Unexpected tears

More unexpected joy this week, but you're going to have to bear with me a tiny bit because there's backstory to why I was crying during a two-hour predominantly Japanese-language OMF celebration on Monday.

For a long time I've had a passion to share missionary's stories. It's stories that grab people's attention, and missionaries collectively have some amazing ones to tell, but often not the time or skill or passion to get them out to a wider audience. It's my joy to be pretty much working with missionaries and their stories most of the time these days. 

In 2017 I had a unique opportunity to start a blog for OMF Japan that has become a wonderful vehicle for getting missionary's stories about Japan out to a wide audience. I've had the support of OMF Japan leadership and the field in this endeavour and the last eight years we have published one story a week on our website...that's around 400 stories. At almost the same time I joined with one of my colleagues to start OMF Japan Facebook and Instagram pages as ways to get our website stories seen even further.

Fast forward to today and I'm working with a creative team of five on our social media, and getting stories from across Japan to share with thousands of our followers. In September this year we had the theme "Partnering with Japanese churches" and one of my team members asked one of her colleagues, AJ, for a story about the church that he is planting in partnership with their church. AJ wrote a really good story. As soon as I read it I knew this was important to share with our audience. So, I edited it and then we got it out there (you can see it here).

On Monday, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of missionaries coming to Japan with OMF and 60th anniversary of missionaries going from Japan to other parts of Asia with OMF. It was a joint two-hour gathering in a church in downtown Tokyo.

A portion of AJ's story was shared as a key part of the message presented by OMF International's General Director (GD), in fact, he used it to bookend his talk on John 3: 29, 30.

In particular, this bit:

When we first began exploring the idea of planting a new church, I sat down with our Japanese pastor from Hatogaya and admitted, “I am scared of this undertaking.” . . .

Pastor Oshima listened and I will never forget his response. He simply smiled and said, “That’s okay. I’m scared too. Let’s be scared together.” 

I was stunned, and delighted. And teary. 

Our organisation is very large, over 2,500 people actively engaged in various ways across the globe. The GD is from Taiwan and works in Singapore, I've met him only once and never had a conversation with him. Yet this story had reached him and he used it to encourage his largely Japanese audience (with translation) to push on in doing God's work.

I only had a tiny part to play in this, but somehow God took my "two small fish" and used them for his glory.

To be fair, there were other elements in the gathering that had me pulling out a tissue, before and after this surprise. Most of the talking was in Japanese and the only speech that I really understood was the one spoken in English by the GD. 

But we sang. One of the songs, "One Voice" I first encountered it in Japanese during our first term in Hokkaido. I learned it during a very difficult time in my life when I felt pretty useless and exhausted (two little boys under 5 + trying to work in a Japanese church without much language or capacity). It makes me emotional most times I sing it! Interestingly, the English version doesn't affect me at all!

English lyrics:

Father, we ask of You this day
Come and heal our land
Knit our hearts together
That Your glory might be seen in us
Then the world will know
That Jesus Christ is Lord

Let us be one voice that glorifies Your name
Let us be one voice declaring that You reign
Let us be one voice in love and harmony
And we pray, O God, grant us unity

Now is the time for you and I
To join our hearts in praise
That the name of Jesus
Will be lifted high above the earth
Then the world will know
That Jesus Christ is Lord

After the service they had some refreshments and there was much mingling amongst those gathered. The prayer booklet, Beneath the Surface, was for sale, in English and Japanese, this is another project that I had deep involvement in in 2019/20. I'm always excited to see it "out in the wild" as it's also one of my editing babies! I had just had a conversation the day before with someone from our church who's very excited about this booklet, she's sent it to her mum in New Zealand who is also excited and it giving it away to whoever she can. My friend asked me for 10 more copies!

I was exhausted by the end of Monday. It included four trains and an hour-long car journey and constant interaction from the moment I climbed into the car before 8 am. But also so much brimming with joy at God's good gifts to me that day. Though I periodically feel pretty useless and not worthy of being used by God in Japan, he continues to call me and to encourage me, and even use my "two small fish" (see the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand in John 6).

Opportunity to tell about a lifetime of learning to trust God

I "gave my testimony" at church a couple of weeks ago. That phrase is generally associated with telling how you came to Christ. But for some people like me, that is not an especially enthralling story because we came to Christ as a young child with no drama. I can't even remember a time I didn't believe in God, so there really isn't much to tell.

