Homestay trip to Cincinnati!

For about 2 weeks in February, 3 students from our college ministry, along with a pastoral staff member and his family, went to America on a "Homestay". The first week was spent in Cincinnati, Ohio with North Cincinnati Community Church and the second down in Tunica, Mississippi.
From the student's perspective, the Homestay trip was a fun chance to see America, experience American home life, and practice their English. From our ministry perspective, though, it is a great "pre-evangelistic" opportunity where many students over the years open up to spiritual conversations because of staying in Christian homes and experiencing the gospel through these families. Scheduled Bible Times in Japanese during the trip also allow for processing and understanding what they are experiencing.

Please pray for these 3 students, Rena, Saori, and Satomi - that their hearts would continue to be open to spiritual things once they've returned to the busyness of daily life in Japan.

Young Adult Group from Church

We had the young adult group from our Oyumino churches over to our house. (By removing 2 sets of sliding doors we can get a pretty big open space for a lot of people to sit on the floor.) We look forward to hosting many more fellowship and outreach events in the future.
This group is called SUMODON (short for SUMOoru DONkii = small donkey, the humble animal that brought Jesus into Jerusalem). Catchy name, don't you think? :)
Pray for me and our College Ministry team now, as we are gearing up for the new school year (starts in April). We're working through our vision and strategy and want to have better synergy with Sumodon and other Church activities.

Playing in youth worship

Jon had fun playing together with the young adult worship team for the monthly "Youth Worship". Though there are challenges for us in reaching College Campuses directly, we are excited that we have the wonderful asset of a number of young Christians in our Oyumino Church network.

Fun with Little Friends in Chiba

We watched the 3 youngest Dedachi family children the other day, and all together had kids ages 5,4,3,2,1,0. It was a little crazy, but a lot of fun! Good practice for our growing family. :)We had dinner and spent the evening with our friends the Hoshino family, and had fun playing with their two kids (their 3rd was just recently born). Daddy became the favored mode of transportation for the group.Here are the girls on another night with 3 other missionary kid friends - William, Isabel, and Noa.
It is such a blessing for our girls to be building so many new friendships here in Chiba.

A Baby Shower for Calvin & Martha

Our sweet friends, the Stewarts, hosted a baby shower for our baby Calvin, and my good friend Sara-Beth's baby Martha. All of the MTW team ladies came to celebrate the new babies. This picture shows off the two babies that are about ready to come. Martha is due tomorrow and Calvin is due in four weeks. I'll let you know when they arrive.

We had delicious appetizers and a yummy strawberry cake for dessert!

After the ladies gave us cute little things for our new babies, they showered us with prayers for the upcoming deliveries and first few months of our growing families lives. What a blessing to have such good friends in our lives!

College Ministry "Home Party"

We had a total of 25 people over to our home on Friday night. The school year is ending, and we wanted to "break in" our new house with a party for the students, staff familes, and friends of our College Ministry.

Sarah made a bunch of sugar cookies, and everyone had a chance to frost, decorate, and eat "Valentines Day Cookies". It was a lot of fun, and helped us all get to know each other better.
Our "genkan" (entryway) is much bigger than in our previous house in Karuizawa. May God continue to keep filling it with the shoes of those who need to hear the gospel!!!

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!)