Hello from Japan!
Well, now the name of our blog is actually correct! Hello from the eastern side of the world! We arrived safely on Saturday night (Saturday morning US time) with all of our luggage in tow. God protected us and we had a very long, but uneventful trip. I don’t think either of us walked around enough on the plane because our feet are a bit sore and swollen. Many of you were praying about our layover in Tokyo – it went well. We got off the plane, ran through the airport, went through immigration, got all of our luggage, went through customs, deposited our luggage, and found our gate with 20 minutes to spare before our plane took off. What an interesting way to end our 13 hour flight! Thank you for your prayers.
Yesterday was Sunday and we attended the church we are going to be a part of for the next few years. We had visited this church when we were here in 2007 and it was nice to see the people again. We didn’t understand much of anything that was said, but we were glad to be able to pick out a few words here and there. Thankfully we remembered some of our greetings and were able to use them. Afterward we stayed for lunch and then the church’s annual business meeting. Today was the monthly prayer day with all of the Christar missionaries. It was nice to get together with them for some laughs, prayer, and catching up.
Our hopes for this week are to move our things over to where we’ll be staying. These past couple of days we’ve been living with the missionaries in their home and while that has been nice, it will be soon time to strike out on our own to see what’s what. In one of our previous prayer letters we included a picture of the Ministry Center that our team and the church recently purchased. Our apartment will be on the second floor of the building while the church will be on the first floor. A separate house actually came with the Ministry Center when the team bought it that the pastor will eventually stay in. Because there is some work that needs to be done in our apartment (such as putting in a toilet), we will actually be living in the house while a team comes over from the US to help with the work. Once they have done that, then we will move into the apartment in the Ministry Center. The team is scheduled to come sometime in April and so we will be living in this house until then. We went to see the Ministry Center and house yesterday. While we were there, we looked through the items some missionaries who are home on furlough for a few years have given us. How nice to already have things to put in the apartment! God blessed me in a small way – when we lived in Lancaster, we had an air popper for making popcorn. I really liked it but knew that it wouldn’t work if we brought it to Japan and so I wondered how I would make popcorn here. When we looked through the items the missionaries left us, guess what was lying on top of the pile!?! That’s right, an air popper. God is kind. We’ll keep you posted as best as we can in the next week or two – unfortunately we won’t have internet right away where we will live and so we will be at the missionaries’ house to do all our emailing.
Praise the Lord that we are not dealing with jet lag from the trip. Please pray for Colby and I that God would provide the practical things we need: a car, language tutors/helpers, space heaters, a couch, internet, etc.