Big camping goal

We started camping back in 2011 because we wanted to see more of Japan (on a missionary's budget). Back in 2017 I wrote a post that showed, using a jigsaw puzzle, how many prefectures we've visited (either driven through, or stayed a night) And just to clarify: a prefecture is like a state, and—aside from Hokkaido, which is bigger tham Tasmania—they're a lot smaller than Australian states! So it's been an informal goal for some time, but recently I've found myself saying, "We want to camp in every prefecture before we retire." Someone asked me this week how many prefectures we've already camped in, and I wasn't sure. 

So I took some time to figure it out. I think it's 14, so we've got a fair way to go to get all 47 in before we retire (granted, we've theoretically got more than 15 years left). Given we camped in five of these in a single two-week trip, we can probably manage to knock a few off fairly quickly in a summer "camping tour". For example, one trip to Shikoku Island (the smallest of Japan's four main islands, which is roughly one quarter of the size of Tasmania) and we'd be able to visit the four prefectures on the island fairly quickly. Japan doesn't seem so large when you realise that we come from a country that is about 20 times larger and hence the prefectures are a lot smaller than our states.

These are the prefectures we've camped in, some of them multiple times: Hokkaido, Akita, Niigata, Ishikawa, Tochigi, Nagano, Saitama, Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa, Yamanashi, Aichi, Shiga, and Wakayama. (Pictured below)

These are the prefectures we've camped in (we've stayed in several others, but not in tents).

One hard aspect about this year has been how difficult it's been to plan. I had a conversation about this just yesterday. I'm supposed to be helping run a two-week onsite workshop in January. But it's really hard to know if that's going to be able to go ahead in its usual format. How much do you plan, and risk wasting a lot of time? When do you make the call?

Starting school this last month is another example. Usually we would be able to count on certain events happening: like inter-school competitions, camps, bazaars, etc. But this year we simply haven't. A week or so ago I realised that we've got a four-day weekend next month (teachers have good holidays, but there's not much choice about when you take them). October is a beautiful time to camp in this part of the world, so we're working on a plan for that. We're aiming to visit a prefecture that we've missed up till now, but really isn't that far away: Gunma. Nothing set in concrete yet, but you'll hear about it! 

Red arrow is where we live. Purple arrow points to Gunma Prefecture. Not quite
sure how we've missed camping there!

Camping, and planning for camping, are good ways for David and I to stay mentally and emotionally healthy. I'm so excited that there's one more chance before winter clamps its bone-chilling hand on the remainder of our year.

A summer holiday

We got back from our two-week summer holiday on Monday and I've been working hard all week to catch up on editing and writing work that was waiting for me. Therefore I haven't blogged about our holidays or anything else, for that matter, for some time (also worked hard before we left so that I could leave my computer and email packed away for the whole two weeks).

This holiday was sorely needed. It's the first time in two years that we've really stopped for two whole weeks. We did little travel and no socialising. We applied ourselves to relaxing as much as possible. Our days were filled with reading, playing games, jigsaw puzzles, Minecraft (two boys), sleeping, and movies. The latter we did every night (mostly at home, but did go once to the theatre). We also walked to a park down the road several times to play Park Golf...but more about that soon.

I've turned this into something of a "slide show" with a couple of dozen photos, text inserted in-between, so that you can see some of what we did and saw. 

The drive west/north-west out of Tokyo via motorways pretty quickly becomes dominated by mountains and green. It's always a welcome sight.

This is the holiday house that OMF owns and where we stayed. Our apartment was the top floor, which included a loft, so the top two layers of windows here. It was fantastic being able to feast our eyes on farms and the mountains beyond (when we could, they were covered in cloud a lot of the time). 

The grass is trimmed beautifully due to the hard work of David, who spent quite a number of hours with the brush cutter (the property extends down the hill on the other side of the house and the grass was over six-feet tall down there).

Our dining table looked out upon the fields and we watched as the farmer and his wife plowed, planted, and sprayed some of this land (the latter two tasks by hand).

The park 700m from our house is smallish, but a beauty. It has some playground equipment, this pyramid, and a 32-hole mallet/park golf course that we did twice over four days.

