This is one of a series of emails I sent while preparing and living overseas in Japan, from April 2008 to April 2009. They are mostly for my own benefit, but also for anyone who may care to read them. Enjoy 🙂

Konnichiwa!

Hey everybody from a beautiful Japanese Wednesday morning!  The weather has been great lately!  I’m so glad that it is warming up and there are so many things going on outside and around town.  It’s so pretty here!  Starting in the middle of June (after my birthday, thank goodness) we will enter into the rainy season, which will last for a good month and a half.  Yippee!  It will rain pretty much nonstop the whole time.  My classes go through the middle of July, but after that I won’t have any classes until September.  Samantha will be taking off for the States at the end of July and then I will hang out by myself for a month or so until Washeila can come over from England.  She will be the new teacher/missionary, and most likely living in the Center with me.  She is an older woman, saved out of Islam, and she works with Pioneers.  She will be here to start the new term of classes. 

I am so sorry that I haven’t updated until just now.  I usually do it Sunday evenings/Monday mornings…but I had a very full Sunday, and then I couldn’t access my email account all day Monday.  The past week and a half have been really fun.  I have a new class on Tuesday mornings, that I mentioned in the last update.  They are a group of 5 women, all housewives.  They are very cultured and elegant in a lot of ways, but they are a lot of fun.  They have a great relationship with each other and we have hit it off really well so far!  Last week, we read in the Children’s Bible the story of Samuel being called.  We had some great discussion of how we would feel if God spoke to us in our sleep, and also what we would do if our child came to us in the middle of the night thinking we were calling them.  They all agreed that they would do just like Eli and say, “It wasn’t me…go back to bed!”  One even said she’d probably lock her bedroom door.  Hah!  This week we discussed our requirements for picking a king, and then we read about Saul becoming king of Israel.  Next week, we’ll move on to David being anointed as king, and why he is a better candidate than Saul was.  They thought it was so weird that Saul would be chosen just because of his height and that he was so cowardly that he hid himself from the people.  I really hope that through these engaging stories, their hearts will be opened to the truly engaging story of the God who loves them.

After the morning class, I’ve been going out to lunch with H, one of Samantha’s students.  Samantha has to run after class to Kawanaka (the church site) for another class right in the afternoon, so I’ve taken to chatting with H after class is over.  She really loves the Center and all of us who work here.  She knows that we have so much love for her, and she comes regularly to International Cafe, even bringing friends and her clients (she’s an aromatherapy masseuse).  Pray for her that she would realize that it’s more than just the love in our hearts that she feels when she is with us.  She has a yearning, and consistently searches and is learning, but her heart has not yet completely opened to Jesus.

My relationship with the Quixote people has been growing as well.  Several people from the church, too, have been going to have lunch and dinner there.  It is wonderful to see them pick up this restaurant and take it as their own ministry as well.  Several people have already set up days to go and eat with me (which is either great for me or I might start gaining back any weight I’ve lost).  Last week I went in and only Yoshio and Satsuki were there again, and Satsuki said that she considers me a dear friend.  It was very sweet to hear and I pray that sometime soon we could call each other dear sisters and not just friends. 

This past weekend was International Cafe which went very, very well.  We discussed the meaning of life, and watched a clip from Planet of the Apes (the old one…without Marky Mark, alas).  I will put a link to some pictures at the bottom of the email, and you can see the very special guest we had at the dinner party.  He couldn’t stay long, but he caused quite a commotion as he came to eat with us.  🙂  On Sunday, after church, a large group of us went to Karato for the special “One Day Picnic”.  It’s an annual event here in Shimonoseki and local venders and artisans get together and display their products and sell food.  It was really wonderful.  They had many coverbands also, so I got to sing with a lot of American classics.  🙂  My Japanese friends thought I was really funny for it, but they liked it.  A sister at the church, Noriko-san, had her own display booth.  She studied chalk art in Australia and has come back to start her own business of making display signs and whatnot.  I have a picture in the album below of her display.  They are fantastic! 

