Planning for our 2018 Australian sojourn

Today we've been doing more home assignment preparation: we spent the afternoon talking about ideas of how to communicate about our work and the elements that go into what we do when we're meeting people in Australia.

That includes:

• Elements of a short presentation that we can use in front of a church or other group that explains what we do and why we do it. Most places we'll only get around 10 minutes, so we don't actually have to prepare a lot and will recycle it endlessly!
• What to put on the display board and table that we cart around with us: it's a place we talk more informally to people after meetings and have resources to give away and sell
• A photo album: a great communication tool about our lives in Japan that we take everywhere with us, yes, even to coffee shops when we meet people.
• Audio-visual stuff that gets projected onto a screen while we talk. We've found a fun video that we're keen to use at a "Japan Night" if we can persuade anyone to hold one.

and

• Take-aways: stuff about us that we can give away, including a prayer card.

Which is where this photo comes into the story. A couple of Sundays ago we stood outside at school in 6˚C temperatures and took a family photo for the staple product of a missionary: a prayer card. We suddenly realised that we needed to do this before our eldest son left for Australia next month.

We were much blessed by a photographer friend and his assistant wife who were willing to stand out there in the cold with us and take nice photos. Once the whole family shots were taken we got an unexpected bonus of some photos just of David and I. Do you like it? 

My hair is a mess. I really should have had a haircut before the photo and the sneaky breeze finished off the mess. But nonetheless, it's lovely to have a nice photo of the two of us—once you have children photos as a couple are quite rare.

From early July we'll be in the South-east Queensland area, but closer to Christmas are also planning to spend up to 10 days around the Perth area. If you'd like us to visit your small group, youth group, young adults group, Bible study, or church, please contact me and we'll book you in. If you'd like us to run a fun missions awareness evening or afternoon for your group, they are one of our favourite things to do (aside from meeting people for coffee), let us know!