Not the greatest photo, but I stuck my finger in to show how small this frog was. We found several of these during our golfing.

One of the features of the park is this picturesque bridge. It doesn't lead you to much, just the rest of the golf course, but it's lovely to look at.

Some of the golf course. The big feature of park/mallet golf is that it is largely in a natural park environment with lots of natural obstacles. This is really a mallet golf course (though we really aren't sure of the differences between the two, except that park golf is mostly a Hokkaido sport). The clubs are different, but we used both (having our own park golf clubs that missionaries gave us a few years back).

One day we walked down to the park and it was a bit cool and rainy, I realised that not only did I have a teal shirt and jacket on, but my umbrella also was too, and this teal-coloured shed was too much to resist!

The road past the house is a bit of a sealed track and is bordered closely by bushland. Just gorgeous green-therapy for our Tokyo-singed eyes.

Not a great view for the camera through the fly screen, but we could watch the sun set every day from our living/dining area. Most days we only caught a short glimpse, because cloud was the predominant feature of the skies.

 It always amuses us, when we're in the Japanese countryside, so see how many of these utility trucks there are. It's the standard vehicle ("ubiquitous" is the word that comes to mind) for anyone on the land and also the managers of campgrounds. They are the equivalent of the Australian "ute" but much smaller and not so "cool".

We slept on the floor in a traditional tatami room. However, the futon were a bit old and my neck didn't appreciate it. I ended up piling up a lot of bedding in order to get a good night sleep and help the headaches stay away.

One of my favourite spots, with key pursuits in view: cross-stitch, a game, a jigsaw, book to read, ice coffee, and TV. And as with all the windows in this apartment: we could see green!

One afternoon we went to a nearby town to play ten-pin bowling, buy shoes at an outlet mall, check out the Lego shop (a family tradition in this area), and finished up with afternoon tea at a coffee shop. A lovely afternoon overall, even if I did terribly at bowling, others did really well. I'm surprised at how hard it is to get teenagers to enjoy a family outing. I didn't expect that when I had younger kids. They weren't even keen about going away on holidays, however, it wasn't as bad as they expected.

This shop was next to traffic lights that we stopped at a number of times. We never went in, but the name of the shop makes you want to! Maybe when we go back in December...

 More park photos: there were some gorgeous fungi around if you kept your eyes open, but they were generally small.

We walked past this pile of logs every time we walked to the park. I loved the pattern!

Side view of the neat stack.

This was the most fun puzzle we've done in a long time. 100 very quirky chickens and a worm to find. There are more in this series, though the company doesn't sell them anymore, I'd love to get my hands on one or more!

Another frog.

 

 One afternoon our youngest and I had a baking afternoon. He made cinnamon rolls and I made bread rolls for a BBQ dinner. The aromas in the house!

And finally, a screenshot to show you where we were. We were about 900m above sea level, just a bit cooler than on the plain, and only a couple of hours from home. We slept beautifully at night.

Maybe you're wondering why a mission would own a holiday house? To start with, Japanese people don't take long holidays. Two weeks is unheard of—I've been asked, "What would you do?" Therefore they don't have affordable self-catering accommodation for this sort of holiday. So, we missonaries find it difficult to take long, affordable holidays. Our mission organisation owning and maintaining holidays houses makes it affordable. We are ever so thankful.

So live

I'm still struggling to find some open space for swimming. That's how I'm phrasing my current "status" at the moment.

It's less than four weeks till we walk away from our lives here in Japan and move to Australia to spend half a year talking to people about what we do in Japan. Preparing for that continues to seem quite messy right now. I'm hoping that I'll have a clear run at getting my current responsibilities under control in these next few days, but every time I see a bit of clear space to swim forward, another "piece of debris" turns up to hinder my movement forward.

Today, it is email-sending difficulties. That always flusters me because when you send an email you trust that it goes to where it should, especially if your computer says it has gone and you don't get an error back. However I am periodically getting messages from people asking about an email reply that I sent and they didn't receive. That's a big concern when I've sent about 140 emails from four of my five regularly used work email accounts in the last 12 days (when the trouble seems to have begun). Yep, my work is very reliant on email.

