This is one really late post, and it will include thoughts and reflections from a couple of weeks back (on the 2nd weekend of the mission trip) and also of the past few weeks. I will not So bear with me, as it will be a super long post (as if my others weren't long enough!)
Mission Weekend # 2
So once again i caught the bus to Shinjuku, arriving at the bus stop soaked because of all the rain (it's been wet season for a while!). I then caught the train to Yokohama from Shibuya, noticing after about 4 stops that i had gotten onto the "women only" carriage... I was wondering why all the people around me were giving me strange stares...and to make it worse i don't look like a foreigner, and so i think they might have just taken me for a pervert :( So after my realisation of my embarrassing failure, i changed carriages at the next stop. Upon arrival at a station near Yokohama, i met up with Makiko, who brought me to the KGK group meeting, where i was able to meet a whole bunch of awesome people, many of which had really good English speaking skills :0 They seriously put my Japanese to shame! After the talk, we had a super late dinner at 10:30, and managed to make it in time for the last train back to Asakusa! Praise God that we could make it on time!
The next day, we headed to the KGK office at Ochanomizu to meet up with "So Sweet" Sousei and the other KGK people, and traveled together to the KGK National Conference. Good teaching, good fellowship, good times :) My host (a korean guy called Ha Nuru) had to leave early, so i followed Keita who lived on the same train line as him. It was good talking to Keita about his faith, and it was very encouraging hearing about the work he and the other KGK students have been doing. Nuru lives in Saitama, which is the prefecture next to Tokyo. In other words, my travel back to his house was quite long... it almost took me two hours to get there!
Anyways, Nuru is a korean dude whose dad is a missionary from Korea :) It was a tad late by the time i got to their house, but i was warmly welcomed by their family and was given an amazing korean meal :D They were really happy that i finished all the food they put in front of me (i was really really hungry lol...). After the meal, we watched the Japan vs. Netherlands match, which Japan lost...but it was quite enjoyable spending that time with the family :D That night i couldn't sleep very well at all, so i was falling asleep in service :( I personally didn't Nuru's dad's preaching style, but i felt that the church was very nice and it had a very home-like feel :) It could be because their church is situated below their home in the same building though haha...
After church and an awesome lunch i said goodbye to the Ha family, and trekked back to Asakusa to meet everyone again.
It was Fi's birthday (yay!) so we went out for dinner and for a little jazz live at a nearby pub. The band was awesome! Our mission blog has some pretty hilarious videos of us dancing :P Alen got picked up by a small old Japanese lady who asked him to dance LOL! And we all ended up getting up to dance eventually :) It was a heap of fun! We finished the night off with some ice-cream and headed to our new accommodation...which was rather dodgy... the showers were tiny, and were either too hot or too cold. It's like you couldn't mix hot and cold to make it warm or cool, it was just cold or hot :(
So we checked out and left again for Ochanomizu to pick up our luggage and Sousei. We then traveled by bus to Kofu for a meeting with the KGK people from Yamanashi daigaku. The meeting was a tad awkward... a few failures in communication and epic fails in translation on my part :( Well it was my first time ever doing translation lol... Still i think it was nice for the team to meet the people there and be encouraged by their stories! We also learnt about my Chinese buddy Haru-chan (Chan isn't here last name btw), who is not yet a Christian, but she continues to go to church every week and has attended a few KGK meetings :)
After our meeting we headed down to near the station to eat some Yamanashi specialty houtou :D That stuff was aweessssommmeee :) A tad bit on the expensive side, but each bowl had a heap of stuff in it :) We then parted way - alen going off to tokyo, and the others leaving for their accommodation in Fujiyoshida.
