Joy with my new garden

I've been wanting to write about my little garden for a while now. What's been stopping me? I've concluded that it's because it is not perfect, several aren't doing that wel! But that's a terrible excuse. Not all the plants are at their best, but it is winter time here, getting down to zero at nighttime, not the best time for plants! And because most of them are new to me and the conditions in this new apartment are also new to me, so I've been making lots of little adjustments: to plant placement (light and temperature variation), how much I water them.

These last five months has been a rebuilding time for my little potted garden. I got back some of the plants that I gave to others to take care of for the year we were away. Not all the plants made it through the transition to different locations and caretakers, so there was a fair bit of natural attrition. But as I got back some "old friends", I also got some new plants from the ladies who were looking after my plants, which was a surprise. On top of that I bought some new plants too. So now I have 21 pots with plants in them. Some are enjoying the bay window in our living room, two are in the dining/multipurpose area, and the rest are out on our tiny balcony, sharing space with laundry some days.

Parlor Palm

I felt very happy when my new garden was largely assembled. Why? Apparently there are many benefits to having indoor plants in your life (see this Time article, which, amongst other things cites an experiment where people who spent five to ten minutes in a room with a few houseplants felt happier than those in a plant-free room!) They are generally good for your mental health, though obviously not if plants are dying on you, which is why I always advise people to start with easy plants like geraniums, which are super hard to kill in moderate climates (mine survived being snowed on in Tokyo but didn't survive a year in a higher altitude when temperatures are much lower than here)! 

I particularly enjoy plants that I can nurture and see grow, rather than those you can buy fully grown and just water. There is also a lot of satisfaction in making changes so that a plant starts to thrive again. The Parlor Palm we have started out as a tiny little thing I bought for 100 yen (about a dollar)! It's now quite tall.

My sick maidenhair. I moved it outside
because I was concerned the fungus 
might jump ship to other plants, so I 
guess it's in isolation!

The maidenhair fern also started quite small and the second one (pictured) is a baby of the larger one. They've both been through some rough times. I think I'll have to wait till the weather warms us to see how they go. The latest drama with the little one seems to be a fungus of some sort.

Miniature rose

My miniature rose was a gift from David five years ago and it also has survived a few different crises. When we got it back this year it was just sticks and very dry, thankfully regular watering has revived some of the "sticks" and I'm hoping for good things come spring.

On either side of the rose you can see my efforts at a little bit of vegetable growing, but haven't had much success yet: my lettuces are still sprouts and I'm really not sure about the plants I thought were spring onions.

Baby hydrangeas. I don't know why they still 
have leaves...but I hope they flower in June!

The plants with the best story, though, are the two hydrangeas. Last year when we were moving out of our house in Tokyo I posted a photo of the two large hydrangeas in our backyard just as they were in full bloom, noting that I'd miss them. My mum suggested I take a cutting and someone else suggested that I ask a friend to look after the cuttings. I thought it was quite a long shot, but also realised I had nothing to lose. I Googled the topic, did the deed, then gave the fragile little cuttings to a Japanese friend (who also takes care of her parents' farm) and she gave them back to me in September this year looking magnificent. I'm so glad for the suggestion from my mum and friend, and for my Japanese friend who nurtured them! The parent plants are no longer in existence because the whole house and garden was demolished the week we moved in to our new place. But I've still got these little reminders of the place where we lived for 13 years!

The chrysanthemum is flowering quite nicely, with
many more buds forming, the Gerbera will probably
not flower again till it gets warm, and the Japanese Grape Leaf
Anemone looks a bit ill, but again, hopefully it will limp
along until we get to spring.

One of the surprises: another kind of geranium,
but I don't think it is well, it's also in iso.

The beautiful geranium flowered just in time for Christmas.

On the edge here is my lavendar: first time
trying to grow this plant. It's also not
looking great, but I'm hopeful.

My Aluminum Plant. I've shifted it
around a few times trying to find 
the right light and temperature combos,
it seems to be thriving in this spot 
where it gets light for a short period most
mornings.

I'm so glad to be settled in a place where I can have a garden again. I enjoy watering it and tinkering with it. It's a very small hobby that takes little time and not much money, but brings joy and colour into our lives.

Another crazy week: but I'm thankful

I'm starting to realise that having a few less responsibilities means I'm more flexible! So I'm able to take up short-term opportunities more easily and have the space to recover from them.

