The good and the bad, and joy in the midst of it all

I have a lot to be thankful for this week . . . maybe I'm learning how to have joy in the midst of pain?

On the one hand, I've been weary and overwhelmed, and I've struggled with headaches all week. 

Playing French cricket with our UK friends on Saturday was fun.
And the sky was magnificent viewing: all day! It's not often you
get so far from other people and buildings in the greater Tokyo area.

But on the other hand, we've had some great things happening. Last Saturday, despite being unable to do our planned camping trip, and having some last-minute hiccups, we were able to spend the day with friends/colleagues. I was able to have a long weekend—a quiet day of just relaxing at home on Tuesday was very unusual, but matched with my family's schedule (school's Fall Break) and was needed. 

And, after months of waiting, we're seeing some positive changes in the local situation. The number of new COVID-19 infections is the lowest it's been all year. This week three meetings that have been online for many months have been, or will be, in person: a prayer and fellowship meeting with our mission, a prayer meeting at school, and worship on Sunday at church. 

All good, but also a tad overwhelming in the suddenness that it's all changed. We've also seen forward movement on a couple of fronts for one of our guys, which is very encouraging, but has made my schedule next week a bit busier than I'd like.

Another unexpected thing I've been doing this month is a daily photo challenge with Taking Route, an online community for expat women. The challenge is #thisglobalwalkoutside. Using daily photo prompts, expat women around the world are taking photos outside and sharing them. I've not been interacting much with the community, but been simply enjoying taking the simple prompt and searching each day for a photo to take (or one that was taken earlier) and post, plus something to write about the prompt (I can't resist the writer-side of me). It was something I stumbled upon at the start of the month and I have to say the results have been unexpected. My reflections have surprised me (as have some of my photos).

I have to say also, that despite all that I've had going on, plus a headache, I've been remarkably productive in even this short week . . . but that reminds me that I must get back to my To Do list before this working week is over.

A birthday post

It's nearly a week since my birthday and I wanted to recount the blessings of that once-a-year day to you. I've learnt not to have too high expectations, but also to plan something fun for myself.

This time I got some surprises: two invitations from friends. One from a friend I've invited out for coffee before on my birthday (yep, don't be shy!). She blessed me with a great conversation, a cute card signed by her kids, and some lovely "Pillow perfume"!

Another friend invited me out to lunch on Friday. I recounted this on Facebook at the time:

A friend said, “I’ll buy you lunch for your birthday.”
“Where?” I asked. 
“Anywhere!” 
So I asked if we could go into the city to one of the spots people come from overseas to see in this Sakura season and she said, “Sure!”
So for the first time ever, I joined the crowds around the Imperial Palace in Sakura Season.

I'm always amazed at these elderly Japanese people
who are really into photography. And I mean "really"!
It's very common to see them along the river with their
"foot-long" lenses.

Tulips were a big discovery in our first spring in Japan.
We'd arrived during the snowy winter of Sapporo and
the splash of colour that tulips made was a wonderful delight.

On my actual birthday I also took a couple of hours to ride to my favourite park. It's a popular sakura viewing spot, but there are other flowers out too. The whole place was pulsing with energy: lots of kids, families, and various groups celebrating the visible start of spring in Tokyo. The tulips and following park photos are from that ride.

Groups like this are common. They're having a "hanami" or "flower viewing" party. Often it involves alcohol and snacks.

So many bikes!

I also got some cool presents including a potted rose from my hubby. He reasons that even though it might die in my care, it will last longer than cut flowers do.

I received two necklaces. One from my parents and one from my 13 y.o. The latter is extra special because it is a rock he found while we were camping the week before. He got David to help order a chain and attached it himself with left-over wire he bought for another project. Wow!

I also spent an hour talking to mum and dad via video chat and another hour talking to a close friend the next day. We "dragged" the boys out to dinner at a family-friendly Italian restaurant in the evening and had a reasonable family time too.

I'm thankful for one more year of life. Each year brings surprises and challenges. Possibly my last year had a few more than most in the last few years. But I continue to be grateful to my rock and foundation, the Lord Jesus Christ, who holds me steady through all the changes and surprises each year brings.

Acquainted with grief

Another thing the psychologist asked me to think and write about was how Jesus was "acquainted with grief" (from Isaiah 53). She was suggesting that we can learn to not treat grief like an enemy, more like a friend. However, after pondering this, I think it's a better course to get to know the one who is acquainted with grief and has the capacity to heal us.

I found a good article pondering this (I have a theological issue with the second last sentence, but the rest is great): http://www.terynobrien.com/2014/04/10/jesus-man-sorrows-acquainted-grief/

This bench in Singapore reminded me of one of our loses this
year: a friend and missionary colleague who passed away
from brain cancer a few months ago. Her husband has
had a passion for photographing benches around the world,
in times past (when our boys were younger and more
willing to pose for my camera) we'd take "bench photos" and
send them to him.