These are the gorgeous flowers
that stood in front of the lectern are
a type of protea, native to South 
Africa. But they are a close relative
to the Australian native plants:
banksias, grevilleas, and macadamias.

 But "testimony" also means "an open acknowledgment" or "a public profession of religious experience" according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. So, I called it "A lifetime of learning to trust God" and told a bigger story about my life. I said a bit about my childhood, a bit about how I came to meet David and came to Japan, a bit about how I came to be an editor and writer. The last third of my story was about struggling to trust God as I walked alongside our kids, as they finished high school and moved into adult life. Much of this is stuff I've written about here at various times, though it was a challenge to squeeze the details out so that I could present it in under 15 minutes.

I have stood up in front of churches and other gatherings many times to tell stories about life and ministry in Japan, it's part of our job when we're on home assignment (which we've done for a total of 4 ½ years during the last 25 years). I can't remember having an opportunity like this before. I did have to give my testimony in Japanese at language school, but doing that in (my poor) Japanese was a very different experience to speaking in my heart language.

This one turned out to be a pretty teary experience, even bits that were from a very long time ago! I know that public speaking makes me nervous, which in turn makes me more likely to be emotional when I speak, so I had tissues with me, but I didn't expect be this tearful! 

But I was very encouraged by the opportunity to be heard by the whole church. An experience like that often means an emotional connection with the audience and I've had numerous conversations since then confirming that. I pray that it was helpful for some to hear that this very ordinary person, who happens to have the label "missionary", struggles in her faith, just like they do.

The value of listening

The other day I got a message from someone in our organisation in Australia who I don't know. Her role is specifically about helping advise our members about their kids, as needed. We've never met. However, somehow she'd discovered this blog and had been reading bits of our story and wanted to know what we've learned along the way, especially in regards to neurodivergence and what help we'd received that she could pass on to others if she needed to.

A photo from a few years back when the
boys all lived with us in Japan.

I asked if she would be interested in hearing our story in detail. I explained that it would just be easier to tell her, because it's a long, complex story—which is pretty normal for neurodivergence, but I suspect ours is more complex because of the cross-cultural elements. It's a story that would take me hours, even as a fast writer, to get down. She agreed, and we talked for nearly two hours. Well, most of that talking was me! She asked some great questions, including some that I've never been asked before. But I think we were both exhausted at the end. 

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since. It was great to be really listened to (she was even taking notes). But it was hard to make sure I included all the bits and pieces. The story went back around 20–25 years and there were so many threads. In the days that followed that conversation, I kept thinking of more things that I could have added! But I think that in the end she got all (and probably much more) than she needed. It made me aware again of the various people God has given me along the way who have listened to me tell parts of our story, with all my struggles, questions, and tears. I'm so thankful. I'm thankful to all who have prayed for us, usually without much information, but just that we were struggling.

It's a huge blessing to be able to look back at all of that and see where our kids are now and that they're all okay. One of the hardest things about being a parent is not knowing the end of the story. Of course all parents have to make decisions without all the information that you feel you need (especially a comparison between the outcomes of two different decisions). Not knowing what long-term impact your decisions will have on your kid is difficult, but when your children aren't thriving or "fitting the norm" it's even harder. One of the extra hard things about being a missionary parent is not having many people around you whose situation is similar to yours and few who understand the nuances of your situation. It can be quite a lonely and difficult place to do parenting and make hard decisions.

So, what's the point of me sharing this? I think, to shed light on the difficulty of being a parent of a kid with neurodivergence and that it is even harder when one is living a missionary life. But most especially to note that the most valuable thing you might be able to do for such a parent is to listen to them. You might not be able to provide any solutions, or point a parent to a place where they can get help, or help them make an important decision, but if they feel heard then that is a help. Parenting kids who have difficulties is a lonely job, it's hard for others to understand the daily challenges you face. If someone is willing to stop and listen to you talk about those challenges, it's a huge encouragement.

Telling stories and being heard

I've had more time to write this week than I've had for some time. It's been lovely. One of the things I've been writing is my regular column about writing for the upcoming Japan Harvest magazine. But the topic is convicting: stories. I'm passionate about telling true stories, but, like many people who write non-fiction, I often fail to use them. Stories often aren't as direct and take up more space. It also takes attention to notice some stories. Others, like my hair-braiding story, told here just are begging to be shared.

