Personal Blogs #1

Jono’s Blog Blurb
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I still love being here; every day has something new and exciting to experience and do. Today we went to visit a 400 year old Shinto shrine at the bottom of Mount Iwaki; it was really beautiful and very educational. On our way out we stopped to talk to the head priest of the shrine,. He was the kind of person with a perpetual smile on his face and a joyful glint in his eye and a tricky sense of humour. We ended up chatting with him for half an hour about whales and living in harmony with nature and all the other things you would expect a Japanese Shinto Priest to talk about. When he found out we were a music team from Canada he asked us to sing him a song. So we sang “Nothing but the blood” for him and Martin explained the words of the song to him. We should probably pray for him. For lunch we went to the beach and ate raw Sea Urchin, freshly barbequed squid and some kind of snail. Every meal that we’ve eaten here in Japan has been more delicious than the last.

I’m very happy to be here in Japan – the country is beautiful, the people are beautiful, and God is beautiful. It’s exactly the kind of change that my tired self has needed for a while now. I’m feeling much better about things since I’ve been here and figuring out a lot about what I want to do with my future. I’m fairly sure that I’m going to end up coming back to Japan for a longer period of time after I graduate. There are a lot more things I want to explore here. We’re just in a small rural (Well, if half a million people is considered small and rural) province of Japan and there are so many things to learn that you could spend your lifetime in just this one area and still learn new things. It’s really cool.

As for prayer requests… You can obviously pray for Japan which is one of the most secular nations in the world and which is having a lot of internal struggles. Pray, like the Shinto priest, for world peace; peace between people and themselves, and between people and nature. Pray for the team, that we will continue to be excited as we have to visit 7 schools in three days; we are going to need a supernatural amount of energy. And pray that we can live in the present and not be distracted by the future or the past.

Jess' Blog Blurb
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I think one of the most important lessons I've learned while being here is that as a result of the nature of work that is done here I've learned how to praise God for the little things. Because it takes on average about 10-12 years for a person to become a baptized believer even being able to start a simple conversation goes a long way in planting the seed. By doing all these concerts, the Ghents are able to meet people and invite them out to the various ministries that they do; whether it is English class, parenting class, cooking class or even Bible study. By seeing the excitement on the faces of Ruth and Martin in meeting someone new I have seen tangible ways in which God can be praised, even if by everyone else's standards it seems insignificant. I hope that I will be able to carry this new mindset home with me so that I can be truly thankful for everything that God blesses us with.