Episode Transcript
It's all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea with my story of help in Japan. Welcome to miracles in the 21st century. I'm Ann Browning. When I was a young girl, at age 17, I was working in PNG, living with my parents. And my parents were missionaries. We lived in Caveying and we worked up in New guinea for three years. And then it came time for our holiday period and we often were used. Used to come back to Australia and have our furlough. But my mum had been working up there and she asked permission for us to take a trip overseas. So we got a just a cargo vessel. They had a few cabins on this vessel and we were able to go as they dropped off cargo in different places on the way to Japan, we stopped at Okinawa and other places in Japan and my mum had logged out some ideas of places that we'd like to see. So we called into this port and my mom had this list of places she wanted to see. So the first one we went and had a look at and then we came back to the ship and then we got a taxi and mom had had the Japanese people write down the address of where to go. And they bartered with a. Or bargained with a taxi driver. And so the four of us, my mum, dad, brother and I, got into this taxi and this taxi driver started to head off to where we thought we were going to go. And he went and he went and he drove and he drove. And we were getting worried because we had to get back because the ship was leaving at a certain time and we had a time slot that we had to be back by. And finally, eventually this taxi driver dropped us and. And we got out of the car and we did sign language, asking him where this address was. And he just shooed us away and took off in the car and left us standing in the street. It was only houses. It was like a really rural village. We saw a little building that looked like a bit like a shop. So we went to this shop and there was a lady behind the counter. We passed her the note with the Japanese address of what we were looking for. And through sign Langu, she let us know we were nowhere near where we were planning to be. So we thought to ourselves, what are we going to do? There's no taxis up here, no way of getting back to the ship. We're nowhere near where we want to be. And we had a deadline to get back to the Shiwangi, which was the name of the vessel we were on. So my dad and mum and my brother and I, we went out into the street and my dad was a tremendous man of faith. And he said, God knows where we are, God knows what we have to do. How about we pray about this? Because we're going to need his help. There's no way we're going to get back on our own. So we all stood in the street, it was freezing, it was beginning to snow. And he said, dad prayed. And then we all prayed. And when the last person prayed, we opened our eyes and this lovely Japanese guy in a suit, very well dressed guy, came up to us and spoke to us in lovely English. And he said to us, are you in trouble? And we said, we told him what was wrong, that we couldn't find this place. He said, this is nowhere near that place. And he said, you need help? And we said, yes, we have a deadline to get back to the boat. He said, I can help you. Come with me. So we followed this lovely Japanese man down some streets, down some back alleys, and he took us to a train station. And my dad said to him, we need to buy tickets. He said, no, it's okay. And we walked past the ticket man and it was like we were invisible. The ticket man didn't seem to even notice us. There was the Japanese guy, my dad, my mom, myself and my brother. And we just walked through the ticket collecting place and this guy took us onto a train. And I said to the guy, why didn't we buy a ticket? We didn't get any tickets. What happened? He said, don't worry, my father owns this. And I thought, this is amazing. This young fellow. How did God send us this young fellow? His father was the owner of this railway company. So we went on a few stations down this journey and then the train stopped and he said, come with me. So we walked out past the ticket man again, ticket man didn't seem to see us and he said, come. And we went to another platform and he got us on another train. And we said again, I spoke to him and I said, we haven't bought the tickets. He said, it's okay, my father owns this. And I thought, this is amazing. God is really amazing. Sending us a person to help us that actually his father owned everything. I thought we were just so blessed. So we get out at the final station, he takes us down a few streets and then he pointed to the ship and he said, see that? Those masts? That's your ship. Just follow that road down there. And we're looking and oh, yes, we can see the ship. And we turned around to thank this man. There wasn't a person there, not a person anywhere. We looked up the street, everywhere. There was no person. And I am absolutely convinced, without a shadow of doubt, that God sent us a Japanese angel. And his father, our father, owned everything. So we didn't need to buy a ticket and we were invisible because God arranged to get us back to that ship in time. We got down to the ship, we got up the gangplank and they pulled up. The gangplank was an amazing, amazing end to a very, very interesting day.