So, I feel compelled to write a blog post this afternoon, but am struggling to find a story to share with you, because as an editor so much of the time I'm working with other people's stories and not having experiences that can be told...but it's good to struggle sometimes. Here are some stories from the last couple of weeks that I hope you find encouraging:

Talent Show

On Tuesday evening we went to the school's Senior Talent Show. This has been a tradition for many years, but of course this tradition has been interrupted in the last couple of years. It's a fundraiser put on by the senior class in preparation for their overseas ministry trip in March. It is usually a mixture of fun and serious acts, but there are also a reasonable number of acts that just make the parents and teachers feel old because they are based around current pop culture that we're not familiar with. 

I did enjoy most of the evening, but it did go on a little too long (2 hr 40 min). Or perhaps I'm just getting old and unused to going out in the evening? I have to admit to still feeling a little exhausted by large groups of people.

It was fun to have one extra senior staying at our house that evening because he lives far away, and to chat with our son and his friend the next morning . . . but they're tired. I keep reminding myself that I was the same way at the same age and that it's just for a limited time. This will be all over in less than four months!

The importance of people-focus

Twice in the last few days I've had unexpected conversations with team members. Members of teams I manage. The teams I work with are quite task-focused—we're teams with specific outcome objectives: publishing a magazine and social media posts (for the purpose of mobilising for mission in Japan). So, I'm not sure I do a great job at caring for the people in my teams because I spend a lot of my time taking care of many tasks with deadlines. I often measure how I'm going in my job with how many tasks I've been able to tick off my list. Because both teams work remotely, I often go weeks without talking to any team members directly. We communicate a lot via text, email, and other online tools. 

So, spontaneous opportunities this week to connect (via video calls) with two team members who are struggling in different ways was unusual, but also good. 

I also led an online prayer meeting with about half the magazine team and it was good to not just pray for magazine matters, but to pray for one another and the things that are on our hearts and minds also. I felt heard and I hope they felt heard too.

Being heard

Last week I had another online prayer meeting with some expat mums in (or with a recent connection to) Japan who have kids with special needs—various needs, various ages. I'm new to their group, but I already had met most of the mums in other contexts. I'm starting to feel like these are "my people", and I find myself telling them things that few other people know. 

Recently I've found that what we've dealt with as parents over the last few years in terms of mental health and neurodiversity has meant I've found it harder to connect closely with many people. There is an experiential gap, one that's hard to define. People who don't have an experience with such parenting challenges can find it hard to understand, or simply don't want to, and I feel constrained in what I feel I can share with them. I wrote a bit about this with a great deal of emotion, back in October. There is great power in feeling like you're understood, and that people want to hear about what you're deeply struggling with. I'm so thankful I was "found" by one of these ladies last year and welcomed into their midst.

It's hard to literally see hills from our location
in Tokyo (Mt Fuji is visible from certain 
points, but not our house). This is a view
of mountains from a wrestling venue back
in December, a place I'll be returning to
next month for a Track and Field meet.

I lift my eyes to the hills

At the magazine prayer meeting I'd decided to help us focus by listening to a song based on Psalm 121, which starts, "I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth". 

Most of the team, it turns out, are labouring under some heavy burdens, so this was indeed God going before and leading me to use this psalm and song in our time together. Maybe this song will help you as you struggle with something today too: Psalm 121 (I Lift My Eyes) Lyric Video • Kristyn Getty • Jordan Kauflin • Matt Merker

My writing journey

And to demonstrate how fried my brain is, I'm also
sharing a photo that is completely unrelated to this
post. But it is my most favourite sunrise experience.
Photo taken when we were camping on the banks of
the largest lake in Japan several years ago. It was
an accidental sunrise sighting: I'd merely gotten up to
use the toilet facilities (at 4am) and found this outside
our tent!

This is the second week that I'm helping facilitate a workshop for our organisation. It helps workers prepare to go back to their home country to connect up with those who've supported them and, very often, report back about the work they've been doing. This week we're focusing on spoken communication, in particular, a modular system of putting a presentation together that involves telling two-minute stories. I've had the privilege of sharing some examples of stories from my own life with the participants. Here's one I shared today, and I thought you might be interested to read and a portion of my journey:

Do you enjoy hearing people’s stories? Most people do. I have the privilege of working with people to share their stories.

Early in 2007, I was questioning my calling as a missionary. I spent most of my days at home with three kids under 8. Not just that, but I barely knew anyone locally besides the Japanese mums at my son’s kindergarten. We’d moved to Tokyo less than 3 years earlier so that my husband could follow his calling to teach missionary kids. I was happy for him, but I found myself without the capacity to do much—not only was I busy with three young boys, but my Japanese was pretty terrible.

