Many opportunities

The home assignment sprint continues, more like a 400m than a 100m! 

Despite the busyness, so far we've had many wonderful opportunities to talk to a variety of people. Last Saturday we spent several hours meeting people at a church hall, people who hadn't been able to catch us anywhere else. This "open house" style of meeting is an efficient way of catching up with folk when we have limited time to make individual appointments.

I've had two different team meetings this week with colleagues in Japan. I'm thankful the time difference is only one hour! But each of these meetings have jerked my head around: I'm both in Australia and in Japan and it's a bit challenging. Certainly I wouldn't encourage newer missionaries to attempt such continuity of Japan-based ministry while on home assignment!

We've also been attending to medical needs: skin cancer checks and mission medicals and the action points from those (including an iron infusion for myself), women's health screening, etc.

We've cooked two Japanese meals this week for each of our younger two sons (and others), and spent extra time with them. I forgot to take a photo of the chocolate cheesecake I made them :D I'm treasuring these times with them.

As a result, this week there has been less opportunity to rest, and that's probably why we've been feeling more ragged heading into another full weekend.

I really want to write more here...but I'm almost out of time and energy this week. 

We've got a whirlwind of things on in the next four days. These are some of the things going on:

• Three public speaking opportunities (which need Powerpoints and scripts finalised).
• 300+ km of driving over two days.
• Meeting up with two different couples over coffee and then a meal on Saturday.
• An online meeting with Japan-based colleagues for David.
• Planning and shopping for our own food (not something we've had to do in the last five weeks as we've stayed with people who've provided most of our meals).
• Packing up, then unpacking into my parents' motorhome (our mode of transport and accommodation some nights in the coming 2 ½ weeks).
• Answering some emails and finishing up a few Japan-ministry bits and pieces before we go on holidays from Monday.

We're tired and hankering after that holiday—just have to get through these final days before we get there!

Our holiday will include time on our own as well as time with family, including four nights with our granddaughter and her parents.

Please pray for God's strength and grace in these coming days!

Time to rest (and move)

One of the biggest challenges of a short, fast-paced home assignment is getting rest. We've designated each Monday as a day off and have that written on our online shared calendar. It's important to decide that beforehand otherwise a dangerous "creep" can happen and you end up with not enough time to truly rest. Also, we're trying to have a mentality that downtime can happen at other times too. This week we have meetings on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. It'll be wise to have rest time during the day on those days (and probably Friday morning too...after an evening event I often don't sleep well).

Yesterday (Monday), on our designated day off, we went a little further afield for a longer walk. White Rock Conservation Park is not far from our home church in Redbank Plains, Ipswich. We've lived around this area several times in the last 15 years and yet never gone to the park, though I've heard it mentioned many times by people. Yesterday we had good weather, plus the time and energy to go and explore it. We ended up walking seven kilometres through typical Queensland bushland. It was a delightful outing that was good for us on many fronts.

There were so many gorgeous trees, mostly a typical Queensland eucalyptus forest.

The "rock" itself is a sandstone outcrop. We walked from the carpark in to the rock and out again.

We saw a number of kangaroos, but none so close as these two who calmly grazed on grass as we walked within a few metres of them.

When we were almost back to our car we passed this kookaburra. He was perched at head height, only a metre or so off the track and also didn't move as we walked past, pausing to take his photo.

Pondering our uncommon "walking around life"

Before we went on home assignment in 2023 I was reading a book called Uncommon Ground, a collection of essays brought together by Tim Keller and John Inazu with perspectives from people thinking deeply and working daily to live with these times. Here are some of my reflections on that in light of our upcoming time in Australia:

Home assignment means meeting
up with people for various reasons.
On Saturday we met up with a 
member of our church in Tokyo,
someone we'd never met before.
We got to walk for the first time on
this cool bridge across the Brisbane
river.

In the case of a missionary on home assignment, we have to "translate" overseas mission and Japan to Australians. In general people we encounter there don't clearly understand what we do or where we do it. If you've followed my blog for a long time, you'll know that our work in Australia is composed of answering a lot of questions.

