A teenager, Margaret Ridgway became a Sunday school teacher in the 1920s. More specifically, she became a Sunday school teacher for Japanese children living in Celtic Cannery, the first fish-packing plant in Vancouver. This would be just the beginning of Ridgway’s work with immigrants from Japan and Japanese citizens in Canada.
When WWII led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Canadians, Ridgway sensed a clear calling from God. She was certain that he wanted her to move to an internment camp.
“I had no doubt now that He was calling me to leave my ‘ceiled house’—the security of my home, my church, and my familiar surroundings—and follow my Japanese friends who were deprived of their homes and their livelihoods and were being sent to makeshift quarters in the narrow valleys of the Kootenay and Slocan Rivers,” Ridgway wrote.
Ridgway moved to a tiny cottage where she began to meet with Japanese women. Together, they read Scripture, prayed, and hosted clubs for children and young women. She dedicated herself to sharing the gospel in the internment camps, leading many to the Lord.
Decades later, Japanese Christian leaders in Canada credit Ridgway with much of the evangelical work that has been done in their communities. Though she passed away in 2004, her legacy of faithfulness lives on in Canadian Japanese Mission, the formal ministry she began after the war, and the lives of many modern believers.
Most of us will not be called to a scene as dire or desperate as an internment camp. But people in need of hope and encouragement are all around us. May we have the eyes to see our neighbors, and the ears to hear the God who loves them, just as Ridgway did.