I asked God: why did you bring me to Japan and yet I can’t do anything like what I imagined a missionary could do? That was a turning point.

That year David gave me a CD from a guest speaker at the school, one of the songs called “Seize the Day”, spoke to my heart: I should be seeking what God had for me to do that was in line with my gifting, limitations, and life stage. A colleague volunteered to take care of our kids so I could go to a three-day missionary women’s retreat where the theme was writing your story. By mid-year I‘d started exploring the writing world. I’d joined a small international writing group, entered a writing competition, and wrote an article about one of our experiences in Japan. Later that same year I did a one-on-one online writing course with an experienced Christian writer.

Three years later, in 2010, I went to an OMF writing workshop in Hong Kong. There I realised that my heart’s desire was not to write a book, but to tell the stories of ordinary people who happen to be missionaries. Someone prayed at that time that God would bring people across my path whose stories I could tell. Forward twelve years to now, and I spend most of my time working on missionaries’ stories as an editor. As a magazine editor and OMF Japan’s social media manager I’ve helped get hundreds of stories out to thousands of people. I’m so thankful that God has led me to serve him in this unique way.

A story blast from the past

This week I'm preparing to help facilitate a two-week online workshop. I'm not experienced at teaching (and would be inclined to say, not good at it either). Nevertheless, I was challenged this week by an article I had to edit that it's important to not avoid doing everything that you aren't good at. That's a real temptation for me! 

Anyway, I'm trying to "marinate" in the content I have to present next week (that's the advice of a teacher friend) and hope that I'll be able to wing it once we get there and there won't be too many awkward moments.

One of the parts I like about this course is that it encourages (actually, requires) people to write their stories. It's a course that helps to prepare missionaries to go back to their home countries and share with people there about Japan and their ministry here. 

So, as a facilitator, we have to model "story sharing". The particular format they've chosen is to share "module stories" of two minutes each. I've actually gotten quite distracted writing some of my own stories and looking at things I've written in the past. 

I need to get back to work, but want to share with you a fiction story that I'd forgotten I'd written, even though it was only written five years ago, but it's quite poignant as it's based on real experiences in language school 20 years ago.

“Don’t pick up the phone.”

This is my mantra in my first year in Japan. It is too intimidating. It presents an impenetrable divide between me and the person on the other end called language and there seems to be no point. A while ago our language adviser found out that I was not answering the phone and I was in trouble. After all, I am in language school, I am supposed to be boldly confronting this wall of language.

Trouble is, like a rock climber with sweaty hands, I struggle to find a handhold. The footholds don’t match my feet and my progress seems unmeasurable. Whenever I do get a handhold it turns out it’s the wrong one. Or it doesn’t allow me to get a foothold too and then my teacher corrects me. As soon as she does I lose my grip and my confidence in the same moment. There just doesn’t seem to be a way forward to begin to climb that wall.

I used to be a daredevil, that, after all, is how I came to play both netball and the clarinet. I came close to representing my state in netball and my senior year at school was a blur of activity. As a child I had too much energy, so my mum sought to direct that into extra activities. It seemed to work, or maybe it drained me of spunk? Because I don’t feel like a daredevil anymore.

“Brrrrrring, brrrring . . . brrrrring, brrrrrring” Oh no!

“Brrrrrring, brrrring.”

“Ah hello?”

“Ohayogosaimasu, blah blah blah…” The rest was a blur.  I presume they introduced themselves.

“Goshujin . . . blah blah blah . . . masu?” Ah, are they looking for my husband? He’s not here, otherwise he would have answered the phone. Um, how do I say, “Not here?”

“Ummmm. Gakko desu.” He’s at language school, how do I say that?

Silence

So I venture: “Arimasen.” Does that mean not here? No, maybe it means doesn’t exist? “Go ji desu.” I think I said five o’clock. That’s what time I think he’s coming home.

“Go ji kaerimasu?” He’s coming home at five?

“Ummm, hai.” Yes, am I agreeing to the right thing?

“Shitsu . . . blah blah blah.”

Click.

Sigh. Daredevil I am not. Surely there is a better way to live than this? But how can I admit to being defeated by a language? How can I continue to live in a land where I can’t even answer the phone and tell someone that my husband is out and won’t be back until 5 pm?

My problem is not only that I’m bad at learning language, I’m bad at quitting too. I can’t come up with a good enough reason to call it quits here. We spent a long time telling people how much Japanese needed Jesus, and that we were going to help. How could we just turn our backs on that? What would we tell everyone?