It's easy to be flustered and I admit I've been there today. Then, late this afternoon, I remembered this article that I saw over the weekend: 
http://www.alifeoverseas.com/death-is-right-around-the-corner-so-live/

Here's a particularly good quote: 

Living and working cross-culturally is hard, and we often forget the joys of the little things. We need rhythms of rest and Sabbath to restore us, to remind us of how much we need the “sensible and human things.”

The content in quotation marks is a CS Lewis quote.

Though I know that it delayed my dealing with all the things I need to deal with in preparation for this move, I'm really glad that I spend my Saturday doing "sensible and human things".

Basically we "played". Friends invited us and another family over for a final get together before we leave. These are two families that we've spent quite a lot of time with over the last three years, socially, and at school events, especially sport, as our kids competed together. Two of our kids graduated together last year. We've travelled together (one of the mums I travelled with to Korea with and shared a room). One family we've camped with several times. These friends have become something like the family you have when you aren't near family.

On Saturday we were invited to lunch. Before we left, David and I spent time in the kitchen together preparing some things to share (I made tortillas from scratch and he made waffles and a yummy chocolate, nutty sauce to go with). That creating in itself was therapeutic.

Then lunch was tasty and fun. I did not expect it to morph into an afternoon of fun, though. The adults played card games and the seven kids kept themselves entertained (eldest 18, youngest 8). At one point I video-called our eldest and everyone spontaneously sang happy birthday to him and several chatted a little with him.

We got home at about 5.30pm. My love-tank was full to overflowing. We'd laughed our way through the afternoon. It was the first day that week that I didn't take a pain killer for a headache!

We didn't get anything done to prepare for our move at the end of the month, but we were reminded to live, and in doing so, attended to our well-being. So as I continue to try to swim forward through all the cluttered water ahead of me, I'm bolstered by the rest we engaged in on Saturday.

Sunshine surprise

This week we've had some unseasonably cold, wet, and gloomy days. Our temperatures went down to low teens (Celsius). I don't enjoy Tokyo's version of cold, so it was particularly discouraging to have to pull out my long underwear, heaters, and extra blankets that we'd only just put away after the long winter months.

I come from a state known as the Sunshine State and there is good reason for that. Only 30% of days are completely overcast. (Tokyo sits much closer to 50%.) I find cloudy, cold days pretty depressing. Though cloudy warm days (i.e. over 20˚C), not so much.

So, after revelling in some gorgeous warm spring days in recent weeks, this week hasn't been so enjoyable. But then yesterday the sun came out. In fact it seemed a little more dramatic than that to me. I drove an hour to Costco in the cold rain. I had the heater on in the car. I was inside for less than two hours and when I came out the sun was shining brightly and inside the car was very warm.

As I drove home I remembered the words I'd read just the night before in John Hindley's You Can Really Grow. He wrote that you can use creation to help you focus your eyes on Jesus. I knew this, but he went a bit further in explaining it.

When we read a verse like Revelation 1:16 'His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance', it is not that the Holy Spirit was searching for a way to describe the brightness of Jesus' face, and realised the sun would be a good image. No, the sun was made in the first place in such a way that it would declare the brightness of Christ. When you see and feel the light and warmth of the sun, you are not meant to think Jesus is a little like this; you are meant to think that the sun is a little like Jesus, and that he put it there to help you remember that and be amazed by him. (p 81)

So, right there, in the midst of Tokyo traffic I was able to worship Jesus by enjoying the warmth and light the sun brought us yesterday afternoon.

I went on in my reading of the book last night and also enjoyed the next chapter about people and stories. It talks about seeing reflections of God in people and in the stories we read and see. Also balancing that by noticing the brokenness that our sin brings into the world.

He challenges his readers to be proactive in our thinking, not just in worshipping through what we notice around us, but also to reject that which will draw us away. Not by withdrawing from society, but by actually just noticing things that will cause us to draw away from Jesus and not allowing those things to take root.

I'm finding this book a refreshing read. Have you been refreshed in spirit by something recently? Do share.

Retreat musings

This year's theme: "Leaving a Lasting Legacy".
Though it's left me pondering whether thinking about
leaving a legacy might be the wrong tack to take, but rather following
Jesus to the max might be better and the legacy will take care of itself?

