This past Sunday afternoon Colby and I went ice skating with his sisters and niece.  That was an interesting experience for me.  Growing up in Maine you would think that I am a pro at ice skating since we get so much snow and ice.  However, I am not.  There was a large swamp in the woods behind my house when I was young that my family and I would go ice skating on.  I mostly just slipped and fell, but it was fun nonetheless.  Unfortunately we moved away just as I was getting the hang of it.  The next time I went ice skating was when I was in high school with a bunch of friends.  Again, I mostly teetered around the pond, trying to keep my dignity in tact.  We all decided to form a line and skate around together in circles.  Much to my delight (sarcasm), I was at the end of the line and thus was the one to be whipped around the circle.

So it was with trepidation that I went ice skating this past Sunday.  Even the thought of it made me start to feel stressed.  This was when the Lord brought to my mind the thought, “This is a great opportunity to practice having a good attitude!”  “Yippee”, I thought, but I knew He was right.  I began to pray that God would help me to do my best, remembering that falling down is not the end of the world.  When the time came that we went ice skating, I was nervous and did cling to the edge a little bit.  However, pretty soon I was able to go at it alone and found myself cautiously making my way around the rink.  By the end of the afternoon, I was going a bit faster and feeling more confident!  It makes such a difference when you tell yourself that you can do something and encourage yourself along the way.  I don’t know as if I want to take up ice skating as a regular hobby, but at least I know that I am capable of it.

Please pray for Colby and I that God would enable us to have the right kind of attitude as we adjust to Japanese culture and learn the language.

We’ve been feeling a bit weary as we get close to the end of our orientation.  With so much good information to process through, we’re feeling the need to just take a step back and let it all sink in.  It has been such a unique experience to be around so many people who have hearts for different parts of the world.

Our typical days have started out with a praise and worship session with the people who are soon to be joining Christar.  Next we have a couple of sessions followed by a break (which is filled with coffee and many good eats) after which are a couple more sessions before lunch.  Lunch is usually a longer break (which I’m on right now) to eat and just relax.  The afternoon is filled with more sessions through until dinner at 5:30 each night.  Our sessions have been about all sorts of topics from church planting, to health issues, to learning how to be biblical leaders and followers, to personality styles.  Thankfully we have a lot of our notes downloaded from the internet and so we don’t have to worry about toting around a large binder full of notes.

Orientation will end tomorrow night with a banquet and then we are heading back to Colby’s family this weekend to spend some time with his sisters and niece and nephew.  It’s so nice to have a change of pace every once in a while and we have really appreciated that this past week.  With that in mind, both Colby and I are looking forward to being able to settle down long-term in Japan and have a bit more consistency and stability in our lives.  We’re not sure if being career travelers is a good thing for us – so much packing and moving!

Please pray for Colby and I these next few days that God would enable us to process through all that we’re learning here.  May we truly be able to apply these concepts and principles to our lives.

We got up early Wednesday morning ready to begin our time here at our PreDeparture Orientation for Christar.  With a delicious breakfast already down, coffee in our mugs, and fellow missionaries surrounding us, we had our first seminar of the day with Christar’s president.  A veteran missionary, he stood before us to challenge and encourage us for the next step in our journey.  When he said this, he got my attention:

“It’s okay to fail. Failure is not the worst thing that could happen.”

This is interesting, I thought.

“It is better to step out in faith trusting God than to never try at all,” he went on.

What a profound thing for the president to tell aspiring missionaries.  What a profound thing for God to tell me….

To be honest with you, I don’t want to fail.  In anything.  It’s just not comfortable, lovely, and doesn’t seem right.  In thinking about telling the Japanese about Christ, I want more than anything to be effective and see people’s lives changed by God.  The concept of failure being okay is a totally foreign thing to me.  It’s scary to even think about because it so goes against who I am as a person, American, and “good” Christian.  For so long it has been ingrained in me that to fail at anything is awful.  But here we were yesterday, sitting before the president of our organization, being told that it was okay.

