First day of Omagari!

It was my brother’s birthday yesterday, so we ended up skyping around 11pm-12am the night before! :D happy birthday Ron!

3rd December: A Warm Welcome!

This was typed yesterday, after we came to Omagari...

Today we had the rest of orientation:

• a Japanese language class, lessons on Japanese do’s and don’t’s (and we realised that we already did a lot of the things we weren’t supposed to such as pressing ANY red buttons, blowing your nose, sitting cross -legged if you're a girl, or not wearing socks indoors)
• prayer for both teams before we went to Ramen
• some orientation as to what we would be doing for the next few weeks at Omagari and what homestays were going to be like (yay!)

before we got on the subway and bus to go to Omagari :)

Learning to bow as we greeted!

part of the theme of the OMF Hokkaido language centre

Map of Japan on the OMF Centre wall

Karin, one of the missionaries who serve at FMZero

It took a while to get there, especially with all the rain today that melted the slippery ice away but we were greeted with a warm welcoming party by the families on the Omagari Church Plant Team, including 6 kids and a rabbit. Praise God for their amazing hospitality and love to us by cooking dinner and amazing dessert and by very encouraging conversation.

Matsumi (the girl on the bottom right) asked Tracy to share her testimony, and then reciprocated by sharing her own. She attended a protestant kindergarten, but never understood why her mum thought that "making God No.1" was the most important thing in life. She attended a church where she was the only student in Sunday School and had no christian friends at school either. Her mum suggested that she go to a Christian camp bringing kids from churches all around Japan. She made lots of friends and learnt that making God no. 1 was IN RESPONSE TO HIS LOVE, and it was no longer difficult to understand why her mum was so devoted to God. She gave her life to Christ and is now a teacher at a protestant kindergarten. Unfortunately there are very few christian primary and high schools so much of what kids learn in kindergarten do not stick in their heads through their childhood :(

And now, what happened today! :)

4th December: First day in Omagari :)

Today I woke up at 9am Japan time, which is 11am Sydney time! For the past few days since arriving I've been waking up at 7am Japan time as I hadn't quite adjusted to the time difference. Tracy and I are staying at the Manders' house, and their hospitality has been so touching for us and we thank God for them so much :) They have a 7 year old daughter Emilie who really loves pink and we play shopping with her. Her cash register could say "welcome", "here is your change", "please come again", had a barcode scanner, calculator, and credit card swiper!!! Japanese toys are so high tech! Shopping at Emilie's supermarket was very enjoyable however, as she often gave you 5 times more "change" back than you paid her in the first place :) Good way to build customer loyalty I reckon :)

Everyone else came over for a team devotion and a meeting on the schedule for the rest of mission. Steve led us on devotions today and it was on 2 Timothy 2:1-13, and the main message from that was 'Remember Jesus Christ'.

Steve had preached on this passage to encourage another church and it was really encouraging as he reminded us that when we're on short term, even if we don't see anything, we shouldn't feel that there's 'nothing' because God uses everything! This reminded me of what Tracy told me last night before we slept. She was telling me about a particular friend and how God has been working and preparing him for His purposes since he was little. His ethnicity, upbringing and education were all pieces of a puzzle God intricately designed for his purposes. I think hearing about a lot of missionary's stories about how they came to serve in Japan or wherever they are has been really eye opening. I hear about how God moves them bit by bit and how He prepares them without them even knowing!

Steve also said that our role as missionaries is to enable God's word to go out and do its work because IT is powerful, not us :)

Praise God that Omagari, where there are a lot of young families with kids while the husbands work in Sapporo which is about 45 minutes away by car, has been really responsive to the church events with a lot of seekers (including someone who had been meeting up with a Jehovah's Witness for 10 years, but had never felt it was quite right, and then met Saeko, one of the missionaries, and is now getting baptised in March! The first fruit of Omagari Church! PRAISE GOD :D :D)

Steve and Saeko (the long term missionary couple) and Susan showed us the advertisement for the main Australian Summer Christmas outreach event to be held on the 18th of December, where we'll be serving some Australian snacks, showing a slideshow of what life is like in Australia, facepainting, etc etc :) IT HAS OUR FACES ON IT!! :O The ads are actually going out in the 3000 subscription Omagari newspaper in a couple of days :D please pray for many to come!

