Archive for November, 2009

My poor frisbee

This last weekend marked the end of our first week in Japan; time is going by pretty quickly! My first visit to campus was on Wednesday, where I began to acquaint myself with the layout. At Gaidai, I met several of the Christian students on campus. Gaidai has seen several students come to know Christ over the past month or so, so it was very exciting to meet quite a few students at the lunch we had.

Most of the time on campus is spent meeting and talking to students, trying to build relationships, and develop community that reflects the love of Christ. One of the ways that I have tried to do this, is to find people who are interested in playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee. This is played every week at Griffith university, and I think it’s a great way to connect people, and to have fun, so I brought a frisbee with me from Australia, with the intention to try and play in Japan.

Friday saw the first attempt at frisbee, and quite possibly the last for my poor frisbee. We didn’t have enough people to play a game of Ultimate Frisbee, so we just threw around the frisbee on campus. It turns out that plastic frisbees weren’t designed to hit tables, rocks, poles, concrete, and walls. Hopefully with my tape-covered frisbee, we can try and have an actual game of Ultimate next week.

Sharing faith with the students on campus is a little different to Australia, but many of the Japanese students like the idea of Christianity, and want to have a belief in God, but if you ask them how they can, they don’t know. On Friday evening, one of the girls at university prayed to receive Christ, and we were very excited to welcome her into the Family of Christ, and to know that she has placed her trust in the love of God, and the sacrifice He made for us.

My first week in Nagoya has definitely been a lesson of walking in faith.

Living in Japan as opposed to holidaying in Japan has meant that I have had to learn and adapt quickly to the culture. Although we had cross-cultural training, it only prepared me to a certain degree.

Traveling to places has been somewhat of an adventure, missing a few turns, asking people for directions and  trying to  read a Japanese map. However, we eventually managed to find our way to  the important places that we had to go, e.g Train stations and the university.

I also managed to digest my first  sashimi ( for those who know me- I don’t do raw food). But  one thing , I will never be able to eat is a nato, it was soooo feral, tasted like phlegm/snot/saliva.

Traveling to a foreign land and trying to find my way to places and trying foreign food, definitely took a lot of faith but my biggest faith lesson would be doing ministry with the Japanese. Doing walk up ministries and evangelising to people who I don’t know, in a foreign country where language us a barrier from both sides has been challenging.

However, God has been good and has directed and guided me this week.  He has provided me opportunities for me to meet people and provided me the wisdom to talk and connect with the Japanese Christians and the non-Christians.

Despite the challenge, I know I can trust God in all this and submit to his soverignity, knowing he knows best and to simply walk with him as Abraham did when he went to a foreign land.

Yesterday, after a long flight from Sydney, we arrived in Nagoya, Japan, at 7.50am. This is a photo of our very tired team straight off the plane!

The first lesson we had to learn was how the trains work, and the system of getting onto, and off of, a train without offending the locals. Which of course, we did, by not lining up where we were meant to, and talking too loud. But the power of being gaijin (foreigners) helped us get away with it.

We settled into our apartments, but not before breaking another rule – shoes off before entering the room! The three Aussie STINTers (short-term missionaries) explained to us a few rules, and in particular the crazy rubbish system, of different coloured bags, with many categories, that needed to be not only sorted, but cleaned.

To explore the local area, we went on a “scavenger hunt” to learn to read our Japanese maps, and find the vital locations (like groceries and McDonalds – where we had our first dinner in Japan).

After much needed rest, today we will be looking at orientation into ministry on campus in Nagoya. We hope that through this, it will help to encourage, equip, and prepare us for ministering to the Japanese students we will be meeting over the next four weeks.

Please join us in prayer for:

• guidance for our team dynamics and that God will grow our heart for us to love and serve each other, and Christ, so that He might be glorified.
• the Japanese students that God would open their hearts and minds to know Him.
• our overall team vision of seeing 6 students come to know Christ personally.

Mission Megumi has been an intense 4 week experience for everyone involved. Our vision was to bring the Japanese one step closer to God, wherever they may be with God. We accomplished that with the students that we met, however Japan is still the 2nd most unreached nation amongst 1st world countries and the ratio of missionaries and people remain at 1:2000.

Japan still need us and you can partner up with Japan in two ways, by continually praying for them. You can also support them financially as well.

Please contact Jody Kubo: kubos6owari at gmail dot com if you would like to support Japan either financially or in prayer.