Our third weekend has been blogged about in our mission blog :)
Final Mission weekend - de-briefing and relaxing :D
Last friday was the first time ever i caught the train from Kofu, though i've been here for more than 3 months already (unbelievable!). That night it was pouring and i struggled as i made my way down to the station on my bike while holding an umbrella. When i arrived i was quite soaked, but i was wearing thongs so i didnt have to deal with wet shoes and socks :D So i met with alen, aki and kevin at Fujiyoshida station, and they brought me back to the church where we were staying. The accommodation was amazing :) Loooooooove tatami mat rooms :D The showers were great too (staying anywhere outside tokyo is pretty awesome :) ). We had our final de-brief meeting that night, and everyone except for myself was dead tired. I think they all had a great sleep that night :)
We woke up the next morning to the sound of aki playing the piano, and man oh man that guy can play! So i asked him to play some studio ghibli music, and he did :D I hope this video works! And if it does, i apologise for the bad quality and the excess movement of my hands lol
Anyways, so that morning we had breakfast at coco's - an all you can eat buffet breakfast :D It was AWESOME! And all that for just 680 yen :D As if that's not awesome!! So after we got our big breakfast boost we headed back to the church, grabbed our stuff and said goodbye to the lady pastor there. We then trained it to Kawaguchiko, from where we caught the bus to the fifth level of mount fuji (about halfway up! it apparently takes about 3 days to climb to the top if you start at the bottom...). We only climbed up one level (to level 6) since we didn't have much time. There we took a break and had our lunch (which we bought at 7/ll earlier). A couple of us bought mango melon bread, and it was AWESOME! :D Best melon bread i've ever had! I should've gotten some more :( The view from up there was amaaaazing :) The air up there was nice and cool, and we ate some tasty mountain cloud (as jay suggested we should) :D I think the clouds actually made the view really nice :) It felt like we were in a studio ghibli movie (Laputa or howl's moving castle :D)! We had to leave early to make it back to tokyo on time, so we headed back down the mountain and caught the bus back to kawaguchiko, and then another bus back to tokyo.
We arrived in tokyo at about 9, and we were all starving and ready to stuff ourselves! We met up with Azu, who led us to the place. And i've gotta say, that was the most amazing shabushabu ever :D It was a bit expensive (all you can eat for 3000yen per head) but i think we ended up eating much more than just 3000yen worth of food! Between the 10 of us, we had 174 plates :D That's probably 150 plates of meat and the rest veg LOL! Seriously, we were all so full we could barely walk! Soooooo goood :) Jay and alen went absolute psycho over the beef :P The awesome thing was that the beef they prepared for us was pretty good quality stuff too :) Not just the beef, but the pork, the tofu and veggies - everything was pretty goood quality! I seriously think we would've put them out of business if we did that everyday LOL. Oh yeah and the ice-cream they gave us at the end was amazing :D Especially that maccha ice cream :0 Soooooo gooooood :D
So we stumbled back to our accommodation in Asakusa (the Khaoson Samurai hostel - the one we stayed at at the beginning), for our the team's final night there. I didn't end up sleeping at all, and alen only got about 2 hours. We stayed up that night having a looooooong man chat, and we talked about some pretty important stuff - about faith, about girls (as guys do) and about our thoughts on being on the mission team.
Needless to say, the very next day i was dead (although to me it wasn't quite the next day, but the previous day continued on for another 24 hours). But throughout the day i think i did okay at staying up :) After brekky, Midori (one of the girls working at Khaosan) was teaching a brazilian dude (Igor) some origama, and we heard Midori playing the ukulele, and we recognised the song! She was playing All in All!! (which in Japanese is called "Yowai toki no chikara" i.e. My strength when i am weak - the first line of the song) So i asked her "where did you learn that song!?" And she told us that she learnt it in church in New Zealand. So it turns out that she's a Christian :D She told us that she became a Christian 3 years ago and got kicked out of home for it. But she held onto her faith, and she started working at Khaosan (which allows workers to live there). I'm not sure how old she is but she looked about 20. She said that she goes to two churches on sunday - a korean church in the morning, and another church in chiba-ken (which is a prefecture near tokyo). To see a young Japanese girl become a Christian and hold onto her faith despite being rejected by her parents for it - that is truly an amazing and encouraging thing!
So we said our final goodbye to the hostel, and left for alen's church - Jesus lifehouse (which started off in Australia). The church is huge for a church in Japan - about 100 - 150 attendees in the morning service, which is one of about 5 services they hold on sundays. The church is very charismatic, and is much like Hillsong. I...don't know what to say really...well... the music was great, and the talk was quite good bar the fact that there was very little Biblical content (it sounded a little like a motivational talk), and the people there were really friendly and willing to connect with newcomers. Other than that, i worry that the members don't know enough about the Bible...in terms of reaching out to people they are awesome at it, but i really do wonder about the strength of their faith.