Here are some quotes from the post:

He [Jesus] lived his life knowing that the people he loved and served and healed would someday turn on him. 

I am not alone. Jesus knows pain. He knows grief. He’s walked that road. He’s carried those burdens. And I can lean on Him when I get so,  so weary.

He’s the only One who can truly comfort the broken, the hurting, the grieving. . . Turn to the Messiah who is acquainted with grief and find healing in his nail-scarred embrace.

We are not alone. This secular world would like us to think that we are, that all we need is ourselves. But, deep down, most of us know that we need more than that. We usually end up reaching out to others and things that won't satisfy us in the long-term. Don't get me wrong, God's given us these people and things. It's not wrong to invest in relationships with others to help us through this life, it's just that they will never be able to meet all our needs. No matter how hard they try, they will fail (as will we, in relating to them).

The only one who won't is Jesus. Though it's not necessarily so easy to relate to him as it is to someone who is sitting across the table from you. I think becoming better acquainted with Jesus is a life-long task, one that I've got a lot more to learn about yet!

Scripture backs up the idea that Jesus will comfort us. I read the following last week:

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God" (2 Corinthians 1:2-4 NIV).

Followed by this later in the book of second Corinthians:

"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (4:16-18).

That's our ongoing challenge: to keep lifting our eyes from the pain and ugliness of this world (and even from the beautiful and attractive) to our unseen God. It's a daily battle, and one that I doubt will be won by this flawed human this side of heaven.

Fusion of Japan and Australia

Yesterday I met a close friend for lunch. That was super special. We have the kind of friendship that I don't have to waste time on the superficial, but can dive right in and know that there's not going to be any issues with that!

After that soul-refreshing time I went for a short walk around a nearby Japanese garden with my camera. The idea of a Japanese garden in Australia is quite interesting to me, after having lived in Japan and spent time in some of their very old gardens. Japan really takes gardens to another level! (Here's one of their top three gardens that we visited a couple of years ago. Here's an inner city one I visited on my own last year.)

Anyway, I haven't been to a Japanese garden in Australia for a long time. Here's what I found: a fusion of Japan and Australia.

The garden is called "Nerima Garden", a celebration of a sister relationship between Ipswich (where we are living in Australia) and the city of Nerima (which is only about 2 km from our house in Tokyo).

Our house is at the "pin" and you can see Nerima marked between there
and Tokyo city central.

But actually it is only about 2km between our place and the western border of
the city of Nerima.

This is quite a typical looking Japanese garden scene. It looks quite different to Australia in general, especially because it is so green and Australia really is very brown and dusty at present as we experience a significant drought.

They have a traditional tea house, which of course was locked up, but by getting close to the glass, I managed something of a photo of the inside. The floor is just like the floor in our  bedroom and lounge rooms in Tokyo. I'm sure the smell would have cast me into homesickness!

This method of paving paths is very much a Japanese style.

The fusion: this isn't a plant usually seen in a Japanese garden! I believe it's a member of the Xanthorrhoea genus and is pretty common in Australia.

In the middle of this Japanese garden were some huge eucalyptus trees. Something you'd never see in Japan. However it was surprisingly hard to get a photo angle that showed both Japanese and Australian elements (possibly would have been better in the morning or on a cloudy day).

Here you can see a gum tree and bamboo.

The gum tree (eucalyptus) with the Japanese-shaped bushes and the tea house.

Back to Japan, here's the tea house with some bushes shaped very much like they would be in Japan. I found the Australian sun is very strong, even on a spring day, it made photos with strong contrast between shade and sun difficult to take well. This year is the first time I've used a "fancy" camera in Australia.

And then a couple of Aussie lizards were sunning themselves, they're pretty flighty, though, so I only got one or two photos of this one.

Azaleas were out. These you see in Japan and Australia. They are used as hedges in our city in Tokyo.

A different angle on the pond and "lantern feature". 

The garden was walled, just like many Japanese gardens are. 

Just outside I found the gorgeous bottle brush. Also had fun trying to figure out the right manual settings to use, but I was happy with the result in the end.

This is bougainvillea, a prolific non-native in Australia (from South America, I believe). We once had one right next to our driveway and it needed constant trimming, because it not only grows fast, it's got nasty thorns. But in the right place it is a gorgeous plant. 

I've had little time to go wandering with my camera in nature, so this half-hour was a delight. I hope you've enjoyed this little excursion too.

Today's adventures

I have a bunch of blog post ideas running around in my head but things are starting to crowd in on my time and alas my blog is one of the first things to get crowded out.

But I've got a few moments now, so I'll see what I can churn out.

Park ride

Today I went for my last park/coffee shop ride. It was a gorgeous day in the midst of a bunch of gloomy, cool days. I'm so glad I seized the opportunity.