I think that’s about it!  I’d love to hear from you!  So please shoot me an email or whatever.  I love getting letters too, so if you want to, send me a letter.  Here’s the address:

[address removed]

And here’s the link to the pictures:
This link has expired and has been removed.

For anything else, and for interim updates, please check out my blog:    http://xanga.com/pkcricket

Have a great rest of your week!

In Him,
Sarah ><>

This is one of a series of emails I sent while preparing and living overseas in Japan, from April 2008 to April 2009. They are mostly for my own benefit, but also for anyone who may care to read them. Enjoy 🙂

Happy Mother’s Day!!!!

I have a bunch of mothers and a couple mothers-to-be on my update list, so I want to wish you all a Happy Mother’s Day!

Today was a really great day on the Japan side!  We had combined service at Kawanaka so there were a ton of people.  I was pretty nervous because I was asked to play my violin this morning, and I hadn’t practiced with the others yet…only with the pianist, and then doing my own practicing until this morning.  I was nervous, but everything went really well and everyone seemed to enjoy it in the praise team.  It’ll probably be a monthly kind of thing…but I’ll have to wait and see what Pastor Tony thinks.  It was fun though.  Samantha gave her testimony in Japanese too.  It was her final exam for her Japanese class, which doubled as a distance learning class for her degree she’s working on with Liberty University.  She did really well, and I sat next to Megumi, the Japanese teacher, (whose name means “grace” by the way) and she only made a few notes on her piece of paper and not a whole slew…so Samantha was encouraged by the piece of info. 

I had asked for you to pray for the owners of the restaurant I’ve been building a relationship with, Yoshio-san and Satsuki-san.  I wasn’t sure if they would come to the service this morning, and it got to 10am and I still didn’t see them.  Suddenly, Samantha got my attention and nodded over to the middle seats and they there were!!  I went and sat with them, and Yoko, Brian’s wife, sat next to me and helped with showing them where to read in the Bible as we came to passages.  It was so neat.  They came just to hear me play violin, and I am so excited to know what kind of a friendship has been forming with us.  I really pray that they heard the Gospel and were amazed by the love in that church.  A lot of people went up to greet them, and Satsuki also received a gift along with the other mothers in the church.  She was really pleased with that.  Please pray for continued interest and for our new relationship to grow and for more opportunities to share in a non-confrontational way.

We also had another visitor at church.  Mark, an exchange student from Australia, is studying Japanese at the university near the train station between the church and the Center.  I got to chat with him some, and Eri and I coerced him to get some obento (prepared lunch) with us.  It looks like he really likes our church and is going to come back next week and throughout his time here (he’ll be heading back to Australia to continue his studies in Japanese medicine) until January.  Deborah, he’s from Brisbane, which I was pretty sure was where you had worked when you were Down Under.  I’m so glad to have another English-speaking gaijin (foreigner) with us.

This week, I am getting a new class Tuesday mornings, and I lost my once a month Saturday class.  I’m kind of relieved about the Saturday class, though, as the curriculum was completely different than the regular one.  The Tuesday morning class is of older women and the setting is more like an “English Club” than a class.  We’re all preparing for another International Cafe!  Please pray in preparation for that, the we will have many returning visitors like Mika and Hiroka, but also new ones.  I’m going to take a couple flyers down to Green Mall to give one to the man from Nigeria we met a couple weeks ago, and also the restaurant employee, Tetsu, who helped us find bulgogi.  Pray that I can get there on a day the Ghetto store is opened, and also that I can find Tetsu, as I don’t know his work schedule or where he lives, but only remember where he works.  🙂  I know God will work it out! 

I think that’s just about it.  It sounds like I’m far from worrying about this, but one thing I asked for pray for in the Ladies’ Prayer Meeting this afternoon was that I would not cross the line from contentedness to stagnation.  I pray that God would continue to give me the energy needed to make contact and build these relationships with Japanese people.  I have a whole year, yeah, but only a year…and I don’t want to waste any time. 