Much patience and diligence is required in translation. Much attention to detail as well as sensitivity to the wider picture. My work as an editor is also translation to some degree. I have to ensure that the writer's intent is accurately and appealingly translated into words that the audience will understand and not stumble over. And of course, as a writer who writes about cross-cultural life, I am translating my experience, life in Japan, and missionary life, into words so that others can understand. Pretty similar, in a way, to what we do on HA, except that as a writer and editor, I can hide behind my screen, rather than have to engage people face to face, or stand up in front of an audience with no time to edit my answers. (from here)

In the midst of another home assignment, one that is far more fast paced, the thoughts about still resonates with me. I'd definitely rather be working behind the scenes, but alas, God has given us this thing to do and we're getting on with doing it.

These last few weeks, when I have some free time and energy, I've been gradually making my way through A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene H. Peterson, the author of the Bible paraphrase: The Message. A Long Obedience. It is a book that I heard about early in our time in Japan but have only now gotten my hands on a copy. I didn't realise that it was a book on discipleship based on the Songs of Ascent, Psalms 120–134. It's a good read!

The chapter I read on Tuesday was based on Psalm 123 and in it Peterson connects it with Romans 12:1–2:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message)

Below is how I more commonly recognise this passage: 

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2 NIV).

The Message version of the passage stands out to me because the intro that I'm giving to our formal presentations includes a series of statements about what our ordinary lives in Japan looks like. Our "walking around life". We tend to think of service to God as the extraordinary stuff, not the stuff of ordinary life. As we talk from the front of churches and other gatherings I'm deliberately framing our stories as being from the place where God has set us down. (From the quote that Alistair Begg uses from his mentor Eric Alexander: "There's no ideal place to serve God, except the place he sets you down.")

And of course the other thing that stands out is the observation about culture. As we move between our two "home" cultures, we see things that people who are immersed in them don't necessarily see so clearly. It doesn't make us experts in either culture, but it does give us a unique perspective. Perhaps not fitting so well into either culture is an advantage, helping us to focus our attention on God as Paul instructs us to do?

I'll continue to ponder this and other thoughts in this book while I go about my "walking around life", which, this afternoon includes the joy of hanging out in an Australian library :-) and even borrowing some physical books!

Sprinting through the weeks

We enjoyed a walk in Toowoomba's
Japanese garden.

We're starting to get into the swing of things in this home assignment now. It's fast-paced and exhausting! Manageable, though, as long as we're mindful that rest is needed. Home assignment is usually tiring, but in the past it's been a much longer and slower affair. This time we're "sprinting," but we can look forward to the "race" being over soon.

And a scone with coffee and chai.

Walking with my parents' lively dog
that reminds us so much of the
literary Harry MacLary of
Donaldson's Dairy.

We spent a week in Toowoomba with my parents enjoying catching up with them and others who live in that city. 

We spent Friday afternoon with closer friends and on Saturday we held an open afternoon in my parents' home and five people came, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s. 

On Sunday we shared the microphone for about 40 minutes up the front of my parents' church. It's very rare to be given so much time during a church service to talk about missions and we're grateful. David hadn't had time to write a sermon, so we filled the time with various stories about our lives and ministry as well as the needs in Japan and also challenged the church to pray right then about what we'd been sharing. 

The next challenge we face is how to condense that into just 10 minutes (the time slots we have this coming Saturday and Sunday).

By Monday we really needed some downtime, but ended up spending time with my great aunt in the morning and with another former OMF missionary in the afternoon. On Tuesday we downed tools, stopped looking at email, writing our prayer letter, and other tasks, and just rested—it was very restorative. On Wednesday we headed back to Brisbane and started preparing for this coming weekend of events.

Toowoomba is about 600m above sea level,
it's perched on the edge of the Great Dividing
Range and the climate there is definitely cooler
than down on the plain in Brisbane. It's 
renowned for its fog and we certainly got
some of that.

It's always good to spend time with family when we're in Australia, though we are acutely reminded that there's no making up the time that we haven't been here. It's difficult sometimes not to feel melancholy or guilty. I don't often feel like we've sacrificed much to do what we've done, but time with family can be a reminder of that, and a reminder that they've sacrificed a lot too.