In thinking more about this and about the God I have committed my life to, I have to consider the fact that He is bigger than anything I aspire to do for Him.  He can use a failure of mine just as much as a success.  Probably the bigger issue is if I am willing to fail.  Willing to try something new that might not work, to take a risk, or to pick myself up after having failed.  My response to my failure is probably what is more important than the failure itself.

At least I would have tried….  Stepped out in faith, and tried.

Pray for us this week as we enjoy Pre-Departure Orientation and all we are learning. Pray that we will learn all that God has for us as we prepare for Japan. Pray also that we would soon receive our Certificate of Eligibility, which we need in order to get our visas.

For any of you who follow the church-year calendar, yesterday was a holiday called Epiphany. It is the day that the church celebrates the visit of the magi to the Christ child and ultimately the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles. Recently, we were discussing the magi and their visit at our Wednesday night service. It got me thinking about the role they (and more specifically, their stargazing) play in the story of Christ’s birth. I have been reading a book recently by Gerald McDermott called Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions: Jesus, Revelation & Religious Traditions. In it, McDermott postulates that while other religions cannot tell us anything about God that is not revealed in scripture, they can sometimes help us to see aspects of biblical revelation from a different perspective – with fresh eyes.

This brings us back to the magi. It is interesting to note how they came to be notified of Christ’s birth. It was through the stars. Certainly nothing unusual there; Psalm 19 tells us that the heavens “declare the glory of God (ESV).” However, the more interesting thing is how the heavens showed them that and where Christ was to be born – using secular astrological symbolism and interpretation. Anyone who understands the truths of the Bible knows that there is no credibility to astrology. God sovereignly controls all that happens in the world, not the stars. But in this case God chooses to use this pagan system to announce the birth of his Son, the Messiah, to these pagan wise men. Using the power of modern computers, we can backtrack astronomical phenomena to the time of the birth of Christ.  Doing so reveals that a fascinating set of astronomical occurrences with astrological significance would have occurred – sufficient enough to get this group of magi to leave their palace court and their homeland to pay homage to a great king (for more on this, see http://www.bethlehemstar.net/dance/dance.htm). The interesting part is that not only does this astrological interpretation cause them to realize the birth of the Messiah, but to be the ones to notify the political and religious leaders in Judea. Those religious leaders, with their copies of the scriptures, must fill in some of the details, but the magi initiate the process.

This has made me think about what Theresa and I will learn as we are in Japan interacting with the Japanese. Our goal is to go to spread the light of the gospel to those who have never heard, but I think the Japanese, with their “secular” culture will have much to teach us as well. Just today I was talking with a colleague about the fact that in Japan people are not so concerned about having their own way as maintaining harmony among the group. It seems to me that their culture is better prepared to live out passages like Romans 12:17-18 & Philippians 2:1-4 than we are as Americans. Sometimes I think that we mistakenly believe that, just because a person or culture has not been permeated with the gospel, there is nothing we as Christians can learn from them. However, the truth is that all people (and thus all cultures) have been created in and contain the image of God. While they may be marred by the curse of sin, elements of that image still shine through and in some cases could even outshine that element in the lives of even a dedicated follower of Christ. My prayer is that Theresa and I can be open and humble enough to learn from them.

Pray for Theresa and I as we continue to prepare our hearts for Japan. Pray that we would be open to learning from the Japanese and would be able to quickly acclimate to the Japanese culture and lifestyle.

Well, two big changes for the Weinhofers as far as readers of our blog are concerned. First, we turned in the keys to our apartment in Lancaster on Wednesday and are now officially vagabonds. I have had to think about the writer of Hebrews’ description of Abraham:

It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land… he lived there by faith—for he was like a foreigner, living in tents. And so did Isaac and Jacob, who inherited the same promise. (Hebrews 11:8-9 NLT)

However, the second thing – the good news – is that the time I am going to save from having to clean-up after Colby around the house (check out – http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6452) will hopefully mean I will have time to start writing regularly in our blog after a long hiatus. Along with each post, we will be listing a prayer request so you can follow along with what’s happening with our ministry. Look for it at the bottom of each post.

Pray for Colby & I this week as we spend time with my family. Pray that it will be a restful and refreshing time for us and a good time to connect with people from Maine before we head over to Japan.