But secretly, I’m looking. I’m checking the internet for jobs in Australia. Oh how I dream of going back to a place where I can talk to anyone I like. To a place I can read. To a place where I’m not scared of the phone.

But I can’t admit it to my husband. He’s soaring away from me in language learning. He loves the challenge, I hate it. He’s climbing up that wall at a speed that is shocking to me.

“Brrring brrrring” Oh no, not again!

“Ah, hello?”

A familiar voice greeted me, “Hi, it’s me.” Phew, I sink to the floor, so weary of the fear.

“Hey darling, when will you be home? I just got a call from some unknown person who, I think, wanted to know.”

“I wonder what that was about? Maybe it’s our new table they’re going to deliver. I’m just leaving now, do you want anything from the store?”

“Just a new brain.”

“Ah, what?”

“Never mind. I think we need some milk and eggs.”

“Great, I’ll be home soon. Love you.”

“Love you too. Bye”

Click

Fantastic, just enough time to write an email to my best friend. I scurry over to the computer. 

“Hi Sal, 

I miss you!!!!!! I’m not doing well today. I just can’t stand it here. The phone rang today and I answered it, but I could barely understand a word that was spoken. I still don’t know who it was and why they called, or if I managed to communicate anything with them. How am I going to keep living like this?

The other day I went to the store and I put four milk bottles in my basket. The cashier took two away from me at the checkout and wouldn’t let me buy them. I’m not sure why. Then when I got home I tried to make dinner. I just felt so down that it was hard to get up the motivation to cook. I was making pizza on bread slices (no pizza bases here), but because our kitchen is so small first I had to wash and dry up all the dishes and put them away so that I’d have room to cut stuff up. I’d rushed out so fast this morning that I didn’t get to them and, presumably, Phil didn’t get to them either. Somehow doing all that just to get the space to chop up stuff for simple pizzas seemed like too much work. I ended up preparing everything on the dining room table in the other room. We ended up with a lot of washing up afterwards, but at least we got dinner.

Daniel's doing well at language, but they want him to be a church planter and he’s not so sure about that. Me, well I’ve got no idea what I’m doing here. How are we going to work in a church when I can’t even answer the phone?

Tell me I can come home? Help me find a way I can get out of this.

I miss you so much, can I have a virtual hug?

Love,

Tess.”

I heard a key in the front door and a blast of cold air rushed into the room. “Hi honey, I’m home.”

My greeting was less than enthusiastic; I’ve never been good at pretending I feel good when I don’t. “That was fast.”

As he shook the snow off his boots and hung up his coat he asked, “What’s for dinner?”

“Oh, I haven’t got that far yet. I was totally derailed by that phone conversation.”

“Hmph. I’m hungry.”

“Well, I’ll figure something out. Did you get the eggs? Is it okay if I scramble them?”

“I suppose so. Are you okay?”

“Yeeeees, maybe not.” My brave mask started to crumble. Heck, where’s the tissues?

“What’s up?”

“I really hate living here. I can’t even answer the phone without sounding like a complete fool. I’m stuck. I hate being so dependent on other people and not knowing what’s going on. I’m lonely too. When did I last have a good conversation over coffee with a girlfriend who’s known me more than a couple of months?” I paused as I blew my nose.

“Yes…”

“Well, too be honest I’ve been looking at jobs in Australia and there’s this really good sounding one in Dalby, not so far from my family.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Well maybe this was all a mistake, maybe we misread the situation. Maybe we’re not meant to be missionaries?”

“But a lot of people have given money for us to do this. We spent so many months visiting churches telling them this was God’s calling for us. How can we just give up? What will we say to everyone?”

“Yeah, well I had that thought too. But how can I go on?”

“But what if I don’t want to go back to Australia?”

“Oh, well . . . “I pulled out a bowl and started breaking the eggs into it. “Um, I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to keep trying?”

The next day we have a guest at the language school, Rose, a missionary from England who’s in her 50s and been in Japan since she was my age. Her talk is about looking after ourselves, how to “stay the course”.

Afterwards there is time for questions and before I could think I burst out with, “But what if it’s too hard? What if we can’t envisage ourselves staying until we’re 50?”

She looks at me and I know that she’d been where I am. She said, “You do it one day at a time. Can you last out today? Then do it. And tomorrow you ask yourself the same thing. That’s how I’m still here.”

