Category Archives: Prayer

Coming up…

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It has just become the last day of 2011 here in Japan, in 24 hours it will be a whole new year. This past year has seen a lot of new things for Emily and I: a trip to Okinawa, a new pastor at the church we work at, the birth of our beautiful daughter Anna… We have had a lot of challenges and new things to learn, a lot of things to give thanks for, and others to continue to pray towards.

These past years have been years marked with change for us, 2008 I came to Japan, 2009 Emily moved up to Hokkaido and we got engaged, in 2010 we married and moved to Oasa, then in 2011 we welcomed little Anna into our family. 2012 looks like it will continue the trend as we prepare to head back to the UK in the spring time (with a estimated date of 1st of May).  Our return to the UK has a few purposes, first of all Emily can spend some time learning about and experiencing the culture that has influenced and shaped my development, also she will be able to study English and gain some experience in using it in day to day life! We hope to return to Japan with OMF in the future and English is a requirement as it is OMF’s internal language. We also need time to process Emily’s entry into OMF and hopefully gain a permanent residence visa for her to ease transition back and forth in the future.

But we hope it will also be a time of personal development for us. Emily will experience life and faith in another culture and I learn to be patient with her and help her as she has with me here in Japan! We hope that God will provide a place for me to work that will help me to develop for future ministry in Japan as well as provide for our family while we are in the UK. Whether that is towards the IT skills side, or more focussed on traditional ministry (or both?!) is to be seen. We also will be spending a lot of time sharing about Japan and the work God has for us to do here. We will both need to learn to trust Him to provide anew as we step into the next stage of our journey.

As we move forward into 2012 we are just at the beginning of this, we are beginning to become active in gathering the documents we will need for Emily’s visa application, thinking about timings as some of those may overlap with original documents needed for Anna’s UK passport application, and for my re-entry permit to Japan… We will need to get used to the seemingly endless streamers of red tape if we are to survive the coming years!

Maybe 2013 will be a little more settled…

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English anyone?

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It’s not really a big secret that I didn’t really want to teach English when I came to Japan.  I told myself English teaching was really not helping to sever the damaging link between Christianity and the “west”, that it wasn’t a viable reproducible way for Japanese churches to work, that I wasn’t qualified to teach English and couldn’t really deliver on the promise of improving your English that English classes or lessons automatically bring with them…

But really, as I shared at JLC a while ago, my problem was partly that I am not an English teacher.   The reason people want me to teach English is simply because I can speak it (apparently!) and I was born in an English speaking country, and I look like I was born in an English speaking country.
But a bigger part was just pride – I didn’t like that the most valuable thing a lot of people recognised in me was something so coincidental.  There are millions of people born in English speaking countries and any one of them could do English classes as well as I could, if not considerably better.  And what about the years I spent at school and university, learning how to program, develop software, work with databases, troubleshoot IT issues etc…  Isn’t that something not everyone can do?  Shouldn’t I do that while someone who knows how to teach English teaches it?

But the fact is the English is not the most important part.  I am a foreigner in Japan, I stick out and am noticed everyone assumes that foreigners speak English.  So that is what they come and look for when they see me.  I’m not wearing a sign that says “Bachelor of Engineering” or “Master of Divinity” or even “Tries to play the saxophone”, but I am wearing a face that says, or at least people assume it says “I speak English!”  And so that is what I can use.

So, in the spirit of swallowing my pride and using the tools that God has given to me, we (Emily and I) are running a kid’s English “club” (I still am reluctant to make the “class” promise that says you can learn anything from me!) and helping mums and kids from the church meet other mums and kids in the area, going to the English Speakers Group at the local university as a kind of living example of how to pronounce things (like towel, or eight… ha!) and inviting them to our apartment for pizza, or taking them to the Hokkaido Centre for one of FM Zero’s international nights

But basically what I have found is that there is no reason not to use the English card where it is appropriate.  It isn’t taking away from other opportunities, I can still speak Japanese with the people I meet when we aren’t studying, I am really enjoying my weekly IT time and cleaning up the office systems here, and also thinking about some exciting ideas with our RD about how to use IT to help smaller churches without pastors to worship each Sunday.

About the only thing that I am dreading at the moment is JLPT N2 in December, and the practice in November!!

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Graduation, wedding, celebration, honeymoon….

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A lot has happened since I last wrote something of any length on here…

In July I graduated from OMF’s Japanese Language Centre!  This means I have finished their course and they need space for new people…  Well not exactly, I also wanted, if possible, to graduate before I got married so all the aspects of new life could start together.  I am not sure if this was a good idea or not though!!  But it has all worked out well so far!  Technically then I have been working at Oasa Church and doing IT work for OMF since my graduation, but things have been so turbulent with moving apartment, getting married and so on that it is all only really settling down now!

That’s right!  I’ve moved apartment!  Now I am out in Oasa rather than in Sapporo City itself.  Oasa town falls within Ebetsu City, which is the next city to the east of Sapporo.  It is a bit more country side than where I was before, which was much more semi-suburban city-ish!  But it seems like a nice place to live, we are very close to the church we will work at (as opposed to taking two trains and an hour like before) and a fellow missionary who has gone on a 7 month-or-so home assignment has lent us their car for the winter, so it is all pretty convenient!  at least at the moment!

