It's been more than a week since I finished blogging about our road trip. It truly is time to get back on the horse and return this blog to it's original purpose: to write about "ordinary" life as an Australian Christian who's worked as a missionary in Japan for much of the last 25 years. But I guess our travel was "ordinary life" for us for two months, so it wasn't too off base!
But, in the last week we've definitely had a return to the more usual life of a missionary on home assignment.
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| I've been enjoying our deck once more! |
What have we done? Last Saturday morning we spoke at a meeting of people who pray for OMF's work in East Asia. David preached at our home church on Sunday. We've been involved in various other (home) church-based activities this week too. I wrote a prayer letter and sent it out. We had a debriefing with our state OMF director.
But the big news is that we've booked our tickets back to Japan—for the 22nd July. As a result we've been communicating with people in Australia and Japan as we work on putting details into place around that transition. There's no letting grass grow under our feet! Here's what we know:
6 July: Open house here (drop me a line if you'd like to come)
15 July We'll stop living in our house in Ipswich and spend that week moving and cleaning.
19th we'll fly to Melbourne for a wedding and fly back on the 21st.
22nd we'll fly to Tokyo.
23rd or 24th we'll move into our new apartment not far from our previous house (we even got to go inside this apartment last year before we left).
Early August we'll start taking back various responsibilities we handed to others before we left.
As you might imagine my emotions are up and down, as is typical in the midst of transition, and in reality we haven't really made it out of transition since it began early last year. I'm longing for it all to be over, but I know that will also mean that I've said goodbye to Australia and all our Australian-resident family and friends once again.
Long service leave was delightful. It was the mental break that we needed after several very stressful years. But it's hard to let go of the leisure and get back to harder things that our own pleasure! There's also a growing urgency around people to catch up with and things we want to do before we go back to Japan for another year.
It helps to remind myself of the why of what we do. Most Japanese (we're talking over 90%) have never heard the gospel, the good news that we can have eternal security with God, that Jesus came to save us from a life that's full of strife and pain, to give us hope for the future. That he freely offers us his love, the indescribably precious gift of a personal relationship with him that is completely unconditional. That is why I do what I do.
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