Our New Church Home

We are excited to be finally supporting our MTW Church-Planting Team directly, now that we've finished language school. For the next 2 years, we will be serving with "Oyumino Alive!" a new bilingual church plant of Oyumino Presbyterian Church that is only a 12 minute walk from our home.

Oyumino Alive! is using the original multi-purpose building built by our team ~15 years ago to reach young Japanese, as well as internationals in our community. This will be a great opportunity for us to get immediately involved in serving and learning in the context of a growing church plant. This will also be great experience for us since our work in college ministry will always be done to support the greater vision of church planting and church multiplication in Japan.

Here you see Olivia joining in the 9am neighborhood kids oriented Sunday school class.
Being bilingual provides constant reinforcement of our language learning, and I look forward to helping lead worship and singing in both languages (and eventually to help translate from Japanese to English during the services.)

Getting Settled(!) in our New Home

Back to living with boxes. Here poor Olivia and Annabella sit among boxes watching a DVD again, because we hadn't unpacked their toys yet! So without their usual books, puzzles, and toys, the girls found a new way to keep occupied - and it involved Styrofoam packing materials!
Cleaning them up was much more of a challenge than we anticipated, because we were fighting the unseen enemy, namely - static electricity!

"Caught in the act."

Loading Up and Moving to Chiba

While Sarah stayed with the girls in Chiba, Jon came back to Karuizawa by train on the evening of Jan 4 - to rent a truck the next day and move our things to Chiba.
We loaded up the truck out in the snow, and just barely got everything to fit in! My friend Manabu (inside the truck in the top picture) and I drove the truck down to Chiba that afternoon.
In Chiba we were met by friendly faces from our MTW team who helped us unload the truck into our new house.
Sarah stayed near the genkan (entryway) and directed traffic as box after box got carried in. Our friend Manabu (here with Sarah) was such a blessing to us and helped loading, unloading, and driving the truck!

We have a winding staircase, and it was a challenge to get the bed up the stairs!

We were so blessed to be in our new home, but then faced the new challenge of unpacking and settling in. More to come ...

Packing up in Karuizawa

We packed up our home in Karuizawa in just about a week - sped up by the threat of a big snowstorm - and left 2 days early on Jan 1st! We left all our boxes in the house, just taking our essentials to make it to Chiba before the storm for some meetings later that week.
We packed all our closets and "backroom" things before Christmas, but kept our main room looking as normal as possible for the kids. After Christmas we lived among boxes!
Here are the girls sitting in their empty bedroom, with nothing to do but watch the portable DVD player!
An exciting thing for Olivia on our last day in Karuizawa was to finally get to climb the ladder with Daddy and see the loft upstairs. For 2 years the kids knew "with no exception - kids don't climb the ladder". So, Olivia was so excited, and we're sure she must have imagined all the wonderful things that might be up there. Actually, there was nothing to see, since we had already packed everything - but she still loved it!

We said goodbye to our home (though Jon would come back soon to get all the boxes!)