You probably noticed the other bit of news in the paragraphs above there.  Emily and I finally got married on the 21st of August 2010!  We had the ceremony in Sapporo Fukuinkan church in Sapporo city, it was a great day with a lot of friends and family to share it with!
Then we went down to Ibaraki on the 22nd and had a good old (Japanese style) barbecue with those of Emily’s family and friends there who couldn’t make it up to Sapporo.
Then we headed for Northern Ireland where we had another great night with everyone in First Antrim on Friday the 27th!  It was great to be home and see everyone again!!

After the do in First we finally got some time to ourselves and went up to stay in Portstewart on the north coast!  Not the most exotic place to go you might think, but for me it was very relaxing and a great way to spend a few days and for Emily it was a pretty out of the normal holiday (half way around the world from her home!).  And it is hard to beat the north coast really!!

We left Northern Ireland, spent a evening and a night in Dublin and flew back to Japan, got back on Saturday at 10pm Japan time…!  Time to sort out the flat and get everything organised.  Lots of legal bumph to get addresses and names changed and all that kind of stuff to do as well!

So that’s a bit of a summary, spurred on by 5am jetlag wide awakeness!  Once we get the apartment sorted out and all the stuff done we need to get past this week, hopefully there will be some photos and more info for those who are interested!

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Summer Holidays – Week 2 – Aomori

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Over the past weeks I have had a lot of things I wanted to blog about, I thought there and then, “This would make a good blog post!” however, I usually forget to blog about them.  Which is probably for the best as often things that I think will make a good blog post turn dull and boring when I get my typing fingers on to them!

The big news of the past few weeks however is that in the second half of my holidays, for which Emiri and I went up to Aomori on our way back to Sapporo, we got engaged!  After three years of getting to know each other and ultimately seeking God’s guidance, it was finally the right time.  I had hoped to propose to Emiri on her birthday, but as it landed on a Sunday and we were back in Aomori, Emiri had been really looking forward to going to the various church services she had been part of for years, and helping out at as she spent her last months in Itayanagi helping out at the church there.  So my plans were postponed til Monday, maybe we could go to the seaside and find a nice quiet spot on a beach…  maybe we could have if the heavens hadn’t opened and poured all day!  We ended up going to see a (mediocre) movie, but having a very nice dinner at a shabu-shabu restaurant in Hirosaki.
In Japan the traditions before getting engaged are a bit different to the UK, so when I went to talk to Emiri’s father about the whole thing the week before in Ibaraki, he was extremely helpful and understanding.  At the end of the day I think our approach ended up somewhere lost between the UK and Japan, but regardless of cultural affects we were both aiming to arrive at a place where we were both clear as to what was happening and had expressed any thoughts and asked any questions.  The four of us (Emiri’s parents, Emiri and I) ended up sitting down and having a good talk about the future and how things would pan out etc.  From my current understanding , in Japan usually the guy proposes and then together the pair seek approval from parents (on both sides…This is all a bit complicated and would take a bit to explain here, so I won’t bother…)
Anyways, upshot of all that is we are engaged!

So here are some photos of our time in Aomori, and I will post some on Flickr for all the folk behind the great firewall who can’t see the picasa ones!

Summer ’09 in Aomori
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Small groups…

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Marky wrote about small groups on his blog recently (Voiced Thoughts in the Blogroll list on the right).  My own experience of small groups varies from church groups like the group Mark was writing about, but I think the period that small groups affected my life the most was while I was an undergraduate at university…

My experience of small groups at uni was a little more wide ranging than most perhaps.  I was living in Queen’s Elms in first year so I went to Halls Group that year, the next year I helped out leading the group, so I was in it a second year.  At first I went to an English dept small group because I had friends there and they were encouraging me to go along to a small group aside from the halls one…  But I switched over to the Engineering group in the Ashby a little later.  It was through the engineering group that I met Mark who spoke at my commissioning, Budgie who commented on the last post there and a whole bunch of other folk.  But there’s more!  Between second and third year in my degree it was required to take a year of professional experience.  This interupted small group attendance for most, but Ben (Later of SU Presidential fame) lead a small group for those on their year out working.  It was all guys, but we had an awesome year, heightened by the lack of CU attendance and department groups and so on due to work, meeting later than normal and discussing how things were relevant to working life rather than student life was probably one of the most benefitial years I had in small groups…  Then more recently, while I was at Union I attended a small group at my home church, this was very different to the previous groups as people were from all kinds of backgrounds; nurses, drivers, designers, programmer-cum-theologians, missionaries to the Philippines…  And again it was great!

So now I am pining for small groups!  There is a reason for this though…
Irene approached me a while ago asking if I’d be willing to partner up with a small group from Queen’s University, the small groups were going to partner with missionaries and pray for them etc through the year.  So tonight I went and met the group who got (landed with) me!  The group is Steve and Sam’s medical small group (as in medical students) and is part of the CU at Queens.  The meeting tonight was great, there was, of course, a time of bible study, time to spend together and chat (with unpaid for coffee…), time for prayer and all in the kind of relaxed attitude I remember of small groups!  It’s a time when bible study mingles with banter, when fellowship mingles with accountibility, when prayer mingles with honest concern and love for those you are praying with.  It is an excellent small group with great members, pulling together Christians and making it a quality time.  It’s great to have been able to meet them, and it’s great to know they will be partnering with me in prayer as I head off.  Thanks guys!

So yeah, now I’m pining for small group ministry.  I can’t wait to see what God will make me part of out in Japan! :-)

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