Month: August 2008

Support has been coming in a little slow the last few months, so I’m looking for new people to contact and talk to, in order to see if they would interested in joining my team, partnering together to reach the Japanese. This is where you can be of help. If you could do one of these two things, that would help me immensely, and even more important, you’d be taking part in missions – God’s plan to reach the world for Christ. So here’s the two ways you can help:

1. Send me the name, address and phone number of who I should contact at your church to see if they would be willing to support me or allow me to come speak sometime.

2. If you are involved with a small group or Bible study, arrange to have me come talk for a little bit about Japan, and the needs over there, at one of your meetings.

#1 is easy. #2 is a little more difficult, especially for those of you who haven’t met me in person. To that end I’d love to get the chance to meet with any of you in person prior to coming to talk at your Bible study, just drop me a line. And for those of you who are out of the area, and would still like to help in this regard, let me know, it may take some planning, but if I can line up a few other opportunities to meet people in your area I could make a special trip out of it.

This is something I can’t do on my own. God will have to do it for me, and I fully believe that His favorite method of supplying is through His people. I see this as an exciting opportunity to partner with you and your church to impact people thousands of miles away with the Gospel of Christ, and that this is precisely what God wants to happen.

Also, please pray for me. Pray that God would give me the perseverance and diligence to keep pressing on, and pray that He would provide many more people willing to partner with me to spread the gospel throughout Japan. And that’s really what this is all about. Finally, please be praying for the churches I will be contacting in the near future, that God will both provide for them to the extent that they will be able to participate in sending missionaries to other countries, and that God will move in the hearts of their leadership and members to send me to Japan.

Hi everyone, this is Tomo in Tokyo!

Here’s some cultural stuff!

Last weekend, the Shinto shrine in my neighborhood had a summer festival or Omatsuri.

I woke up to the sound of Ohayashi (Omatsuri music with little drums, flutes, and some bells) on Friday and I could hear the Ohayashi all through the weekend.

This festival marks the end of summer, and people give thanks to the gods for safety over the summer and pray for a rich harvest in the fall to come, or they used to. Now people don’t even think about harvest, maybe just a few hardcore people.

Every Shinto shrine has its own tradition of this end-of-summer festival and some get pretty spectacular. Like Gion-matsuri in Kyoto or Nebuta-matsuri in Aomori. You could check them out if you’re interested. 

The shrine in my town throws just an ordinary Omatsuri,

with carrying around of Omikoshi (shrine replica) (below),

(These men are not wearing short skirts, just in case you were wondering. These are jackets. Technically they’re wearing a jacket and an underwear called fundoshi, and no pants. Fundoshi is similar to what Sumo wrestlers wear, with their butts showing and all. These guys are totally allowed to walk around with their butts exposed in public during the festival. It’s ok, it’s cultural.)

and many vendors that sell food and toys and stuff.

 

My Christian parents used to not let me go to these festivals when I was a child and I remember really wanting to go. So now that I’m allowed to, I love going to these festivals. It’s like trying to catch up on all the fun I missed out on. 

My parents had good reasons to do that though. It’s not only a Shinto event, but it’s also an important source of income for the yakuza‘s, the Japanese mafia or gangs. So whatever you buy at the festival, it basically helps the shrine and the mafia. 

I guess it’s one of the examples of Japanese Christians’ cultural dilemma.

That’s all for now. 

Jaane 🙂

One of the things God has been showing me lately is  how necessary a strong spiritual foundation is to serving Him in any capacity. It’s like I keep trying to isolate church, and prayer and Bible reading, and work, and support raising each into their own individual environments.I have a tendency to try to live as if one thing doesn’t have an impact on another, as if I can skip prayer and devotion and still be able to raise support, or be useful in the church. But I’m begining to see is that if I sleep in and miss my devotions, or if I slack off at work, or if I tune out dad’s message at church on Sunday, or ignore my responsibilities in support raising, or put together a half hearted message for youth group on Thursday nights, or skate by in any one area of my life, everything else suffers as well.

It’s all or nothing. Either I am living for Christ, in the word, serving Him boldly, faithfully and diligently, or I’m just barely getting by. I’m either soaring or crashing. And though it’s a struggle to get into the right mindset, and to get into actively striving to follow Christ, once I do, that’s when I start to see God work, and that joy and excitement can keep me where God wants me to be. This sort of all came together for me the other day when I was reading through John, and came to the part where Christ said:

 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

As I read this, I was considering the problem of raising support, as I have found myself doing more and more lately. I like to plan out strategies, make plans, and try to follow through. I like to work it out on my own, and pray, hoping that God will bless my efforts. The solution however wasn’t in my plans. The solution was to abide in Chirst, and let His word abide in me, then He promised to do whatever I asked. And I have been, and still am asking that He bring in the support I need to serve Him in Japan. I alwas figured it wasn’t an unreasonable request, I want to go serve God overseas, but I can’t till I raise the support. But that’s a secondary issue. The real issue is that I can’ t be a missionary and serve God if I’m not abiding in Christ. I could win the lottery and move to Japan, but I wouldn’t be any sort of a missionary if I wasn’t abiding in Christ. If I wasn’t trusting Him, and striving to follow His example, and studying His words, and living them out, I wouldn’t be of any use on the mission field. 

