Interesting conversations

Today started rather abruptly, with a breakfast guest. Well, he was an overnight guest, really, but didn't arrive until all of us except my husband were in bed. But we all got to meet him at breakfast. He was headed to school with my husband today as a guest. He's a mathematician and will speak to various middle and high school classes about using maths as a profession (I presume . . . ). He is ethnically Japanese, but grew up in Canada and he and his wife are now working in Japan. As we washed down our cereal with coffee, a couple of interesting things came up in our conversation.

The first is that he was delighted to find an OMF family who weren't church planters. Not that he doesn't think that church planting is a good thing, just that he recognises that other ministries and giftings are important too. His concept of OMF was that they only did Church Planting. So, now we've opened his eyes! It is OMF's main focus, especially here in Japan, but there others who do other things.

The second was that as foreign-looking people we (that is us, not him) will always be outsiders here. Both Australia and Canada are much more multicultural than Japan. But in Japan, no matter how long we stay here people will always suspect that we've only just arrived, will suspect that "Konnichiwa" is the extent of our Japanese. I think this was one thing that niggled at me when we had our Australian visitors in June/July. We all looked equally foreign. However inside us it is different: our understanding of Japan was quite different. After ten years of living here, doing language study and engaging as best we can in the culture, we are no longer 100% foreign to this land.

English Club days.

This was confirmed when later I had morning tea with friends from our middle son's Japanese kindergarten days. These are the ladies who formed the core of the English Club that I ran for nearly three years. It is always great to get together. We speak in a mixture of English and Japanese, it would be quite a bewildering thing to be a fly on the wall. But at one point one of my friends burst out laughing, to the point of not being able to speak for a little while. She finally said, "You are so Japanese!!" Apparently the way I agreed in conversation had struck her. Not so much my words as my body language – lots of Japanese nodding in agreement with some appropriate agree-ing Japanese words! I assured them that I was no longer 100% foreigner on the inside. I'm thankful that, though to most Japanese I'm just another strange foreigner, I have Japanese friends who no longer see me as totally foreign.

The other thing that came up with our visitor this morning was I heard him murmuring to my husband as they left for school, "What a delightful family!" Then I climbed up the stairs to the bathroom where I found my youngest and eldest in some kind of feud. I discovered them at the opportunistic swipe-hit and throw-water-at-your-brother stage. Yes, a delightful family! Delightfully normal or delightfully deceptive?