This last week I've done a few not-usual things and it's been crazy busy. In fact this is the first time in seven days that I've actually sat at my desk.

David's office where we spent several hours on
Friday sorting wrestlers into weight classes,
recording their names, and setting up the
 initial bouts.

Friday and Saturday were crazy busy, but fun. David and I did the admin side of the school's wrestling tournament. We had 250 wrestlers on campus (a large number for our league). The gym was packed to the rafters. We held a middle school tournament, as well as a full raft of male and female weight brackets for the high schoolers. It's very hard to easily describe what we did because it included so many moving pieces and a lot of copying of names. As bouts happened we had to add those results to the tree diagram (called a bracket) and then create the scoring sheet for the new matches with the relevant wrestlers. We problem solved and answered many questions. One of the most satisfying things personally was solving problems by tracking down wrestlers whose bouts had slipped through the cracks somehow. We've benefited from others doing this for our sons over the last 13 years, so it was great to be able to serve others in this way. I'm thankful it was just those two days, though!

The busyness didn't stop after Saturday...but here are some photos to show you something of the weekend (see more about my week after the photos).

CAJ campus was stunning over the weekend...
but I spent most of my time inside!

No filter here (or in the one above)!

Wrestlers, coaches, and supporters everywhere!
The noise level was very loud...for 12 hours.

I got 20 minutes out of the gym
at lunchtime and I went for a short 
walk around campus. This
ginko tree was stunning.

This was admin central: where we spent about 12 hrs on
Saturday. We had several helpers, including the veteran
coach (Dan Rudd) who did announcements
until he ran out of energy mid afternoon. Coach Rudd
is the one who taught our eldest son in the earliest
days of his wrestling career (and answered so many
of our early questions).

I didn't see much wrestling...we didn't have the 
best seats in the house! Past all the people in
this photo is a CAJ wrestler getting his gold medal, he's
a former long-time teammate of our youngest son.

And the days moved onwards: Sunday morning was our usual time at church with lunch afterwards, then chatting to our sons over an hour or two. 

We had overnight guests on Sunday night, but due to their short stay (34 hrs) in Japan they had limited data on their phones to communicate with us as they travelled from the airport and a lack of on-hand cash meant they had difficulty buying train tickets. We live 1 ½ hrs from the airport, so it isn't an easy drop-in, but they were determined. We waited an hour for them at the train station. Thankfully we could pop into the cafe there for some warmth as the temperature was around 5C. It turned into a late night! The next day I showed them around the school and our neighbourhood and they treated us to lunch. We've had very few supporters visit us in recent years, so it was a delight to have this couple visit.

Another great Japan Harvest issue completed!

On Tuesday I went into the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association (JEMA) office to help pack magazines. A friend from CAJ-parent era met me there and we caught up while stuffing magazines into packets. That was an excellent use of time and I felt refreshed afterwards. I left a little early to get back to school for (you guessed it): more wrestling! Just an hour as a spectator, this time.

Yesterday I had another new thing going on: I'm hosting a short term worker and I met her for coffee and to talk about her involvement with social media, her weekly schedule, etc. I then took her to meet a Japanese friend of mine at the JEMA office, we ate lunch and packed more magazines. Another really good use of time because while doing a manual job like that there is much time for conversation.

It's been a lot. I ended up on my bed before dinner on both Monday and Wednesday. I'm really tired! Today is an office day (and a short grocery run). I'm grateful for the peace here at home and that while I've been gone things have been chugging along in the two teams I work with.

Thankfully it looks like the coming weeks aren't quite so hectic. It's just under three weeks till we travel to Australia for our son's wedding, so hopefully we'll be a bit more rested and able to enjoy that time.

A new layer of being settled

On Monday I went to our organisation's monthly regional gathering on the other side of Tokyo. It was, as usual, a huge day. But also a really good one. In particular I was able to have four longer conversations with old friends and new. I'm an extrovert with a strong introvert shadow (at least that's what I was told 25 years ago). I love time alone, as well as spending time with people, but most value deeper conversations. Random memory: no one told me that on your wedding day that you shouldn't expect to have deep conversations with anyone of these precious people who you invite to share your special day, it was very disappointing.

Some of the conversations on Monday included questions about how well we were setting back into life in Japan. It's over four months since we returned now, and you might think that is a long time, but in fact we've been in transition for much of the last two years, and some of those changes were massive, so it takes time to resettle and adjust.

I was surprised to realise that during November I'd hit another level of "settledness". And I think that is mostly related to connectedness. During November several things happened. 

