journeys

It is officially 25th December right now in Japan. MERRY CHRISTMAS! Christmas is the season to remember the birth of our saviour Jesus Christ. He is no ordinary baby. He is Immanuel, God with us. Amidst all the celebration and parties, are we sharing this wonderful news to our loved ones?

I would like to end off this year by sharing an amazing encounter with you.

A mission team from Australia, Mission Megumi, came to Nagoya for a month from 17 Nov – 21 Dec. During that time, 2 members of the team, Joellen and Naomi tagged along with me to campus. Through them, I got to know a Nanzan freshman named Yuka (see picture).

Yuka’s father is a Singaporean Chinese and her mother is a Japanese. She moved back to Japan since she was four and has been in Nagoya ever since. Here comes the interesting part. She excitedly showed me a picture of her extended family and I found my primary school teacher among her aunts! And even though there is a 10-year age difference between us, somehow (by God’s grace I believe) we clicked really well and we hung out together a lot and also talked about many different topics.

On Naomi’s final day on campus, she shared a little about Jesus and her personal testimony with Yuka and challenged her for evangelistic Bible study (Christianity Explained). I did the first session with her last week. She reads a lot and thinks quite deeply too. She believes in the existence of God and wants to find out if Jesus is that God she believes in. I immediately thought of the people in Athens Paul reasoned with. Please continue to pray for her and the remaining 5 sessions of CE I have with her.

Enjoy the final week of 2011!!

Thank you for praying. I have successfully completed and graduated from my Japanese language course! As of October 1, I have officially started campus ministry.

Farewells
On 7 October, we bade farewell to our dear Singaporean staff in Nagoya. Pamela, who has served faithfully for 6 years and the STINT team, Adam, Xiaojun, Bixia and Esther who served for a year. Thank God for their great work and their faithfulness. Please pray for Esther. She has decided to extend her stay in Nagoya for another year and is now in Singapore for a month to raise the money she needs for this coming year.

(From left: Adam, Xiaojun, Bixia, Pamela, Esther)

Staff retreat
Immediately after sending the 6 staff off, the rest of us proceeded on to have our staff retreat. We spent the time getting to know each other better and had a training on “assertiveness”, conducted by a church friend, Naomi (2nd row middle). Besides the staff and the children, our 3 student leaders, Hikari (last row 2nd from left), Keiko (3rd row 1st from right) and Kumiko (2nd row 1st from right) joined us too.

The assertiveness training isn’t about demanding our opinions to be heard or carried out. It is about being truthful and clear in communicating our feelings and opinions in an open and honest manner that is inoffensive and non-aggressive. Through the training I realised that being assertive isn’t part of the general Japanese culture and perhaps Asian culture too. We tend to be passive (don’t say anything but just fume inside) or be passive-aggressive (keep dropping hints and hope someone gets it). Neither of them help in having healthy communication and building a healthy team relationship.

Welcomes
From fall semester, we have included our 3 student leaders in our staff team meetings. They will join us for prayer and be involved in some of our discussions. This is our first step in getting students involved directly with planning so that we can move towards a student-led movement in the campuses here.

This week on Wednesday, we also had our first believer from Kinjo! Deng Rong is an exchange student from China and is a friend of another exchange student in our ministry. Listening to her made me realise how God had been working in her life and preparing her for that moment on Wednesday to finally trust Him. Her mother attends church and prays for her with her. She has been reading the Bible and attended church a little since coming to Nagoya last month. Finally she approached me and asked whether she is a Christian or not and how to tell if she is one. Pray for her faith to take root firmly in her heart and that she will mature as much as she can before she returns to China in a year’s time.

At Nanzan, I am meeting with Aya, a 3rd year student who transferred to Nanzan in spring this year after spending a year in America. She is a 2nd-generation Christian. Pray that as we meet for Bible study, she will be sure of her faith and have a heart for her friends and school.

I have also been meeting many new students in both Kinjo and Nanzan. Please pray that I will be able to meet them again over the next few weeks and have a chance to either share the gospel or challenge to join me to explore Christianity through a material called “Christianity Explained”.

Reminded through an email that I haven’t been posting updates. My apologies! Many things have happened in the past month.

1. We have been seeing several students praying to receive Christ since April at Gaidai (Nagoya University of Foreign Studies)! Hallelujah! So far all girls. Please pray for their growth because it is easy for baby Christians here to be swayed and fall away. Pray for proper follow up and good understanding of Christianity. They would have gone through or are going through a Bible study series called “Christianity Explained”, which is meant for seekers and brand new believers.
There was also finally a new believer from Nanzan University! For the past 2 years there has only been one known girl Christian. Through her contact, the Nanzan staff team got to know her friends from her cooking club. They had a fun party over food.

2. Thank God for the wonderful social network called Facebook. Through it, I got reconnected with a Nanzan student I met during my mission trip in 2008. We haven’t met up yet because she is not in Nagoya at the moment (lives in a neighbouring city) but we have promised to meet up when she is in Nagoya. She is a Shanghainese whose father is working in Japan and so she is studying here. Pray that we can pick up from where we left off in 2008.

3. I have settled down in a church here – Nagoya Glorious Chapel. This was the church I attended during my mission trip in 2008 and I liked it then. Still like it now. Prayed about it and had peace from God to stay on. Plus point: it is near my apartment. Through church, I got to know a Taiwanese post-graduate student. She is studying at Meijo University, which is somewhere in between my apartment and church. She is a new believer. She starting attending church only 2-3 months ago in Japan. She asked me if I could help to explain some of the Christian and Bible terms because she has a little difficulty following the explanations in Japanese. Pray that we will be able to set aside time for this. Pray for me to have wisdom too because I will need to learn the terms in Chinese first. We will be meeting for dinner this coming Friday. Pray that we can “click” well and build a good friendship.

4. I will be finishing the first term of my language school in about 3 weeks’ time. Then I will have a one-week break before starting my second and final term. Thank God for seeing me through so far. There has been a lot of homework to do and many new grammar rules and vocabulary to learn. My brain is getting a little rusty for all this cramming.
Thank God for the friendships made with some of my classmates – Yamin (Myanmar), Emi (Thailand), Dai Leshu, Shi Hongxun and Sun Xiaoyin (China). Out of these 5, only Hongxun and Xiaoyin are continuing the next level with me. Pray that I can get more chances to hang out with them outside of class (they are so busy! always having part-time jobs). The other 3 are housewives, so their ages are closer to mine, but they aren’t continuing with school. Pray that we can still meet up and continue our friendship
after school has ended. They know that I am a Christian and that I’m working for a Christian organization. Pray too for opportunities to share the gospel with them. Right now, everyone is just focused on getting done with school so that’s a little hard. But, we might go out to a beach nearby during our one-week break. Hopefully that works out.

Many apologies for the lack of updates. Setting up my internet has been a very trying process. Just to say the least.

Easter is the day to remember the victory that Jesus won over sin and death and the prince of darkness. The reason life is worth living is purely because Jesus is our risen saviour.

“Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because He lives, all fear is gone.
Because I know, I know, He holds the future.
And life is worth the living just because He lives.”

I sang this song during worship in church today. Simple yet profound lyrics. Speaks volumes of the hope we have in Jesus. This is my first Easter in Japan and it is very quiet compared to Singapore. One reason could be that Good Friday is not a public holiday. Perhaps because of that, very few people are aware of it. In church, Easter isn’t as huge an event as I remember it back home. Perhaps it is due to the smallness of the church. I am not very sure.

Keep praying for the Japanese during this difficult time. Pray that
the hope of life in Christ will reach their hearts and turn them to God.