Introduction
On September 20, 2026, the Chitose Gospel Christian Church (千歳福音キリスト教会) in Hokkaido celebrated its 60th anniversary with a conference titled "Finding Hope for Living." The speaker, Pastor Kida, now a pastor in Yokohama, was baptized in this church, which he joined at age 17. He had chosen the title "A Flower for the Weed, a Dream for the Stray Dog," with a subtitle that sums up his life: homeless in elementary school, a member of a motorcycle gang as a teenager, living with bipolar disorder as an adult, "and yet happy."
He begins with a simple encouragement. Starting something new keeps the heart and body young, at any age. He mentions a man who took up surfing at 80 and entered the Guinness World Records at 89 as an active surfer, and his own mother, nearly ninety, who began attending a day care center this year. He also quotes a pastor friend: "Today is the newest day of the life you have left."
Then he opens the Bible to Genesis 50:20: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is today, to save many people alive." His whole testimony is a reading of his own life in the light of this verse.
Outline of the message
1. Joseph looks back on his life
- The words of Genesis 50:20 are not a fine phrase written at a desk. Joseph, Abraham's great-grandson, speaks them at the end of his life, as he looks back on what he actually went through.
- He was wronged, he knew misfortune, he made his own mistakes, he went through suffering and sadness. And yet he can say that God turned it all into good.
- Pastor Kida asks everyone the question: our lives mix joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. What a blessing it would be to be able to say one day, with Joseph, that God has turned all of it into good.
2. A broken family and a word that lifts up
- He was born in Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture, the second son of the owner of a small construction company. The family lived in a new house, with hot spring water even in the bathroom.
- His father became dependent on alcohol. When drunk, he threatened the family with a knife, and his mother fled in the middle of the night with her three children, the youngest still a baby on her back. The company went bankrupt, creditors came to take everything, and his schoolmates made fun of him.
- A Christian woman whom his mother met invited her to church. There she heard the words of Jesus in Matthew 11:28: "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest." Her heart was seized, and she brought her three children to church. The boy sensed something warm there, "something real."
- Even so, the family had to leave their home. Members of the church introduced them to the Salvation Army in Tokyo, which made an exception and took in the whole family. They left Fukushima almost like fugitives: he was in fourth grade, and he lost his home, his belongings and his friends.
- At the shelter, his mother learned to pray before every meal. The boy then understood: "God is truly alive." The house was gone, but food was given every day.
3. "God, if you really exist, help me"
- His mother did nothing extraordinary: she went to church and leaned on God with a prayer that was barely a prayer. And a path opened, step by step.
- To anyone going through a great difficulty today, he suggests saying in your heart: "God, if you really exist, help me." God sees the heart, and he hears even a silent prayer, whether you are a Christian or not.
- He bases this invitation on the promise of Jesus in Matthew 7:7-8: "Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened for you."
- He insists on the value of life: money, health, friends and family are precious, but life is more precious still. As long as there is life, you can start again, as many times as it takes. He shares that a member of his family chose to end their life, and that the pain of those left behind is immense. He pleads: do not draw a final conclusion.
- He is convinced of this: we are kept alive today because we have a mission.
4. When the brake in the heart disappears
- His father did not recover from alcohol, the violence continued, and his parents divorced. His mother remarried a Christian man with a rare illness, who became an adoptive father to the boy. The family settled in Odawara.
- There, his parents' work fell on Sundays and the family stopped going to church. By the third year of middle school, he had completely forgotten God. "There was nothing left in my heart to hold me back," and he threw himself into wrongdoing with the same seriousness he put into everything: shoplifting, alcohol, tobacco, then, in high school, the big Saturday night motorcycle gangs, where he volunteered to ride at the front.
- He draws a lesson for parents from this: continuing to take your children to church and keeping them in contact with the Word and prayer matters a great deal. After becoming a Christian, he went back to those shops to ask forgiveness and repay what he could.
- He left high school in his second year, with a broken hand after a fight. Yet his former homeroom teacher remembered the dream he had shared on entering high school: to own a ranch. The teacher found him a place at a dairy farm in Hokkaido, and the owner accepted him despite his look of a young delinquent.
- What he takes from this: when an adult hopes in a young person without stopping at appearance or past, that young person begins to make an effort to live up to that hope. He lives this today as the head of a nursery school in Yokohama, and, as a pastor in Hokkaido, he went several times to tell young people in a juvenile detention center: "In Christ, you can start your life over."
5. Why am I alive?
- At 17, when winter came to the farm, he asked himself three questions. Why am I here? Because I chose it. Why do I work? To live. But then, why do I live? To that last question, he had no answer.
- If a person is born by chance and ends up dying, you might as well live as you please. But he sensed that there must be a real purpose, and he longed for it.
- One evening, in his bath, a word came to him: "the Bible." His mother, who had become a Christian, had sent him a Bible and introductory books, which he had thrown to the back of a closet. He opened the New Testament and came upon the genealogy in Matthew 1: disappointed, he closed it.