We also had time to set up our
Christmas decorations and tree
on Saturday. Doing that for the first
time in a new house is always
significant. We're particularly
enjoying the fairy lights in the
lounge room.

School

I've been able to be a useful part of several events at school, a place where I no longer hold the role of "mother of student" and wondered if I'd find a way to be part of the community.

1. School bazaar where we rented a table and not just sold stuff to happy customers, but got to catch up with old (and new) friends.

2. Wrestling. It's been a few minutes since I mentioned this here! And no, we no longer have a wrestler at school, but it turns out that I can still participate. Our school team has had several matches "at home" over the last few weeks and it's been fun to wander down (just 5 minutes on my bike), to cheer, and also catch up with old and new friends in the bleachers. This Saturday CAJ is hosting several schools at an all day tournament. David's running the event for the first time and I'm his assistant! I'm looking forward to working with him again these next couple of days.

3. Christmas concert. Last Thursday we went to the Christmas instrumental concert at school (yep, they have a choral one too). I love orchestral music, it was fun being part of the audience. But I unexpectedly found myself getting sentimental as I sat in the school gym. It's a place where so many of our family's important events have happened. Sporting events, yes, but also three high school graduations, and various other events. So many memories (am I getting old?). I ended up sitting next to someone else who has many memories. She worked with our eldest son when he was in Grades 3 and 4, in a period of life when he definitely was struggling. She was so happy to hear how things are for him now.

Church

Since we came back to Japan we've also been searching for a new church home and during November we found one. It's so good to be settled, not just in that decision, but also week-to-week knowing where we'd be attending the next Sunday. 2024 has been very unsettled. We've worshipped in 16 different churches this year, five of those were churches we visited to speak about our work, seven were churches we've visited in Japan in the last four months, and we also spent two months early in the year travelling on long-service-leave and at different localities each weekend.

This new church includes a number of people from some of our Japan "circles": school, parents of kids who were classmates of our boys, and missionaries I've met via my magazine work and retreats I've been on. David has a couple of the youth under his care this year at school and one of them is also on the wrestling team, so we've been able to get to know them a little there. This church has a tradition (as many churches in Japan do) of eating lunch together after worship. It's a BYO situation and we've been enjoying "breaking bread" with church members and gradually meeting more people. Sundays are becoming a big blessing.

We've also been riding to church, which is potentially good for our health, as it's further than we usually ride each week: about 18 km round trip. But that's a story for another day (navigation in Tokyo isn't easy on a bike).

So, in answer to the question: How are you settling? I think we've hit another level and are feeling pretty settled. Something I read today reminded me of the "Maslow's hierarchy of needs", a psychological theory that organised human needs into five categories in a triangle figure. The base level is physical needs like food, shelter, and rest; after that is safety needs; then love and belonging needs; esteem needs (need for respect, recognition and status); and finally self-actualization needs (to achieve one's full potential and be creative).

There is some truth to this. The basic idea is that the "lower" needs need to be fulfilled before the higher one's can be, however it's also true that people are usually partially satisfied and unsatisfied at any one time. And of course it doesn't factor faith in there, although you could say that trusting God for all your needs changes all this. However, it did strike me that some of my unsettledness could be related to struggling with belonging as well as changes in "status". Just something to mull over.

We're flying to Australia again in a month, so that's probably going to destabilise me again, but it's just a short visit (for our son's wedding, but hopefully include many more opportunities for deeper conversations with those we meet than ours did), and then we'll come back to our new home.

The Psalmist says it well:

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;
    you make my lot secure.
6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
    surely I have a delightful inheritance.
7 I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;
    even at night my heart instructs me. (Psalm 16:5–7 NIV)

 

Mini cars

Slightly random topic here. No, I'm not especially interested in cars, but have enjoyed learning more in recent months about this (possibly) unique aspect of Japanese culture. Up till this year we've owned larger cars in Japan, in fact we'd driven eight-seater vans here since 2010! If you could see the size of many roads here in Tokyo you would think that that is an act of bravery!

But now it's just the two of us we've not just downsized our living space, we've downsized our car. We now own a four-seater car of the type that is called a "Kei car". It's the smallest category of expressway-legal motor vehicles in Japan. Literally "light automobile", it's a category of car created by Japan in 1949 to stimulate (according to Wikipedia) car ownership and the growth of Japan's car industry. The government specifies the maximum dimensions of the vehicles (3.4 m long x 1.48 m wide x 2 m tall) and the the size of the engine (less than 660 cc). The engine size number doesn't mean that much to me but a little research tells me that 660 CCs is the same as a mid-weight motorcycle and around 44% of cars in Australia are 1400 to 2000 CCs. Just a little more powerful!

