Amazing true story I got to write

Every now and then I take on a short-term publishing project. Last year one of my colleagues asked if I'd be willing to write up the true story of an amazing provision to our mission in the 1990s. It's an exciting story that many who've been around OMF Japan for a while knew little bits of, but almost no one knew the whole story. I thought—This can't be too hard.

After I accepted the challenge I discovered I was wrong about how easy it would be to write, but it was satisfying to do. I was given portions of the story that had been written by different people and two recordings of one person's recollections of events. It was a complex story with many threads and people—one of which went back to before WW2 in New Zealand. Reconciling all the details was really challenging. My brief was to write it so it fitted on two A4 sheets of paper and could be understood by anyone with no prior knowledge of the story, Japan, or OMF. It was hard to pull together the multiple threads to write a coherent story that was so short.

The story is about how, in the 1990s, OMF Japan ended up owning a tract of land near a major train station in one of the most expensive metropolises in the world at that time. OMF was able to build our national headquarters on it as well as a mission guest home. Both of these buildings are still heavily used each week and are key parts of our ministry in this country.

The goal was to have a copy of this story in each of the guest rooms so that anyone who stays or works there can know of God's amazing provision of this fantastic facility.

This week I uploaded the story to our website and you can read it there: https://omf.org/how-omf-japan-came-to-own-the-land-its-headquarters-are-built-on/

Take a look and see how complex a story it is! But at the same time, how amazing it is! I'm so glad we have been able to get this written down so that it won't be forgotten.

This project gave me a lot of respect for people who write lengthy biographies and histories. Their capacity for research and holding a lot of data in their heads, then writing it all down coherently is amazing!

Finishing some biggies

Some things are finishing up, finally! Here are two:


My role with getting the Summer issue of Japan Harvest is pretty much finished. Yay! I shifted dates around with this goal in mind (so that I wasn't working on the magazine during our transition, this end of things is a internet-intensive affair and I couldn't see that working while we were in this period). So, it's very satisfying to actually achieve it.









Yesterday I finished our photo album for home assignment about our last three years living and serving in Japan. This is something I've enthusiastically done before each home assignment, but this time I struggled to get time and motivation. Finally, however, it's done. I think it looks okay, I hope the print copy looks just as good.

Today I ordered a copy. I would have done it yesterday, except that I know that the company I did it through has sales often, so I decided to wait a couple of days. Sure enough, a 40% sale code came through this morning!


And soon we might even hear that we've secured a house to rent for six months. 

Lots to praise God for, even as we say our goodbyes. This morning it was to our Japanese church. Not a big affair, as we're not staff at the church, but it was still good to mark the occasion.

Celebrating the end of another publishing project

Side-by-side with last year's calendar to show the changes.
It required some tight writing, with only two sentences
per month.

This is a project I've spent quite a bit of time on over the year. I produce this for our field every year, but our sales were declining. So I did a survey, put everything out on the table to be considered, and ended up doing a re-design of the product I was already producing. What do you think? I'm pretty impressed. It looks even better in my hand that it did on the screen.

As producer of the calendar I was able to even slip some of my own photos into it. This one is from our camping trip in July.

It is a product designed, not for general sales, but for use by our missionaries as gifts to supporters. We printed 2,200 English copies and 1,000 German copies. I really hope that is is a great blessing to all who receive them.