Here are some photos. Such a sparkly day!

Then I rode to a favourite coffee shop and enjoyed a light lunch with a street-view.

I did some shopping (coffee to last till we leave, plus a couple of other needs).

Orthodontist adventure

Then I went back to the orthodontist that we visited last Friday to pay the balance of a bill. 

This was a classic culture-confusion problem. Kids in Japan get extra health coverage until they start high school, yes, even non-citizens. The "start high school" thing is, of course, linked into the Japanese system, not the international school system. So we didn't register that our middle son's coverage ran out on March 31 this year. Apparently, the dentist didn't either. I tried to present the now-expired card, and she pointed out that it had expired. She didn't realise why it had expired and neither did I. So I paid the mere 200 yen for the checkup (about $2.50) and promised to email a photo of the new card.

But when I got home David realised what had gone on and we had to 'fess up to having not paid the whole bill. He called them Friday afternoon and said I could come back this week. They said "call us before you do so we can have the bill ready." The orthodontist is quite close to this coffee shop, so it was natural to just do it when I rode down there, rather than taking an extra hour's round trip in the car. 

David rang them this morning. No worries. Except that after he left to do the car-parking paperwork chasing, they rang back on my phone and I missed the call. I stiffened my upper lip and called them back (I'm not fond of phone calls and even less in Japanese). I'm actually not really sure of what happened in that conversation, except that they ended with "matte imasu" (we're waiting for you). So I left.

I didn't get to the orthodontist until just after 1pm. Here, many medical/dental places have about two hours closed in the early afternoon and I walked into a waiting room that had the lights off and the door to the "surgery" closed. So I sat and waited a while to see what would happen (and save myself another hour's journey later in the week). After about 15 minutes someone came into the reception area and from there we quickly sorted things out. I paid the outstanding 2,170 yen (about $AU27).\

Back to my ride

I rode back to the park, via this intersection where I've been fascinated by this little shrine for many months. I've driven past it many times as we've gone back and forth from the orthodontist. 

I rode back through the park, took a few more photos.

And said "sayonara". This is the little path I use to enter the park (and exit today too). Can you see it? It's hard not to feel a little envious of the people living in these houses abutting the park!

On the way home I stopped at one set of lights. I was startled to see my image reflected back at me by a little roadside mirror placed to help someone get out of their driveway.

After I got home and had a shower, I coached the person taking over my blog-posting job to get an OMF Japan blog post up, at the same time as worked with David on speaking material for Australia. 

Phew! It's been quite a day.

And now I've run out of time. My next blog post might be about "God's amazing economy" in us being so dependent on others. It was one of the themes in an unusual sermon on Sunday and has come up in other conversations recently too. So stay tuned.

The "Bobs" are back

Two years ago in spring we had a couple of birds take up residence in the bird house that our eldest son made in middle school. They laid a batch of eggs and hatched them. But once the babies were able to fly we rarely saw the family again, actually we never saw the babies, though we could hear them. 

We wondered if they'd come back the next year, but they didn't. However this year we have the same species of bird back again. Thanks to my blog (see here), I can tell you they are Parus Minors or Japanese Great Tits. For ease, we've nicknamed them the "Bobs" (from this fun song about fourteen animals with the special name of Bob).

I spent some time trying to capture them with my camera last Wednesday. Alas my lens doesn't have a great zoom, and the birds are so energetic and flighty that I ended up taking most of my photos through two layers of glass (having work to do, I didn't spend the whole day with the door open waiting for them).

My favourite: I captured one of the "Bobs" in flight!

Our weekend away Part 2

I have way too many Mt Fuji photos from the weekend! It really is a photogenic mountain. Much like when we were at Uluru (Ayers Rock, the enormous rock in the middle of Australia), it was hard not to keep snapping photos as the light changed.

We saw two sunsets from different vantage points and I saw one sunrise also. Here are my best shots:

Sunset on the first night

Sunrise the next morning. There were a lot of cars in the carpark, but not so many people at this viewing point 80m or so from our cabin. I'm thinking most of the viewers climbed the nearby peak in the dark and watched from there. We climbed the peak too, but quite a bit later in the morning.

The path up the nearby peak. It wasn't all as wide and smooth as this, but as far as mountain climbing goes, we had it pretty easy. It was about 30 minutes up and 30 minutes back.

With amazing views from the top! Australians are used to wide blue skies, but it isn't so common when you live in Japan. The horizon is something we rarely see from ground level in Tokyo and certainly not "wide skies".

This is the little bay and town (Heda) that we drove down to and had a delicious seafood lunch at. We watched the sun set from the other side of that little peninsula (the one with the beach). The next photos are from that vantage point.

Looking back at the mountains and Heda town.

This one is one of my favourites, I think.