However, as you might have read back here, we loaded our little blue car up for a camping trip in October and not just drove on 120 km/h expressway, but also up mountains, and the engine size didn't seem to be a problem!

What's intriguing is that the manufacturers took those dimensions and built cars to suit: making cars that just fit inside the maximums.

Driving around in Japan you see a lot of Kei cars. They are easy to spot: they have yellow or black number plates. In 2018 seven of the top 10 selling models were Kei Cars. Our car, the Honda N-box, has been the top selling mini for nine consecutive years, many times in those nine years it's also been the top car overall.

Other benefits from owning a Kei car, aside from fitting better through narrow spaces and making parking a breeze, are the financial incentives. It's cheaper to register them, to get the two-yearly roadworthy certificate, and even cheaper on road tolls. It was much faster to get our parking permit from the police too (required whenever you buy a car in Japan—they confirm that you actually have a place to park it regularly).

Many Japanese people who live in the city don't use their car for regular commutes to work or to take their kids to school. This (small) 2000 survey said around 60% of students and workers use public transport for their daily commute. Among the students surveyed (I presume university-aged students) 18% ride their bikes and 7% walk. Elementary-aged school children in Japan almost all walk to school.

It's a very different scenario to Australia, where the top 10 cars are mostly SUVs of varying sizes and where more than 50% of people drive to work and more than 50% of kids get driven to school. From experience very few people use bikes to do daily stuff like commuting or shopping.

I'm still learning about this country I live in. It's good to stay curious!

Letting go makes room for new opportunities

I was chatting to a colleague the other day on a Zoom call. He noticed the piles of boxes behind me and asked about them, a little concerned that we still hadn't finished unpacking. I assured him that that wasn't the case and that these boxes were destined for the school's secondhand sale that was happening the next week. He knew about our quest to sell our oven, washing machine, and fridge, and commented that there was a significant theme in our lives recently: letting go.

It's true. We've had to let a lot of things go. In the last 18 months we've literally downsized from a three-bedroom house equipped for a five-person household, to an apartment equipped for two people. We've also moved countries twice in the last 16 months. Our move out of Australia included letting go of a number of things, as we also downsized there. When our two younger sons moved out in February we gave them a number of things that would be useful to them, but no longer useful to us. When we packed up in July this year we had to put away things that we enjoy, but can't take to Japan, and now might not see for a decade or more. Most of that stuff hasn't been hard to let go of. I think the hardest was the oven. Much of the rest of it was old and well-used, or had passed its "useful to us" date.

We had to say goodbye to two houses. One of which we'd lived in for 13 years and contained many memories—though we were happy to leave it in many ways as it was hard to heat and cool, and broken in various ways. The other one we only lived in for 12 months, but we were very fond of (we especially loved the deck).

Saying goodbye to stuff, though, has an upside: you get to say yes to other things. Like less stuff to look after. We're now able to live in a small apartment that requires less up-keep and takes a fraction of the time to clean and a fraction of the budget to heat and cool. And we now have a cute car that is easier to manoeuvre in the narrow streets of Japan.

Moving between countries means letting go of relationships too. Not as in ending relationships (at least not the closer friendships), but letting go of the intimacy that you get from attending the same church, living in the same community, or living only a few hours drive away. This has been an ongoing theme of our lives, ever since we first moved to Japan in 2000. This time we also had to let go of hosting our sons in person on Sunday afternoons/evenings.

I'm trying to grow lettuce from seed 
for the first time. I think I might have
sown too many seeds!

Other things we haven't so much "let go", but they've changed nonetheless. We're no longer a parents at school or at any sporting event. I'm no longer cooking or shopping for large appetites. But that's getting to be "old news" now, though my soul is still adjusting to it. Christmas is becoming imminent and we're aware that this will be the first time in 25 years that we've celebrated that day without any of our kids, and only the second time in 50+ years that we've celebrated without any family at all (aside from each other)...but again I mentioned that last time I wrote here.

