Saturday went...

really well! I wore my summer kimono (yukata) for the first half of the evening and managed to find a girl almost the right size for our "girl's" kimono. We ate Japanese food (curry rice and miso) with chopsticks, did origami together, gave people a taste of Japanese language, showed videos on below-the-surface of Japan and had a lot of fun. People came away with a deeper understanding of Japan, the culture and what it might feel like to live there. We did have to cut a few things out of the program, like the slipper relay and questions at the end, but overall it was a good evening and lots of people gave us good feedback at the end. The main thing we kept hearing was that most missionaries just stand up the front and talk or show videos (or slides) - boring - but that our evening was "the best missionary event I've ever been to"! It was interactive and not at all static. People will remember it for much longer. What we really want is for more church groups to get enthusiastic about a program like this. It was not a small thing to organise, but very worthwhile. We'd happily do dozens of these, and even though they are more work, we'd rather do them than stand up the front of churches for a 10 minute missionary "spot". We had 100 people come to this small church. Quite a lot weren't even from this church. More than a dozen knew me as a child - a bit scary. However no dodgy stories of my childhood were told that I know of. One man who knew my parents before they were married recounted to us some of the message given at our wedding! We're all tired today. The boys were up till almost 10pm on Saturday night. Hoping that the fairly blank diary for this week translates into a quiet week. But now I'm off to the bank, gym and grocery store.