Come to experience Christmas in Summer! :)
Chinese Australian missionaries.. hahaha

We also had the encouragement of being there where the first RSVP of the ad came by fax. This was the 5th & 6th people to RSVP to come, as 4 people had signed up to come beforehand!! We really thank God for bringing them!



ABC CLUB PREP


Later on we went to Susan's (another long term missionary here from Sydney) to prepare for the ABC club, a new ministry and a kids club for lower primary students after school with a bit of an English segment. We prepared the angel craft (cutting 70 paper plates) together, Saeko went out to buy stuff and we prepared for the "1 hour special" program for ABC club in the coming week where we would introduce ourselves.

Please pray that many kids will come, even though it gets dark really early in winter here so primary school kids in Japan actually have a curfew of having to be home by 4pm. As the club runs from 3.30pm to 4.30pm, some kids aren't allowed to come bt please pray that parents may be moved to come with their kids and there will be gospel conversation made with them! It's so exciting because all but the parents of 2-3 kids (of from anywhere from 10=64 kids) who come are non christians and new contacts!! Please pray that God will be working through the kids and their parents!


To be honest, it was a challenge.

In the 1 hour special that Cerise organised, it was all a bit of a blur as we had to improvise and change a bit when things didn't fit. It was decided that another lady would teach them a Japanese song, we'd play some games (like Bzz, Bullrush and some back up ones like Poisonball, Ninja Destruction, a screaming game (i can't wait for that one!!)), perform a skit and the pastor would do a Christmas message. Then we'd have chocolate crackles and fairy bread :)

HOWEVER.. things didn't work out so smoothly.

The gift skit we had practised seemed too abstract for kids to understand, so we decided to do the other one Cerise had suggested called "You Are Special", but it was too long, so we had to cut it down. After spending a lot of time editing it and changing it into more Japanese names (um we called the people the 'Takoyaki people' :) ) we tried practising it and translating it into Japanese and it turned out to be too hard for us to perform (as only Tracy understands Japanese)....

and in the end we had to scrap it, which was quite sad and personally I found it a bit frustrating :( Fortunately by God's grace, He's blessed us with a team that is very flexible, patient and trusting in God's provision and everyone was willing to change. Susan provided us with a quiz she had made about Australia and used a while before, and before long we were practising how to hop along, pretending to be Australian animals for the kids to guess!

Cerise will be a koala, Grace a kangaroo, Karen a crocodile, Carson an emu, and I will be a frilled neck lizard while Tracy will be the translator/host :)

I really learnt the need to be flexible and the need to be understanding even when things change at the last minute. Steve told us that as a missionary you really have to be prepared to be flexible, even if things change halfway through the actual event! Please pray that we can be humble and willing to serve each other, learning to be flexible and that God will give us the patience and keep reminding us of Christ's love to do so.

Edit: oh yeah, and we experienced our second earthquake today at Susan's house. :)

After all the preparation, we had some team debrief time over the past couple of days to share what God has been teaching us, what we found surprising in Japan, the culture shocks we had and things like that.

I actually found it quite confronting and I was quite tired after a whole day I found it hard to be thinking back over the past few days so I've learnt that I need to reflect everyday over what God has been teaching me or I'd be overloaded by info and forget! :( Please pray that we'll be dependant on Him and His word everyday, setting time aside to be with Him and talk to Him everyday even when things get busy in the schedule.

However we prayed in pairs for each other, and also for ABC club which is really exciting!!

Tomorrow

Tomorrow we'll be off to the Hiraoka worship service (the mother church that planted the Omagari church we're at) and Steve told us that there's quite a lot of believers there. One of the families who are on the Omagari church planting team actually moved their whole family over to the Omagari area for the purpose of church planting. I am so encouraged by their dedication! We're really excited and this will be my first time at a Japanese church where we will understand nothing (I don't think there'll be translation for the sermon) but I can't wait!! :)