It has been a season of letting go: it's worth continuing to acknowledge that. But also remember that letting go allows new things to happen, like the adventure we took last week to watch wheelchair rugby. We're embarking on a new adventure on Sundays too: a new church. If I look back at the four months since we arrived back in Japan, I can see evidence of all sorts of small opportunities we've been able to take up that were largely absent during the previous years of busy parenting. Only God knows where this new season post-"letting go" will take us.

A bit of couple fun

Every time we go to Australia for home assignment we have a debrief with a psychologist/counsellor. A few years ago they told us we were obviously good at working together, but probably needed to rediscover fun. Missionaries having fun?!? Yes, we need to!

And it was true that we'd fallen out of the habit of having fun as a couple. When the boys were younger we rarely went on dates. We first moved to Japan when we'd been married just three years, and we had a very busy toddler. In Japan we had no family and it was just too much stress to find a babysitter, so we learned to stay home and enjoy what we could do there, like watching a TV episode from a DVD or play Scrabble. We’ve turned into home-bods, even more than we previously were. As our guys got older David and I have slowly gotten out a little more, but still often found going out too tiring when we were already tired from work and parenting. Much of our fun was as a family: supporting our guys at their sporting events as well as camping and holidaying together.

The last 18 months, and especially the last nine (since our younger two moved out), things have been changing. David and I went to several cricket matches in Australia (our shared love). Obviously (if you've been reading my blog this year) we went away for two months! Living on a budget, though, we rarely ate out in Australia—though it’s easier to do so now that we don’t have to cater to enormous sporty teenage boy appetites.

This is the first time we've ever been to a live
match of any sport between our two countries.
Japan and Australia just don't have many team sports
in common. One day we might find a Rugby Sevens
match to go to!

Last night we did something that felt like "playing hooky". We went to an international sports event: Australia played Japan in wheelchair rugby, a sport we’ve come to appreciate via the Paralympics. We actually had tickets to go to a session of this sport for the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021…but Covid…'

It was a lot of fun. I just wish I could have cheered louder…there didn’t seem to be many true Aussie fans around (they handed out Australian flags to Japanese people at the door, in a valiant attempt to support the guests).

Time out for a quick team meeting with the players on the court.

It's called the Shibuya Cup and the teams are playing four matches. Last night was the first. They gave us a booklet that showed the teams, and explained the game and the rules.
If you'd like to take a look at some of the action, it's here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JWRF/streams

Japanese publications are so cute!

 

We also were given these free cartons of coffee milk as we entered!

This little trip yesterday was fairly spontaneous, I only heard about this free event last Monday because I follow the Australian Paralympic Facebook page. I wonder what our next adventure will look like? David's got Christmas holidays coming up...and we have no family to hang out with this year, for only the second time in our lives. We'll see what turns up and what fun we can find.

 

It's still messy, but I think I am growing

I took time out of the house yesterday, mostly with the intention of making more progress in reading the book Awe and intentionally following up on thinking about some of things I wrote about in this blog post in September "It's messier than I like to admit". In that post I wrote that I was planning a followup...I've not managed that till now (and I'm just pondering where the last seven weeks have gone!).

Autumn colours in the park

I've been trying to come to terms with a less busy life. A life without boys at home is less busy. Both the ministry roles I've returned to this year are less intense now. A lot of what I've done in the past has been spread out amongst others, which is a good thing, but leaves me with wondering how to best use my time. But I'm also aware that, though I am not "old" yet, I am "less young" than I was 25 years ago when I started having the responsibility of children, and the reality of that is that I have less energy and take longer to recover.

So yesterday I rode to my favourite large park, but was very distracted by how chilly it was (around 18C). I'd neglected to put on appropriately warm clothing as the day before had been quite warm (25C inside). The weather and the seasons are messing with me! Last Friday I had a conversation with some American friends and it became clear how messed up I was. 

This calendar year started with a Queensland summer. We accelerated our descent into winter by heading south in mid-March and our month (April) in Tasmania in an unheated motorhome was quite chilly. Then we drove back north to a more moderate Queensland winter! In July we accelerated into summer by flying north, going from around 2 degrees Celsius to 30 C in just one day. The next two months were full-on summer and since mid September we've gradually been descending into winter again. 

Add to that that we're just still figuring out how to weather the seasons in our new apartment, which has both more sunlight and more insulation than our previous abode. So we often have difficulty accurately judging how outside will feel before we get there. This is made worse by the structure of a Japanese home: in that, to properly go outside, you have to put shoes on, at which point the inside of the house (and clothing) is no longer accessible to you...unless you take your shoes off (or take other measures, that you might have seen illustrated in OMF Japan's social media post a few weeks back, if not, then I recommend checking it out here). 