“Does it get easier?” I blurt.

“Yes, in a way it does.”

At 5pm Daniel came home to a wife that was just a tiny bit happier.

He said, “Hi darling. How was your day?”

“A little better. I still made tons of mistakes in my classes and messed up at the pharmacy, but I think I can stay tomorrow.”

He looked puzzled, “What do you mean? Where are you going?”

“Oh, nowhere. Rose spoke at language school today, I’m sorry you couldn’t be there. She said just do this one day at a time. Don’t let your mind race ahead too far. I’m thinking that I can manage that, for now.”

He grabbed me in a hug, and I grabbed the tissues again.

Rabbit holes, land tax reform, and the angel Gabriel

Last Wednesday my work took me down a rabbit hole that started with the question "Why does Japan's school, church, and financial year start in April?" My journey took me to land tax reform in the 1800s in Japan, to international financial years, and then to British history, all the way to the angel Gabriel! When I got there I realised I'd probably gone too far and needed some help.

I'm very thankful for the internet. Without which I'd be much more
limited in my ability to research.

Early on in my journey into editing I heard someone say, "Editors need to be jacks of all trades". That is, they need to know a little about a lot of things. Our specialty is written communication and helping that to be the best it can be for whatever audience and medium we're working with. But the content we work on is often quite varied. I find I have to research all sorts of things, some fascinating, some very complex, others just plain confusing.

The result is that I often learn lots of interesting things, but also that I can feel out of my depth pretty easily. Take last week for example, I love history, so that was fine, but land tax reform is not exactly my area of expertise! Then part of the trail was in Japanese, which is definitely not my area of expertise. I'm thankful that very early on as a young professional in a rural hospital I learned to network and to ask for help.

Last week I also started writing a social media update myself about why it's hard for Japanese companies to transition to working at home. That also took me down intriguing trails, including statistics about the sizes of houses around the world (I was surprised to find that Japanese don't live in some of the tiniest places, and that Australians live in some of the largest places, on average). I'm waiting on more information from a colleague to finish writing that piece, it was harder to write than I'd imagined.

Sometimes we're fact checking when we editors (and writers) do this, or just checking terminology, at other times we're just trying to get a more complete understanding of the situation so that we can ensure clear, simple communication (usually I find out a lot more than needs to be communicated).

And so, you're wondering what Gabriel has to do with Japan's school year starting in April? Well it turns out that the tax reforms in the 1870s in Japan was partly influenced by Britain, a major global power at the time, starting their financial year in April. According to legend England and Ireland used to start their year on March 25, in commemoration of the angel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus (read about it here), and it gets more confusing as their financial year now starts on April 6! A bunch of fascinating facts, but much more than I needed to know to do my job last Wednesday.

Different presentations every time

So, one of our most obvious jobs these six-months is the up-front speaking. We spoke at two churches in July, and three Sunday morning church services plus one mid-week church meeting and three other groups in August. September is not too much different.

For our sanity we're using the same basic presentation every time. One that we mostly prepared before we came to Australia. However, it also gets tweaked every time according to what we've been asked to provide, the audience, the time we've been given. We add bits in, or take them out, and now, ⅓ of the way through our time here, getting quite adept at this. Tweaking also means altering the power point presentation as needed. 

For example, here are some of the requirements we've been asked to meet:

Church A: 
1.     Share during the service for 5-10 minutes with maybe a summary of what’s been happening in your family and in Japan
2.     After morning tea, to do a 45 minute more detailed summary/presentation of your ministry and OMF’s ministry in Japan (and able to take questions at the end)

Church B:
He (pastor) concurs and you have all the time from 10.00am to present your story and finishing with David preaching. We will need to finish at 10.45

Church C:
Would you be interested in attending a church breakfast? You would have the floor after we had all eaten.

Meeting at a theological college:

[Speaking] from 0930-1020 followed by morning tea 1020-1050 where there is time to chat with the students in a more relaxed setting. . . it will be great for them to hear directly from you of your own experiences, positive and negative, your learned priorities and how you have changed or had to adapt during your time away from Australia. Plus whatever else you deem appropriate. 

Church D:

MLT will try and organise you to visit Bible study groups between those dates and speak at the Mission spot on the Sunday. The Mission spot is 10 mins long and if you have any visuals if you please contact this person...

Mid-week church meeting:

We would like to invite you to one of our Wednesday mission nights to share with us. You have been once before and always appreciated.  I remember you had an activity on sorting garbage in Japan. We start at 7pm and finish at 9pm, with a coffee break at 7.40pm.