- A first book showed him that the history of the world, from Assyria to Rome by way of Babylon, Persia and Greece, matched what the Bible had announced. Then the introduction to the New Testament by the Christian novelist Ayako Miura helped him understand that Jesus' death on the cross was a death in our place, for the forgiveness of our sins.
- He was moved by the prayer of Jesus in Luke 23:34: "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing." Ayako Miura sees in it the heart of a mother looking at her small child. In the evening, under his blanket so his roommates would not hear, he prayed in tears: thank you for loving me this much, forgive me for turning my back on you.
- He also found the answer to his question in 1 Corinthians 10:31: "Whether therefore you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." We received life from God, so we live with him and for him. "Nothing changed on the outside, but God changed the inside."
6. Loved when you can no longer do anything
- He joined the Chitose church and was baptized there around age 18 or 19, finished high school by correspondence, worked three years for a company in the city, then trained for three years at the Hokkaido Bible Institute. He then served eighteen years as a pastor in another church in Hokkaido.
- After about ten years of ministry, he burned out. He had been charging ahead, ready to fall for the gospel. Hospitalized, he kept resisting until his doctor told him: "Here, be a patient." Everything that was tense let go at once, and for days he could not get out of bed. Anxiety came: will I stay like this?
- Then he looked deep within himself: what is left for someone who can only lie in bed? There he found, like a flower opening, the love of God. What he had preached for years came back to him: everyone is loved by God for who they are, not for what they do.
- Isaiah 43:4 then took on its full meaning: "Since you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you." From there he recovered slowly, through the care of doctors, nurses and pharmacists, the prayers and practical help of his family and his church, and visits from pastor friends.
- Too weak to read the small print of the Bible, he fed on the poems of Tomihiro Hoshino (星野富弘), a physical education teacher who became paralyzed after an accident and who paints and writes with a brush held in his mouth. One of them says in substance: I have a wound, but it is through this wound that your tenderness enters me.
- He also mentions Genzō Mizuno (水野源三), paralyzed from childhood, who could communicate only by blinking his eyes. His mother turned the pages of a Bible given by a Christian, he came to believe in Jesus Christ, and then dictated his poems syllable by syllable. In one of them, he thanks sadness: it is what led him to the Lord Jesus, where there is a great joy not of this world and a peace that does not change.
7. God can change your story into good
- He does not hide that he still takes medication for bipolar disorder, twenty-two years later, with one appointment a month. He tries to see this illness as part of his personality. "When I am at my lowest, I cannot think that way," he admits.
- Being healed is a reason for gratitude, and so is seeing a difficulty disappear. But things do not always go as we hope. Being able to say "thank you, sadness" in spite of that is, for him, a life of victory.
- Sick or healthy, young or old, rich or poor, active or bedridden: everyone, without exception, is precious in God's eyes. He puts it this way: "Thank you for being born. You are a joy."
- The evil suffered, the misfortune, the pain cannot be erased once they have happened. But the way our heart receives them can change, and we can hope that one day we will say, like Joseph, that God turned it all into good.
- As his retirement from the pastorate approaches, he still has dreams: a nursery school, meals for children, places of welcome, and prayer for a revival in Japan, in Asia and in the world. God made a small flower bloom on a life that looked like a weed or a stray dog. He believes he will make everyone's life bloom even more.
Key takeaways
- Genesis 50:20 is the view of a man looking back over his whole life: the evil he received did not have the last word, God turned it into good.
- A very simple prayer, "God, if you exist, help me," is enough for God to begin opening a path.
- As long as there is life, you can start again. No one is too far gone to be lifted up in Christ.
- The meaning of life is found in God: living with him and for his glory, because he is the one who gave us life.
- You are precious in God's eyes for who you are, even when you can no longer do anything.
Personal reflection
- What event in your past do you still struggle to entrust to God, and would you dare to ask him to turn it into good?
- If you are going through a difficulty today, can you simply say to him in your heart: "God, if you really exist, help me"?
- What answer do you give to the question "why am I alive?"
- Is there a young person or a loved one around you whom you have stopped hoping for, and to whom you could give back confidence?
- Do you believe that God loves you even on the days when you produce nothing?
Verses cited
Frequently asked questions
What does Genesis 50:20 mean for our lives?
Joseph speaks these words at the end of his life, looking back: he was wronged, he knew misfortune, but God turned it into good. For Pastor Kida, the evil we have lived through cannot be erased, but the way we receive it can change, and God can lead us to say one day the same thing Joseph said.
How did Pastor Kida find meaning in his life?
At 17, alone on a dairy farm in Hokkaido, he asked himself why he was alive. He opened the Bible and the introductory books his mother had sent, understood that Jesus' death on the cross was a death in his place, and prayed in tears. He found his answer in 1 Corinthians 10:31: to live with God, for his glory.
What does this message say to someone who can no longer do anything?
Bedridden by burnout, Pastor Kida discovered God's love deep within himself. Isaiah 43:4 reminded him that God loves the person himself, not what he produces. Sick or healthy, active or bedridden, everyone is precious in God's eyes.
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