Give us this day our daily peanut butter
A surprising story of God’s provision
Just after we arrived back in the US on our first furlough in 1985, our nine-year-old daughter was asked in a Sunday night service what she missed about Japan. She answered rice. The next day, a woman who’d heard our daughter’s answer turned up at our apartment door with a bag of Japanese rice. She told us the following story from her childhood in Japan.
Her father, Samuel Thornton, had been a missionary pastor in Kobe. At one time, he led several young Japanese men to the Lord. Since in those days (the 1920s) new Christians were often kicked out of their families on becoming Christians, Pastor Thornton became responsible for these young men. One day, while he was walking and praying on the docks of Kobe, he came across a crate of machinery, which no one seemed to know anything about. When he saw what was in the crate, he acquired it and hauled it home. It was a machine for making peanut butter, which was not very common in Japan at that time. Soon several young men were making peanut butter during the day and studying the Bible at night. Eventually, the Japan Self-Help Bible School was formed.
The peanut butter business continues today and is still named after Pastor Thornton. However, his name was converted to katakana (ソントン) and then sometime later back into romaji … Sonton.1
1. Charles Thornton, One in Seven Thousand, The Life and Legacy of Samuel Watson, accessed Oct 11, 2016, http://www.sonton.info/docs/One%20in%20Seven%20Thousand.pdf, 14.
Disclaimer: the product pictured is peanut cream.
Photo: Fair use, https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B008XEXLII/