Another mid-week church meeting:

Our group can be anything from 12 – 26 people, and yes seniors. All able to drive them selves to the church. We don’t know anything about you or your mission. The group loves hearing from those working in Gods field and you would be warmly welcomed.

We start at 9.30am with morning tea, followed by a devotion – I can get someone from our group to do it or you can do it – about 15 minutes. Then our guest speaker for about 30 minutes with a question time if possible. We can provide a computer and screen if you want to show photos etc.

As you can see our "brief" varies significantly between groups. Sometimes this is written clearly in an email, sometimes it is nutted out over a number of emails or instant messages, or even on the phone (shock! Yes, it still does happen!)

It keeps us on our toes. We enjoy the more formal, small group times where we can interact with our listeners more, but understand the value of getting some precious minutes in front of the captive audience on a Sunday morning.

Our theme of Support and Mobilisation is helping to keep our presentations focused. We're telling people how important it is to have support personnel in mission and putting faces on what that looks like.

Of course this whole thing comes unravelled if we ever have to face the same audience twice, but thankfully that doesn't happen very often.

Ah, but now I need to get back to actually doing that: editing work for the magazine. Thankfully our two meetings for Sunday are pretty well organised, thanks to our method above, plus a little bit of experience under our belts (more than four years experience over the last 20 years) and I can spend time doing other things!

Re-entry thoughts

These last weeks have been so busy! Our youngest son started at his old Australian school last Thursday. A lot of the busyness since we landed in Australia was focused on getting key things done before he started school. 

This is an old photo from just before we left to return to Japan last
time, when our youngest son (middle) was representing the school in a
cross-country meet. Consistency, like the same school, has
helped us all in these big adjustments. 

Now we're left doing the less urgent, but still important things. For example, me getting to an optometrist, which I did this morning and ended up spending two hours there. 

It was a good experience, actually. Like the school our son is attending, the optometrist is the same one we've been using for years now. She remembered my face, which is a huge help, and has our records. The other big help is that she was born in Asia and came to Australia as a kid, so the idea that we're living in Asia most of the time isn't a big deal for her. The other lady in the shop who I dealt with had an accent too, and I asked her about it (we spent quite a long time together sorting out new frames etc.). She was grew up in Scotland, born to Canadian and English parents. She met her German-Australian husband on a Kontiki tour and now lives here with her two boys. So I wasn't weird to her either.

One things I've really struggled with in these last weeks is explaining. How much backstory is appropriate? At the optometrist it was very appropriate, because they were dealing with lenses that had been made in Japan and that I was less than satisfied with (another story here, about Asian optometrists and how my fears have been confirmed: they do tend to under-prescribe and it's bad for your eyes).

Conversational struggles
So here are some examples of other conversations where I've struggled to know how much backstory to tell:

Last week we visited the Ipswich Athletics club with our boys. Our middle son is doing online schooling and the deal was that he'd join a sports club as well. It's been a tricky experience: joining a club that you know very little about and that is outside on a field with no obvious "office" for enquiries or application. This was all made more complicated by what seems to be wrong start time on the website! 

I ended up talking to several coaches. The president gave me the spiel about the club and showed me where to sign up, but I struggled to explain our circumstances. Did I need to tell him that we'd been in Japan and that our boys had been in an American school there? (School sport is very different and has an impact on what we're doing now, rather than just rolling with the Australia school sports seasons.) Probably not, but it came out of my mouth, to my son's dismay (I could feel the eye rolling). I should have said just that we'd recently moved to the area and our boys were interested in joining the club...then waited to see if he wanted more information. But once you start down the road of giving too much information, it can be hard to stop.

Later in the week I took one of the boys back to the library to see if we could get them to get in a book that was missing from their collection and that he really wanted to read. I also wanted to change to passcodes on our library cards so that we could use the online catalogue, because we could no longer remember what they'd been from three years ago. The librarian had trouble understanding why I couldn't remember the passcode, because they routinely use the last four digits of the member's phone number. I guess we could have looked up our old phone numbers . . . but we just wanted to change the numbers to something more easily remembered for the future. So of course, to my son's mortification, I had to explain that we'd been away overseas for three years and couldn't remember the last four digits of our previous phones. I thought I did a better job of containing the oversharing, though.

But it's hard work every time: how much information do they need?