Before too much more time passes, I want to write about the retreat I went to last Wednesday to Friday. It's the ninth time I've been to this women-in-ministry retreat and I love it every time. It's a time to go away, be with friends, worship in English, and rest from work (although I usually come back tired, but not from work).

One of the friends who greeted me with a hug when we arrived.

It's part of my missionary-life survival kit. I especially love being with friends who know what this missionary lifestyle is about. No explanations are necessary. Though this time I did spend a lot of time answering the question, "How's your son settling in Australia?" That's what I get for blogging and putting my life up on social media!

But friends who've known you for a while in this mobile environment are worth their weight in gold. This was the 25th time this retreat has been held and as part of that they had photos from many of the past retreats, as well as videos from several ladies who've been a part of the leadership team in the past, but are no longer in Japan. It was bittersweet to see these as they are friends who I can no longer share sweet fellowship with.

"Red" sister fellowship.

However, keeping it positive, I enjoyed the friends who were there. One lady asked me, in a slight panic, on Facebook a few weeks ago if I'd be at the retreat. She saw me preparing to go to Australia and wondered if I'd be back in time. I was surprised that someone who I didn't know super well would be so concerned, but encouraged nonetheless. Missionary women go deep fast. Very often we know little about one another and don't have a lot in common (aside from where we work), but we can have deep, honest fellowship regardless. I don't fully understand it, except perhaps that we're bound together by our shared experience of living and serving outside our home culture and thus are more needy and willing to lean on others?

I felt very tired this time going into the retreat. (Maybe I've been overdoing it recently?) It was hard to stay awake during the first night's worship and teaching session. Sometimes I find it's easy to concentrate on the words of songs, but other times, like Wednesday night, worship is singing without engaging the brain very much at all and I've learnt that that's okay. It was great to praise God in English and I was glad for a nice mixture of old and newer songs that I knew as well as ones I didn't.

The retreat has an overabundance of slippers and
rules about where you wear them. They have dining room
slippers and toilet slippers, but also hallway slippers and
chapel slippers! To get from the main building to the chapel
 you change into outdoor shoes and then into slippers again!

The post I wrote at the retreat (here) contained some of the things gleaned from the speaker. I didn't take notes this year, simply trying to soak it in. Probably being so tired made me a little more grumpy and picky with this year's speaker than usual (I was getting grumpy at cliques and a little frustrated that she didn't spend more time in the Bible).

Retreat is usually a time that includes tears for me. Often during worship time, or during times of sharing personally with others. This retreat was no different. Obviously saying goodbye to our son was still quite raw, but the speaker's husband died a few years earlier, so she talked about grief and the loss of Christians in the prime of ministry also brought up tears. She also emphasised that we have a choice in how we react to painful situations: certainly we need to grieve, but beyond that we can choose our response to pain.

Thursday night was enjoyable, it was a celebration of the 25 years of Women in Ministry retreats. We heard from ladies who had gone before us and a little of the history of the retreat. We sang and prayed. We were entertained by a group who'd learnt a new song that day and a spoken piece by two sisters. And we laughed at two ladies who did a skit/song routine that showed the full span of a missionary lifetime, with tongue-in-cheek. Then we finished up with cheesecake (my favourite dessert).

I'm afraid that is a bit of a piece-meal review of the days away, sorry if it comes across like that. But I've come back to Tokyo refreshed in spirit and my love-tank full. I feel ready to deal with the challenges of life again (though I wasn't ready for being hit by a cold first day back at the "office"). I'm thankful that we're planning to be back from home assignment in time to go to the retreat again next year too (Lord willing)!

Spiritual recalibration

I took the morning to ride to a coffee shop (got 55 minutes of riding in, equivalent to 9,350 steps according to this website) and spent a couple of hours doing some spiritual recalibration.

My main take-away? That the rest in verses 28-31 of Isaiah 40 may have been eluding me because the awesomeness of God that the earlier part of the chapter lays out was not as much in my thoughts as it should have been. And that I can fly (vs 31) not because of who I am or because I'm gifted or in control or appreciated but because of who God is and because he, by his great grace, is committed to saving me.