After church we had lunch at a nearby place (which had this really really annoying theme song that they played over and over and over LOL) and then bummed around for a bit at 7/11. The 7/11 had a bunch of tables on the side for people to sit, eat and chat :D Awesome stuff! Before we left, Alen made an important speech (based on what we were talking about the previous night), which was certainly much needed - for him and for the team. After all that was cleared up, we decided to pop down to Karaoke for half an hour :D 150 yen for half an hour including unlimited drink bar? Awesome stuff :D I love Japanese karaoke!! Anyways, we were only there for half an hour but we sang our lungs out :)
The time came for us to part, and we each went our separate ways - Kat, Jay, Kevin, Masaki and Joel made their way back to Sydney, Aki, Azu, Alen and myself went home, and Fi made her way to Tokyo to wait for her Shinkansen down to Kyoto.
So i made my way to shinjuku to catch the bus from there back to Kofu, but i needed to do some shopping for some presents, so i made my way to Tokyu Hands to check it out (first time!) and bought some stuff :) 6pm, caught the bus back to Kofu and slept for half the ride (which was surprisingly good!). Thankfully it didn't rain, but since it was a sunday, none of the shops were open by the time i got back to Kofu... so i didn't get to buy the groceries that i needed... Gonna have to do that tonight!
So what's happenin?
It's been rainy season for a while now, and if it's not raining, it's hot and humid (like disgustingly humid).
Thankfully i finished my final UTS assignment last friday and handed it in, so i no longer need to worry about assessments for a while. I still have uni though, and i have a few presentations and exams to do. I don't feel that my Japanese has improved very much lately, but i guess i haven't really been putting it to much practice... nor have i been studying very hard unfortunately.
I've been thinking a whole lot more about mission lately, and about how it would look like if i were to come here in the future to do work here... I feel that God is putting it in my heart to do mission here!
Sluggard!
It's been more than three months already... it's amazing how fast time can fly, when it feels like just a few weeks ago that i was saying i can't wait to go to Japan! Ever since my arrival, God has been teaching me a whole lot about Himself and about my role in His plan. For the first 2 months i studied the book of Ecclesiastes, and now i've moved on to 1 John. Ecclesiastes was amazing, but also very difficult. Problem is, for the last 3 months i have been enjoying myself immensely and i feel that i've been neglecting important things like spending time with God in prayer and reading His word. Nor have i been studying very hard at all... i feel that i have been rather lazy with a whole lot of things in fact, and it's not good at all.
So the reason i say this is that a few days ago, on the bus back to tokyo from fuji, i was listening to an SMBC Principal hour podcast, and the message was from Proverbs 6:6-11, and was about ants and slugs (i.e. hardworkers vs. sluggards). The message certainly hit me hard and made me reflect on all that i've been doing. Most my life, even when i've been busy, i feel that i haven't been using my time well. I may have filled up my time with a lot of things and made myself busy - but often i did so in order to make myself unavailable for the things that really mattered, like spending time in prayer and quiet time, helping the church out with things, studying, helping out at home, and spending time with people. I often made myself busy so that i could get away from the important things - the things that i knew i should do. That's what the speaker was talking about basically - that you can be a sluggard even if you're busy. Busyness doesn't necessarily mean that you are getting things done - busyness can be a means of escape. Indeed, we should look towards the ants - they work hard all day and do not tire from their work. They know what is important and they go straight for it. Instead of doing what is important i have been busying myself with things that do not matter. When i considered the speakers words, i knew that he was talking about me. I have certainly failed to be a godly man, as i have failed to work hard at everything as if working for the Lord. That is one thing that God has put in my heart to start changing).
Anyways, that was another long post, but if you have read this far, thanks so much for your patience! Here are some prayer points:
Praise God for:
- The Credo team getting back to Aus safely
- The people of the Japanese church - they've been a huge encouragement, and i'm sure the team has been struck by how mature and loving they are
- Awesome weather on our mount fuji climb
Please pray:
- As i start up and English Conversation class for both Christians and non-Christians (a weekly event connected with the church) for every saturday in the holidays. Please pray that i may be prepared for it and that i may be a good witness to the non-Christians that come. Also praise God for those who have expressed a keen interest in it (i guess because it's free and heaps of Japanese people wanna learn proper english) so far, and please pray that more people would want to come.
- That i can be a good witness wherever i am
- That i may learn how not to be a sluggard - that i will use my time well to do God's work and develop good relationships
Thanks guys :D
