Thanksgiving Dinner and Prayer Walk

This past weekend was very, very busy. Isogashi desu! Friday morning Carol and I rushed to LLI (a building shared by the NRK headquarters, a Japanese Lutheran congregation, an international congregation, and both English and Japanese Language schools where I am currently studing.) to help with the preperations for the Thanksgiving Dinner that would be later that night. The dinner is one of many examples of events that seek to link the students from the language school with members of the church and to share the gospel. Ovens are hard to come by in Japan, but Carol and I are lucky enough to have a small one. So that morning I carried our oven to the train station, on the train, and then to center. it made the hour long commute at rush hour a little more interesting! Dinner turned out really well; we had turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoe delight, cranberries, gravy, and so on. It was so good- but funny to watch the children go through the line. They were so afraid to try our american food- all they wanted was salad, bread, and turkey! After the meal though, we took them to a classroom and fed them tons of sugar and taught them how to make gramcracker sweet houses. (Just like Ginger bread houses, but with gramcracker walls.) There were over 50 people at the event (which is huge for a Japanese church), many of them unchurched students who brought their whole family!

The next day, we gathered back at LLI (also called Center) for a prayer walk with some of the other VYM missionaries at 10 am. And then, for the next 6 and a half hours we worshiped, read scripture together, and prayed for the churches that gather there, for the VYM program, for the NRK staff (equivilent to the Missouri-Synod in Japan), for a suicide counseling phone center that works out of the building, and many other things. And all I can say is that it was PURE JOY! The time flew by, and I kept thinking to myself, "why don't we do this more?" There are just so many things in life that cause us anxiety and seem so out of our control. And we spend so much time worrying about them, talking to other people about them in frustration, and expressing that frustration in other places in our life, only to hurt those we love. None of these things are constructive. But prayer is. You can't do anything, you helpless; but there's someone who can. The God who made us and loves us longs to hear our prayers- and no worry or anxiety is beyond His reach.

Thank you all so much for your prayers! Please continue to pray, and please, let me know how I can be praying for you! I love you all; and you are in my prayers! Happy Thanksgiving- I'll see many of you soon!