The other take-away is that this kind of recalibration needs to happen again and again and again. It is not a sign of failure, it is a sign of human-ness (and the sin that indwells all of us) and that is no shame.

Friday Fragments

Yesterday I did more than just ride to the park and take photos. I rode home via a large road that has lots of shops along it. I'm looking for a case for my camera, and stopped at a couple of secondhand stores along the way, which is always fun. I didn't find any reasonably priced camera cases that I liked, but I did see these:

Very fun. I find myself wondering if I could find a use for one of them, because they're so cute! I'd go back in a flash if I could just think of a good reason...

This next photo is from the park. What do you think these are? (I'm waiting to see your answer in comments below or on Facebook, if you're a FB friend.)

One of the other stores I went to is a discount store. Not one of my favourites because it induces visual and auditory overload. The idea, I think, is that they stuff the store with goods and people get a thrill looking for "just the thing". But there is so much stuff! I took a short video to give you the idea of not just the visual, but the auditory (turn the volume up to get the true effect). There was at minimum two different sound tracks playing, often more, depending on where you were standing (lots of shops in Japan have motion-sensored audio recordings that play when you walk past them plus the general shop songs as well as other seemingly random tracks urging you to buy various products you might be located near).

They also had these for sale! Um, no thanks.

I guess the below goes with the above? I showed the boys and they wanted to know what a "girdle" was.

Now this is the ladies rest room. I guess this is where stressed customers and staff go when they are feeling overwhelmed by the store. REALLY a rest room. Pity there were no sofas!

The beautiful tiles even extended to the toilet cubicles!

So this IS titled Friday Fragments. My Friday contribution is a random happening at a coffee shop. I'd planned to do three things this morning: go to an hour-long prayer meeting  at school, the doctor to get more asthma meds, and groceries. 

I ended up staying longer after the prayer meeting to help a new mum figure out how to apply for base clearance to come to track and field meets at the US base in April/May. Time well spent!

Then I spent two hours waiting at the doctor and pharmacy for my meds. Thankfully I had my phone and internet access, so I got some little jobs done while sitting there (like a meeting rescheduled, a couple of small emails sent etc., even the bare bones of a couple of blog posts).

By then I was feeling a bit flaky, so I decided to stop for a coffee at my favourite local coffee shop before going on for groceries. It brought back a special memory of doing the same thing with my mum on occasion, when doing errands with her on a Friday morning.

While I was there, I was again on FB when I saw a message from a great friend (my matron of honour). There was a spare seat across from me and I thought it would have been fantastic if she'd been able to join me for coffee (she lives in Wagga Wagga in Australia). Well, we managed to connect up, via Video call on Facebook! What a sweet surprise for us both. It's been months since we've actually chatted. Precious blessings.

"I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing." (Ezekiel 31:26 NIV)

Taking time to rest

One thing that got me through an extra busy weekend was my plan to take some time off on Tuesday. My schedule was clear and I was able to choose to do something other than work.

In fact it turned out beautifully. Yesterday was an unseasonably warm day of around 20 degrees (though quite cloudy), I decided to ride to a coffee shop about six kilometres away and read a book for a couple of hours. Reading fiction has been my go-to relaxation tool for almost my whole life. I'd been craving a decent "coffee shop coffee" for a while and not been able to get any satisfaction, so this was perfect in many ways. Oh, the exercise was great too.

It was a new area for me to ride to (I've been there on a train and in a car and bus, but a bike is different). It is another city centre, only six k's from here, and with two train stations in-between! My Australian mind boggles. Tall buildings, underpasses, and over passes, it really did feel as though I'd gone a lot further.


It took me a while to find a park for my bike because the streets around the shop I was heading for were plastered with these No Bike Parking signs. Eventually I found a grocery store with individual paid bike stands (you pay a machine after you've been there more than an hour).

I rode home via our usual grocery store to do the shopping I usually would do on Monday and got home in time for lunch, quite refreshed. I'm sure the coffee helped my energy levels, but I did feel more calm and ready to get into work than I had earlier in the day.

Get the idea? I've just discovered our city has also
designated a smoke-free area around the city centre.