But I digress. The problem with my conversation was that if I started using seasons to anchor my story, I was instantly in trouble. For example, "We came back [to Tokyo] in the summer, but will be heading back [to Australia] to a summer wedding in January." followed by "We're also planning to go back to Australia next summer (but it will be winter there)." Americans tend to call the middle of the year "the summer" as an overall term for "long school holidays", whereas Australias call our long summer holiday period "Christmas" or "Chrissy holidays" or "Christmas and New Year" or "End of the year." And so it's all a confused mess. So, in the conversation, I started using calendar anchors, rather than seasons!

Anyway, back to trying to read my book in the park: I spent ages trying to make up my mind about what I'd do about feeling too cold. I ended up eating lunch and riding to a coffee shop in a familiar shopping centre on my way back home. It wasn't ideal as it was much noisier than the park, but at least it wasn't home where there are so many other distractions.

I tend to process things better when I write (or talk), but I didn't take my computer or any people with me. Only the book, my phone, and a pencil and notebook. So I'm going to do some processing here.

The book is full of thought provoking stuff. It's key point is that human beings are hardwired for "awe". The problem is we were created to be in awe of God, but because of sin find it impossible, and the awe of God is very quickly replaced by awe of self. He's saying that "awe lies at the bottom of a whole range of human struggles". Nothing else satisfies our awe-wired existence, and thus we end up angry, lonely, disappointed, addicted, bitter, etc. We are self-centred, feel entitled, or experience relational dysfunction, seek to control people, live in fear or envy or drivenness or exhaustion. Tripp traces all these things back to our "awe problem".

In relation to the purpose of my ministry now that life is running at a slower pace, I was struck (in September) by: "Ministry is meant to be something bigger than completing a list of tasks" (p. 49. Ouch. He continues, "You have been called to the high position of making the invisible glory of God visible to people who quickly lose sight of God's glory and begin to look for glories elsewhere (Psalm 145:4).

In many ways he's writing to himself, but also to us all. All Christians are "in ministry" whether paid or not. We are all called to point others to God's glory. If we were all doing this for each other, we would be a more effective community.

It's easy to get very discouraged by all of this, because Tripp goes to great lengths to tell us that we can't help ourselves. On our own we can't fix this. However, God can.

Only when the awe of God rules your heart will you have joy even when people disappoint you and life gets hard. Awe means your heart will be filled more with a sense of blessing than with a sense of want. . . remember that he [God] is so rich in grace that he will never turn a deaf ear to your cries (p 105-106).

We all question God's character, and, despite the theology that we say we believe, we struggle to live that way "at street level". We wonder if God is good, if he is in control, does he have the power to help us, does he even care? Yep, I have these thoughts too (witness it in this blog post from this time last year). Therefore it was reassuring to read this:

God alone will never leave you...he never sends you without going with you. He is your protector, guide, defender, teacher, savior, and healer. He never mocks your weakness but gives you strength...His care is so awesome and so complete that nothing in your life's experience in any way compares." p 105

None of this is new to me. But I keep forgetting, so it is good to be reading a book that reminds me (and of course the Bible is riddled with such reassurances). Not remembering these things leads to discontent and complaints. And it's so easy for complaints to slip into our thoughts and conversation.

You can't do that work of awe reclamation on your own. You desperately need grace—but you and I are called to treasure that work and to pursue and participate in it any way we can. And we are called to humbly admit our need and again and again run to the grace that stands as our only hope of personal growth and change. (p. 129)

So I guess yesterday was partly about me running back to my saviour and admitting my need for his help. Help to grow, to know how to walk with him in this new season, and to fix eyes on him so that my awe is directed towards him again, instead of my own "kingdom of one".

God sent me to Japan again in July. He came with me and he has a purpose for me here in this new season, with all my weaknesses and foibles. I need to trust him . . . still and again! Possibly I'll look back at some time in the future and know what that purpose is (though I suspect it won't be one simple thing). Right now my job is to do my best each day, with God's grace, to point others towards his glory, however that looks in my life and with the strengths and skills that he gave me.

I hope this makes sense to you. I am not sure I can make it any better at this time! I am planning to finish the last three chapters of the book before the end of the year. Maybe I'll write again after I read those, maybe I won't. Perhaps you'll see the outworking of God in my life and writing without me consciously trying to pry it out of my head?