I would like to introduce you two friends of mine! This is Isamu (whose name means he is brave)

and this is Tetsuya (whose name means he is wise)

I think you can pick who they are by their being Japanese :D
I first met both of these great guys in my first week on campus – what was meant to be a prayer walk with our Christian contacts on campus turned into a lunch as Isamu brought some of his non-Christian friends along. Sigh. But no! Not many of our contacts turned up anyway! So we had a great opening with Isamu’s friends! I spent the lunch getting to know him and Tetsuya.

Now Isamu, I should mention, was an amazing contact to have! Not only a faithful Christian who wanted to help us, but he knew EVERYONE! We would meet some new contacts: “Oh, this is Isamu, do you know him?” “Of course!”. He really helped us get linked in with the campus! He was very proactive in introducing us to Tetsuya – I believe he’d been praying for about a week for that particular meeting :D

A day or two passed, and somewhere in NGU’s daily 5 hour lunch, Isamu and Tetsuya joined as I started to clean my wallet. What was making it fat? A Knowing God Personally tract! What did Tetsuya take interest in as it was casually thrown in his direction? He couldn’t read it, but I had a Japanese one too, so I let Isamu go through it with him. He was amazed! He took the tract with him.

A few days later… TETSUYA! He was really going well, and I asked if he wanted a copy of Manga Messiah – yep! A version of the Gospel in Manga (Japanese comic) form! Man was that boy excited to learn about Jesus! He read the Manga Messiah that night and everytime I saw him he seemed to have the Knowing God Personally booklet just on hand, and usually the comic too:

“Hey Tetsuya! How are you?”

“I’m great Dave!”

“Been able to read that book I gave you?”

“Oh yah! Was really interesting! Here it is here!”

We asked him if he’d be interested in learning more about this Jesus character…

So we did lessons 1-3 of the infamous Exploring Christianity course in 1 week! 1 week! That’s 300% faster than standard! (and 10,000,000% faster than lamzorz who forget to turn up ;-) Always, Tetsuya would be saying “sugei!” (amazing) when he understood concepts! (last sentence phrased in the way I sometimes spoke English to clarify :-) Of course Isamu was helping as much as he possibly could (and that’s not a small amount!) Many biblical concepts were illuminated to Tetsuya via Isamu’s strong knowledge of the bible and translation power :D He was just as excited to be sharing his faith in this way as Tetsuya was to be learning!

Tetsuya was absolutely blown away by lesson two on Forgiveness, and, in lesson three (on the resurrection of Christ (first) and the dead (later) and Judgement), when asked (George – my supervising STInter – prompted this earlier in the day) if he wanted to become Christian, his response can be summarised as “Hiaku pasentto!” – one hundred percent! I couldn’t believe it! So much so that I got Isamu to clarify that Tetsuya knew what he was doing :D – he really did!

So Isamu is much more capable and sensitive in the way he shares his faith, and Tetsuya has hold of eternal life and relationship with God and is growing, with Isamu teaching him :) I’m so thankful to God that I got to be used in this. He is far too good!

Please pray for both Isamu – that he’ll continue to learn how to be a complete Christian, and Tetsuya – that he’ll stay firm and growing in the faith! And thank God that he brought Tetsuya to himself, and thank God that Isamu knows a lot more about how to share his faith! Thank God that we could all meet each other.

Signing off

Dave Prabhakar