So maybe, just maybe, the reason I’m still here, and not there, is so that I can learn to abide in Christ. So that I can learn to abide in Christ by doing my devotions every single morning of every single day. So that I can learn to abide in Christ as I strive to work hard and diligently at the Jesus Film Project, 8:30AM to 5:00PM  Monday through Friday. So that I can learn to abide in Christ in while preparing and teaching lessons, and disciping high school students on Thursday nights, and abide in Christ by fellowshipping with people at Church on Sundays, so that I can learn to abide in Christ every second of every day in every activity, so that when I get to Japan, and face the toughest challenges and most demanding hardships I have ever faced, I will do so not trusting in myself, or relying on my own skills or abilities, but that I will do so abiding in my Savior, who has already conquered the world, and has made me more than a conqueror with Him. Praise God that He doesn’t send me off to Japan without preparing me.

For the LORD God is a sun and shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.
Psalms 84:11

This is Tomo and I have some missions updates from Tokyo!

Last weekend, I worked at a Jr. & Sr. High English camp at a Christian retreat center in West Tokyo called Okutama Bible Chalet (OBC).  OBC was built in 1960 by SEND International and has been used as a Christian retreat center ever since. Every summer, OBC hosts many camp programs. This year, there were some 13 camps, most of which were for children.  I’ve been going to OBC every summer to work as a counselor and this was my fourth year. There were 27 kids, most of them Jr. High kids (13 to 15 years old) and a couple Sr. High kids (16 to 18). There were 8 boys and 19 girls. 

We had many fun programs such as English classes,

chapel time,

 

skit night,

and games.

We also had rafting, one of OBC’s most popular activities,

cooking class,

campfire,

smores,

pool, craft, and so on.  This year’s Jr. & Sr. High English Camp was a rather challenging one, because we had one girl on a wheelchair, and her twin sister who also had some kind of disability. Then on the day before the camp started, the camp staff were told that one boy from Taiwan was coming. When all the campers arrived at OBC, we learned that the boy only understood Mandarin Chinese. However, as it turned out, God sent as counselors a pastor’s wife who used to be a nurse who was able to help the girl on the wheelchair, and a girl from Hong Kong who spoke both English and Mandarin, who was able to help the boy from Taiwan. It was pretty amazing to see how God provided for the needs of the campers, even ones that us staff didn’t really expected.  

What was really exciting was that there were many non-Christian kids as well as some Christian kids. On the questionnaire that the campers filled out on the last day, 8 kids checked on “I want to accept Jesus as my savior”. One boy was very open about it and said so during cabin time, and one of the counselors was able to pray with him and tell him a little bit about what it meant to be a Christian. Non-Christian kids in Japan know very little about Christianity or Christians, and a lot of follow-up is needed for them to know more about it and gradually find a church they can regularly attend.

Please pray that those kids who came to OBC this summer will continue to be interested in the Gospel, and will be able to come back next summer.

Jaane 🙂

Hey, this is Tomo again. 

My church had VBS last week.

It was a five-day program and it was a pretty good turn-out.

We had many kids from the neighborhood. Most of them were not church kids. Some of them were first-comers and there were some familiar faces too. We had English songs, games, Bible stories, English lessons, snack, and craft time. And we had hot dogs for lunch on the last day after the program was over.

Here’s a group picture! This was the picture with most kids. I like how half the kids are not really looking at the camera.

And here is a picture of one church kid (on the right) and his little friends at preschool showing their Daniel in a Lion’s Den craft.

I helped 4 days and I had a great time working with kids because kids are so much fun!! 🙂

We’ve been having for the past about 10 years what we call “summer workers”, which was originally students on a missions trip from the Master’s college in southern California. David was one of them. A couple years ago the college stopped sending a team to work with my church, but some graduates are enthusiastic enough about the ministry to come back at their own expenses to help out. This year we had four guys who had come before as “summer workers” helping out with VBS. It has been extremely helpful since the VBS has been focusing on English lessons, which attract young mothers who want their kids to learn English. There are in fact many people in Japan who are very eager to learn English.

Here’s a picture of Tony and Frank doing English lessons for 2-year-olds. Outreach programs for kids like VBS is very good because we can also reach out for mothers.

It was a busy week for me with VBS in the morning and work in the afternoon (I work part-time at a preschool.) but I had lots of fun and most importantly, more kids and moms in the neighborhood were able to come to church and hear about God. A lot of Japanese non-Christians that I’ve talked to said that they don’t want to go to church because they feel intimidated. Many people seem to think they need to be really good people to be able to go to church. There’s a Japanese expression that literally translates into English as “threshold is high”, which is an expression to describe a place that is intimidating for certain reasons. For many Japanese people, church’s threshold is high. Programs like this might help to lower the threshold.

So it was a really great week! Oh and I put up some more pictures from VBS so I hope you can check them out!

And I hope you’ll have a great week too!

Jaane 🙂