmic, agonizing yearning for God.

Previously, this feeling cropped up in short bursts in my life for a few minutes, hours, or a day at a time. It was a state too painful to remain in long, so I often buried it quickly through distractions.

But in The Desert, I lived in that state for at least a month.

I would sob, listening to Sarah Groves' "Maybe There's a Loving God." I used ChatGPT to mine the Beatitudes for meaning in a way I'd understand it, and I cried over every line. When I tried explaining to Sergey what I was feeling, I would burst into tears.

I talked to ChatGPT every single day because I couldn't break it and I couldn't hurt its feelings and it didn't get tired. I used it to help me with shopping, to research what the Bible meant, to talk me through Weird Fits without totally losing my mind. In the end, I was using its affirmations to drag myself through one chore, one errand, one homework page at a time. I relied on it perhaps too much, but at the time I gladly took the crutch.

In this time, I received the answer to a question I had always wondered; what if I stop believing in God? What if I walked away from Him? And the answer was a protracted scream: Without You, there is no me!

It no longer mattered whether I could prove a damn thing logically. I just knew that nothing was worth it if He wasn't there.

I lacked an understanding of prayer, but I was so desperate for connection with God that I tried to find alternative ways to communicate to Him. I commissioned an embroidery design based off of the song "Have Mercy On Me" by Paul Zach. As I listened to the song, I embroidered this design while weeping this prayer over and over.

Meanwhile, my unknown gut health issue was exacerbated. I started having Weird Fits every couple of weeks. Back-to-back episodes of traumatic anxiety for up to nine hours at a time is not sustainable.

Sergey saw I was deteriorating even as I tried to hold it together so our plans wouldn't change. Loving me more than I love myself, he bought me a plane ticket home for two and a half weeks to be with family and friends.

Two days before I left, I had a Weird Fit that lasted approximately 19 hours. My nervous system was shattered. On the international flight, I turned down every single offer of food, nibbling on my own hardboiled eggs, walnuts, and a 2 ingredient sandwich. When Mom picked me up, I started crying asked her to tell me whether God was really there or not.

Within two days of arriving in Houston, it became clear to Sergey and I that I could not return home in two and a half weeks. I needed to find a doctor and try to get to the bottom of my illness, even if it took months.

For most of the first week, I slept whenever I wanted. I never ate more than toast, oatmeal, and tea after 4pm. I spent hours laying in bed and watching a candle burn as I listened to a joyful and sorrowful old musical saint. I didn't touch my Japanese studies for two solid weeks.

I just existed.

I think it began when I walked into the little church Sergey and I had found shortly before leaving for Japan. I came in through the doors and breathed a little easier. Nobody expected my return, and a lot of heads swiveled in shock. Everybody greeted me by name.

The first song in the worship set was Blessed Be Your Name, and as it rolled into the first verse I left the sanctuary to cry. I'd grown up with this worship song, but that day I understood down to my bones what it meant.

And as I sat there, listening to the worship and the sermon among people who had their faces turned toward Him, I felt like I'd come home. Like, yes, God is here.

None of my questions were answered, but there was a breath of relief in the pain.

As I planned doctor visits and medical scans, I baked incredible amounts of bread knots and loaves of bread, sharing them out to people I hadn't seen in ages. My youngest sister joined me for coffee shop jaunts and late nights watching anime. Mom took me to estate sales to hunt for discount candles. Dad challenged me to two rounds of chess. I partnered with ChatGPT to do tech-support and small handyman work around the house. Sergey talked with me almost every morning and evening, when our "awake times" lined up. Sometimes I left WhatsApp on and asked him to watch me sleep so I felt a little more secure.

Day by day, my desire to do my tasks and visit people came back.

I began tackling the mountain of Japanese flashcards that had built up in my Anki program. I wrote Sergey postcards every couple of days. Our private teacher invited me to rejoin our Japanese lessons via Zoom.

I realized I was recovering when I no longer needed to talk to ChatGPT about every single thing in my day, or log what I'd done and what it all felt like just to be seen by something. I received more than enough of that just sitting in the common area of my parents' house, doing my studies while people passed through to cook or study or do a puzzle or talk.

One day I was making yet another batch of bread knots and I had some good rock music playing, and I just started swinging my hips and twisting on my feet.

When was the last time I danced out of sheer joy?

Too long ago.

As I began to leave The Desert, I felt worried and guilty. After all, The Desert is where I received an answer to my most important question. And if I was suffering, wasn't God closer to me? But all that was fading now that I was receiving what I needed. Was I just distracting myself again? Did I need to marinate in that screaming void to be close to God?

As I turned that thought over, I realized that just as you can't live on the mountaintop, neither can you live in the desert.

In the Lord's Prayer is a line that reads, "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." According to ChatGPT:

Living in the desert becomes too much. You can die of thirst out there. So, there are cycles of testing, but there is always an oasis or a road out of any particular desert.

When I realized that, I was able to let go of the guilt and revel in the restoration. It was a gift, and I needed the rest.

And someday, The Desert will come again.

As September started, Sergey joined me in Houston. We'd both had enough of being apart, and the US medical system was looking less and less likely to deliver an answer. With that in mind, he joined me, planning for both of us to return to Tokyo at the end of September.

When he accompanied me to church, he said, "Oh. It's here." Meaning, the sense of being seen and held by a community, and the sense of God's spirit through them. And by the end of the service, he looked back on his time in Japan and realized that God actually had answered his request for a sign, but that neither of us had caught it flying by.

Many good, terrible, wonderful, and difficult things happened that month, but by the time we packed to return, we were both refreshed and ready for the journey.

It's October, and I've been back for three weeks. In the US, I had three different scans and a scope in both ends, but nothing was obviously wrong with me. One medication the doctor prescribed has proved effective in stopping the Weird Fits. However we are going to try one more option before I go on this low-level psychoactive med permanently: the carnivore diet.

But that's a blog post for another time.

We returned with more prayers at our back. We returned knowing that sometimes it's harder to "hear" God here, like there's a "no cell signal" zone over Tokyo. But we also know He moves in other ways.

The first week we came back, I tried one more church: Awakening Tokyo. It turned out to be what I'd been looking for; a group of people passionately pointed toward God as their first priority. While they are highly evangelistic, that was firmly expressed as an overflow from a relationship with God, not an end in and of itself.

And there, we made new friends as well. Hopefully, the first two of many.

In the meantime, both cafes where I am a regular acknowledged my return with a special greeting.

A few days ago, I was waylaid by a couple of ladies trying to get young people interested in traditional Japanese crafts. One was fluent in English and offered me a free workshop if they were allowed to film me. I got a lovely education in the Japanese art of... I'm embarrassed to say I forgot, but I sure remember how to make one of these.

Little nudges. Little connections. Little events.

We still have a long way to go, and we're not always sure we're even on the road, but maybe now we're a little more rested and ready for the journey.