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By Melissa Lauber

HIROSHIMA, Japan (July 19, 2014) – 8:15 a.m. August 6, 1945.

“It was an exact moment that redefined the city of Hiroshima, the world, and our ideas of peace,” said Sandy Ferguson, the director of connectional ministries for the Baltimore-Washington Conference.

At that moment, during the final year of World War II, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 in an instant and letting loose radiation that killed an estimated 350,000 more.

Bishop Marcus and Barbara Matthews, members of the Baltimore-Washington Conference Cabinet, their spouses and other conference leaders toured the Peace Memorial Park and the Memorial Museum on July 19.

One of the exhibits held a stone step that still held the shadow of a person who was sitting there when the bomb exploded. The person evaporated, his shadow remained.

The museum, which chronicled the horrors of the explosion and the world's ensuing calls for peace, touched each person in the delegation differently, but a spirit of a deep and abiding grief for all that the Japanese people endured swept through the conference delegation.

The Rev. Cynthia Moore-Koikoi, superintendent of the Baltimore Metropolitan District, led them in prayer.

"You are God in spite of who we are," she prayed. "We beg forgiveness for what we did in this place. ... We are also reminded that you are a God of second chances and that, out of ashes, a city grows. This is sacred and holy ground."

"We acknowledge and are haunted by our history, but we also look to the past as a dark inspiration to build a different kind of future," Ferguson said.

She was inspired by tiny paper origami cranes, folded by Sasaki Sadako, a junior high school girl who was made ill by the radioactivity of the bombing and believed that if she folded 1,000 paper cranes she would get well. Sadako died, but today people from all over the world bring cranes with them to the Peace Park, as a witness to the girl's hopes.

"As a church, we're called to wish for peace as well," Ferguson said. "But we're also, each of us, called to create God's shalom in our world. As we tour here, I think of the violence and the victims of those in Israel and Gaza, and of the airliner tragedy and rising tensions in the Ukraine and Russia. In the shadows of all this tragedy, God calls us to work for peace."

Following the tour of the Peace Park the group boarded a ferry to tour the floating Itsuksushima Shinto Shrine on Miyajima Island. Along the way it began to rain, and as they disembarked, a perfect rainbow formed in the sky to guide them home.