I'm not a superhuman
I'm writing this post, not to make you envious of my flexible schedule, but because I want you to know that I am not a superhuman. I get exhausted. What I did from Friday to Monday wasn't normal for me and wasn't healthy either, it didn't give me any margin to take care of myself or my family. 

Entrance to the Kitano Shrine.

I get discouraged when I hear missionaries or pastors talk about how much they work and how little time off they get. I can't figure whether they're asking for our prayers or looking for sympathy or even subconsciously boasting. I just want them to stop before they get stopped by ill health.

But I'm also aware that each of us has different energy levels as well as different coping methods. On the flip-side, we've all got hidden stresses or energy drainers that others don't see.

I have a fairly high energy level and tend to invest myself in things passionately. But I wear out quickly because I tend to sprint and not pace myself. My husband can keep going longer than me most times because he doesn't invest as much energy into everything he does, he just rocks along at a steady pace.

I've also found that a person's backstory can significantly effect how much they appear to be doing.

For example from my own life:

I have three big boys, big active boys who exhaust me. Though I tend not to mention my mothering as a prominent use of my time currently because they're so much more independent than they used to be and aren't in my care for the majority of the weekday (at the minimum they're gone from 8.20 to 3.30, but our oldest is often not home until after 6.30 during wresting season). That doesn't mean that I don't have a significant role to play that takes time and energy. My time from the time they come home is not completely my own and these days that is right up to bedtime. David and I usually carve out about 40 minutes to chill with a video, but other than that we're fair game for all sorts of "parenting" things from the obvious preparation of dinner, signing homework, answering questions, and breaking up fight to the less obvious of making them shower, correcting their tone of voice, making scheduling decisions for the future etc.

So someone could look at me and think that I actually have a lot of time on my hands, with my boys getting so big and relatively independent, but actually that's not as true as you might think. They can be very emotionally draining. So even though I'm "at home" that doesn't mean that I'm relaxing. Quite different to a childless couple or a couple whose children have already left home. Though I'm aware that these life situations have their own challenges.

But now I rant and rave. You know what I mean. I struggle not to compare myself with others, I struggle when others appear to be achieving more than me. But I really shouldn't. And I really don't want you to compare yourself to me either. I don't want you to look at what I did on the weekend and think I'm any better than you just because I was busy.

We are all "fearfully and wonderfully made; [God's] works are wonderful, I know that full well" (Psalm 139:14, NIV).

So take care of yourself. You're precious and not to be dealt with harshly, as in with an overly busy schedule.

Early Spring ride

A cost of busyness often is a lack of time for the exercise. I have taken a long ride for several weeks, this week I knew it was time but kept an eye on the weather. We've had lots of cold, rainy days, but I could see some warmer sunny days coming so I held off going riding until yesterday. 

Oh and it was so worth it! Check out these photos. 

Daffodils on my route there.

Sakura (cherry blossoms) also on my route.

It isn't easy to catch cherry blossoms on a blue-sky day in Tokyo. Today the sky is grey.

I sat on grass in the warm sun and gazed at this sight in the park. I really didn't want to leave, it was so soul-refreshing and reviving. 

Most of the trees in the park still had their winter bare-ness, but if you looked closely some had pregnant buds. 

We're not sure if this is a plum or cherry blossom, but it's gorgeous nonetheless. 

These look like weeds, but are a seasonal flower that also only last a short time. They're Rapeseed Flowers (harvested for canola oil in some places in the world) and flower at about the same time as Cherry blossoms here. So they're often planted together and provide a beautiful contrast for each other. 

These daffodils are just down the road from us outside a small hospital. Easy to miss, but gorgeous after a long cold winter.

I rode about 18km yesterday on my mamachari. With the temperature at about 18C, it was fantastic to be out without cowering under tonnes of layers. This map I give you to provide context. 

My ride is in green. You can just see the tip of
Tokyo Bay to the east. We're about
an hour from there by train, only 26km.

We live where the four blue lines converge. I did some local grocery shopping after my ride to the park and left my app running to capture that riding too. 

I'm keen to go back to the park soon—tulips and more cherry blossoms will be out soon. The ride definitely provides more than just exercise. I feel refreshed and more positive now.