Friday, February 26, 2010

Passover in February

Well, I'm already a day behind in my blogs, but I'll try to write one this morning and one tonight.
I'm pretty sure I've talked about Joe G. a couple times on here, and if not on here then I know I have in my newsletter a couple times. Joe is from Grand Junction, Colorado. He's 27, an amazing musician, and totally called by God to be in full time ministry when he gets home. Although, right now he's not sure where he's supposed to go for ministry. So anyone reading this, if you have any opening at your church or maybe know of a friend who does, please tell my parents and they'll let me know. Joe works the best with older high school to college age kids. But enough of advertising for Joe.
Joe also has another special thing about him, he's Jewish. He's also leaving in two weeks. ;(So since he is leaving so soon, Tim and Christine thought it would be fun to have a Passover meal all together. And that's just what we did last night. It was so cool!! It took about three and a half hours from beginning to end, but that also included dinner and a worship time afterwards.
We ate unlevened bread, bitter herbs (which was wasabi root), and many other things that I don't know how to spell because Joe said all the names in Hebrew.
So that was basically my day yesterday. In the morning I also had Japanese class. We were studying about a suffix that they put on the end of words "te". "Te" can mean many many things, but in the two examples we learned yesterday, it means to either tell some one else to do something (EX - Sit down.) or it acts like the English suffix "ing" (EX -walking). Unfortunately that's the very simplified version. There were lots of other things that went along with those two examples that just made it all confusing, but it'll just take some studying and hopefully I'll understand it.
Then in the afternoon Amy and I just hung out at Joe's place helping him get ready for the dinner that night. We also all found out that Friday is Debbie's roommate's birthday, so we planned we were going to do for her today. (It's already Friday here)
Well that about sums it all up. Hope everyone has a great night and sleeps well. God bless you all!

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Pictures of Enoshima Beach from Kendra's Visit



















A Beautiful Day and a Visit w/ a Friend

Today was I think one of the firs real days of spring! It was beautiful out! We were all able to walk around in tshirts all day and throughout the evening. And the best part is this weather is supposed to just continue to get better the rest of the week. Unfortunately though, there is a 95% chance of rain on Saturday, which means it'll not be so much fun walking around Machida. But that's ok, we'll still have a good time and I know God will do something great like always.
This morning I received a call from Ben Repke, a friend from Peoria. He's currently in Japan. Actuallly by the time I'm writing this he's on his way back to the States. But he was only going to be here until 4pm today, so Amy and I hurried and got ready to go meet him for lunch and to hang out.
Well, long story short (12 trains, and 3 wrong stations), it took us 3 hours to finally all meet up in the right spot. We spent the next couple hours all talking and just kinda catching up. It was good to see Ben, because he's been gone with the Navy for the past year and a half and I haven't seen him in probably a good two years.
So my current goal is to try to write a short blog each day until I leave. I'm not sure how good I'll be at it, but like I said it's my goal.
Hope everyone in the States has a great day! Miss you all and love you all too!

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

My Last 10 Weeks!

A lot has happened since my last blog post. I'm sorry everyone who reads this, I haven't done a great job at keeping up with writing in here on a regular basis.
If you've read my newsletter in December, you'll know that we saw 3 of our friends here in Japan become Christians. Two of them are now translators for the Fuse, and the other is one of our guitarists. We also all went snowboarding just before New Years, had an International Food Party, and a great Christmas Gospel Party.
In the January newsletter, I wrote about the Hawaiian Night and I gave a little background on the different missionaries that are on the leadership team for the Fuse. I work with an amazing group of people here.
It's currently the end of February and the Fuse has continued to grow and change. This past week we had 31 people come and 8 of those people we first timers. PRAISE GOD!!! Nearly every week we see new people coming to the Fuse and some of them are staying around and really getting involved with helping out with the Fuse.
Two specific examples of that are two girls named Midoriko and Hitomi. These girls are two girls I am now meeting with every couple weeks and hopefully soon, Hitomi will become one of our translators and Midoriko will be able to help out in another way. Both are incredibly open to the gospel.
My friend, Kendra, was also just here for the past two weeks. We had a lot of fun visiting different places around Tokyo area and just hanging out and catching up. We visited Shinjuku, Shibuya, Asakusa, Enoshima, and the old houses I took my dad to. It was great to have her here. And it was sad to see her leave.
Well, as I'm writing this I'm sadly realizing I only have about 10 weeks left here in Japan. Then I will go back to the States, back to work, back to school, etc. But I know that when I go back I don't want to settle into the "norm" and get bored. I have done/seen some amazing things while I've been here. God has blessed this ministry and our team here in more ways than I'll ever be able to say. But even though I have such a short amount of time left I don't want to waste the time I have. I want to take advantage of it and use this time to the best of my ability to praise God and to continue pressing on to see what else God has in store for the Fuse and for me. I know God has some amazing things planned and I can't wait to find out what!