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New Year!
We can hardly believe we have been here for 6 months! The time is going so fast and our days are full of excitement and praise! The last few months have been packed with Christmas and community events at church, school, and reaching out to our neighborhood. During the holiday season, we enjoyed celebrating Jesus’ birth and volunteering on many outreaches!
Komyo Church: At Komyo, we had a very busy month of outreach. We visited the nursing home to sing carols and made origami Christmas trees, we put together “Operation Christmas Child” shoe boxes to send to the children in the Philippines, we hosted a Gospel Cafe concert, we had a Christmas movie night, and we enjoyed a fun card making party! On Christmas Eve, we had a wonderful packed house for the candlelight service. The children dressed up in nativity costumes and sang. On Christmas day, we had a birthday party for Jesus, complete with a Japanese Christmas cake, balloons, party hats, and a song with puppets! Then the children handed out handmade crafts they had been working on all month in children’s church. We really had a blessed Christmas; the church treated our children as if they were their grandkids. We were humbled by the outpouring of love to our family. They made our first Christmas away from home so wonderful. We are thankful for all God is doing at the church! We have many new volunteers in the children’s ministry and members stepping up to use their gifts! Two sisters asked if they could perform a hula dance between services…, which then became an impromptu mini talent show! Everyone was jumping in, singing and sharing their talents! Ken has been having a wonderful time teaching his English classes and Bible Study during the week. He has enjoyed great conversations about the Lord and had several opportunities to pray with the students. He has also been busy outside of the class hanging out building relationships with the men.
KCS School: The children love their school! Their classes volunteered at the senior activity center next to our home. They also put on a wonderful Christmas play and we were able to invite our neighbors. We have been busy having playdates with the kid’s classmates and have been invited over to several families’ homes! It has been wonderful to get to know the parents and share about the Lord. Rachelle has been busy with the PTA the last few months. They provided food following the Christmas play, they prepared a curry lunch for all the students, and they have started a once a month prayer meeting at the school. We are thankful for all God is doing!
Our Neighborhood: We have had the best time getting to know our sweet neighbors! Our neighbor, Mr. Sano, plays catch and darts with our children in the yard, and he surprised us by putting up Christmas lights (which are very expensive here)! We invited him and his wife to spend Christmas evening with us. He told us it was his 84th birthday, so we had an impromptu birthday party for him (we had just returned from church with all the Happy Birthday Jesus stuff, so we were ready)! We ate, gave them gifts, and played “pie in the face”! They were so curious about how we celebrate Christmas and kept taking pictures of all our decorations. Their daughter, who lives in France, later told us that it meant so much to them to be invited over. We have also attended several neighborhood festivals/ events like “mochi tsuki taikai” a mochi pounding event, and a memorial candle lighting ceremony to remember those who lost their lives from the Hanshin earthquake. We have met so many new friends at these events and have enjoyed many playdates and many more planned in the coming weeks! One funny story was when one of our neighbors asked Ken to go on a bike ride, but when he showed up, he was decked out in head to toe biking gear…little did we know he used to be a professional cyclist 🙂 Life is full of surprises here! 🙂
Our Family: We are all healthy and the children are adjusting very quickly to life in Japan! We are looking into putting our children in an extracurricular activity to help them learn Japanese and meet more families in the ar
ea. Lily will be starting preschool next month. She will attend a couple days a week in hopes that she will learn Japanese and make friends. We have been blessed to live close to Ken’s sister and enjoyed celebrating the holidays with his side of the family for the first time ever! We have also been able to meet up with several friends from Japanese ministry we’ve done in the past. Ken led Kuzuma to the Lord 12 years ago when he was a foreign exchange student in Iowa, and now he is serving the Lord as a chef at “Kickback Cafe” in Tokyo! We were so thankful he stopped by for a visit! We were also able to visit our dear friends Akira and Soichi. They have a church, coffee shop, and bookstore in Osaka. We met them in 2000 when Rachelle did her YWAM DTS outreach in Osaka where Soichi was her Japanese leader. At the same time, Akira met Ken at Christ for the Nations, and we have all been friends ever since. It has been wonderful to reconnect with past ministry friends here in Japan!
Our time has been so full and God is doing so much! Thank you for your prayers and support; we would not be here without all of you! Please keep us and Japan in your prayers!!
Love, Ken, Rachelle, Fuschia, Azalia, Judah, & Lily