If you don’t recognize any names, places, events mentioned in here, then please check up with my blog at:  http://xanga.com/pkcricket. (I’m sorry, it’s kind of hard to navigate and find things on my Xanga blog, which is why I moved over to WordPress.  If you go to the calendar and get to the complete list of entries, you should be able to narrow down your search by getting to the May 2008 entries.  Hopefully that helps you.)

Also, I have just a few more pictures up.  Sakura, Samantha and I took a walk up to Oinoyama this evening to see the sunset view from the mountain.  Check it out!:

Links to photos have expired and have been removed.

Enjoy!

In Him,
Sarah ><>

This is one of a series of emails I sent while preparing and living overseas in Japan, from April 2008 to April 2009.  They are mostly for my own benefit, but also for anyone who may care to read them.  Enjoy 🙂

Hey everyone!

Well, I wanted to thank you all for your prayers for the outing on Saturday with Mika and Hiroka.  We had so much fun!  The day was very full, we took off around 9:45a and didn’t get back to the Center until 9ish-p.  First, Mika came and we went over to Green Mall (the Korean street) and watched the parade start off.  It was very short, but really neat, we went over to the train station to wait for Hiroka, she missed the first train, so had to catch a later one. 

We then went to Sea Mall to see the Hokkaido Island Exhibition.  They had all these stands of Hokkaido foods and products.  You could get samples of them and then buy some if you liked it.  The samples were pretty good, even the fishy stuff…but one thing that stood out were the chocolate-covered potato chips.  I guess you can only buy them in Hokkaido, so Mika and Hiroka were really excited about them.  I bought us a box and they each bought one and we took them back to the Center to store until we split up for the night.  Before that, though, we went to the arcade and had purikura taken, which is just photo-booth pictures and you add embellishments to them electronically.  I had done it in China too, but you couldn’t really add designs and captions to those, but the Japanese are really good at it.  We enjoyed making goofy faces and funny poses, and they got a kick out of it.  I loaded them on my Facebook too, so you can see some of them.

After that we walked to the Kaikyo Messe Tower and had lunch at an organic restaurant…not really my taste, and it was a buffet, but they didn’t have a lot of selection, or quantity.  The girls said I ate like a bird, though, because I didn’t get a whole three or four plates of food…those two are pretty tiny but they can eat!  Afterwards, we went back to the Center got Mika’s car and drove to the Aquarium where we saw the porpoises make bubble rings and watched the dolphin/seal show.  Then, we took the cable car up Hinoyama and then hiked back down.  The view was incredible, you could see to the other side of Shimonoseki from the summit.  It was great, I loved it.  After that, we were hungry for dinner and went to Mr. Donuts in Sea Mall and had Chinese food and coffee.  We chilled out at the Center for a little while before the girls decided to go home.  It was a great time.

I had asked you to pray for a friendship to grow between us and that our time would point to Christ.  I don’t know what prompted it, but at dinner, Mika asked me the difference between God and Jesus.  As I was explaining, I took the opportunity to share the Gospel message with her and Hiroka.  It’s difficult with those two because they went to Baiko high school and Hiroka is attending Baiko college.  Baiko teaches the Bible, and they even pray and sing worship songs, but they teach that the miracles and stories never really happened, and that Jesus was just a good teacher.  It’s a shame, but also a wonder that they even teach the Bible at all.  Regardless, as I shared some of the stories, the girls had already heard a lot of them.  It made it easier, in a way, but more difficult in another.  Pray for continued opportunities to share with them and that I would be able to spend more and more time with them. 

(At this point of the newsletter, I shared a difficulty happening on the team itself and asked for prayer.  Something that surprised me when I first went on the mission field (not this trip, but one much earlier) is that other missionaries are not perfect and have issues just like the rest of us.  If I feel inadequate on the mission field, then I’m sure others have sins and struggles as well.  I’m not including what the issue was, just that there was one in hopes that it may encourage anyone preparing for the mission field as well.  People are not perfect – only God is.  You must have grace and mercy for other believers, especially those in ministry and when you are far from home.) 

Well, here are the links to my pictures and a couple of videos for you as well:

Links to photos and videos have expired and been removed.

Have a great week guys! 

In Him,
Sarah ><>