This afternoon I had to take a boy to the doctor due to an infection. We, of course, needed to update our details with them and it was almost like she was testing me. What was my former address . . . mind blank. I came up with the suburb, and then she prompted me on the street and I came up with the first of two digits for the street number. I lamely said, "We've been away for three years..." But didn't overshare and she was too busy to enquire about where we'd been. I probably redeemed myself by being able to tell her my new mobile number from heart (I've had to do this so many times in the last three weeks, it's almost tattooed on my head).

Benefitting from consistency
Earlier, our son had been shocked to hear that it would be a 20 min drive to the doctor. Why so far? Same principle as the school and optometrist—this is the clinic we've attended ever since our first home assignment in 2004. This was the place that told me I was expecting our youngest. They've got our records and our trust (though not all the doctors are fabulous, generally we've been satisfied, and the huge thing is that we're not new patients, which can be a barrier for getting an appointment). It's given us consistency, in a strange way, to use these same services over the years, even with the big gaps in the middle. The other one is the dentist, who also was born in Asia and loves that we live there, which makes the matter of getting dental work done much sweeter!

This has become quite a long post, but I hope it gives you a glimpse into the daily, probably invisible challenges that we're facing at the moment and tend to sap my strength.

Wonder soap with a story

I've got a story about this cleaning product.

Two of our boys went to a local kindergarten in our early days in Tokyo, over a period of nearly four years. They had two uniforms, one that they wore on formal occasions and also on the way to and from school (except on Wednesdays). When they got there they changed into their play uniform, which consisted of a white teeshirt and blue shorts. I never dressed my family in white, especially for play! But that's what we had to do for kindergarten.

The kicker was that the playground was basically dirt. Gravelly dirt! You can see both the uniforms and the playground in the photo below and on this blog post of mine from 2009. Believe it or not they also had a "mud pit", yup, not a sandpit, a dedicated mud pit! You mothers out there can imagine what sort of state our kids clothes came home in! Keeping eveyrthing white was a huge deal. 

But the PTA was on top of the situation. One of their fundraisers was selling a wonder soap: this "blue stick". We Marshalls we so concerned that we might run out of them that bought a lot. And ended up with a stockpile. A stockpile that's lasted nine years post kindergarten graduation.

You see, I don't buy my kids white clothes, so once they graduated, we had much less use for the wonder soap!

It is so wonderful that we had to buy some more just recently. No longer from the kindergarten's PTA, but just an ordinary "Drug" store. So if you live in Japan and have light-coloured clothes that need stains removed, this is the product for you!

A precious shared memory

This morning, out of the blue, a friend asked, "Are you going to the JEMA prayer meeting?"
"Yes," I said. "Where is it this year?"
"Higashi Tokorozawa, I think...," she replied.
"Ah, better than going to Mitaka in the snow on buses..." I said. And we laughed.

Tokyo streets generally aren't cleared by
the government when it snows. Local
citizens or the weather (i.e. it warms up)
do the job.

Strange conversation? Actually no. As you might imagine, there's a story behind this (that I'll get to in a minute).

One of the things you miss when you live a life full of transition are people who've known you a long time. "History" in a friendship has a lot of value. This short exchange this morning reminded me of this.

When you first arrive in a new place, you have no history. If you can't speak the language you have an even greater barrier to overcome. No one knows you. All your conversations are of the "getting to know you" or "how do you do such and such" variety. Or they are very much based in the present.

There are no fun memories, no shared history, no nuanced conversations like the above.

It is only after you've "done some time" with others that you start to build up the sort of history that you can take for granted in long-term relationships.

But in our type of transitional community the challenges don't end here. Those people who you build new history with will probably not be around in your life for all that long and when they go, they take the memories and history with them. You can tell the stories to the new folk who take their place, but they don't have the same joy and the new people might not even be interested in your stories. You have to start from scratch—build new history with new people.

That's challenging enough for a married person like myself, but much worse for a single person. At least I have a husband who I've done all my major transitions with, and a nuclear family with whom I have a lot of history. I suspect families like ours are a lot "tighter" because of the shared memories that we hold as a unit and because we don't share them all with anyone else, not even close. Our shared memories are scattered all over the globe.

But this morning I had a short time with a shared memory and it was precious.

A few years back I had been offered a lift in someone's van to an annual winter prayer meeting with other missionary women. But the day before the prayer meeting it snowed . . . and snowed and snowed! Our lift cancelled and most of those who had been going in the van couldn't because school was cancelled also. 

That left me and this friend I talked with this morning. We weren't sure what the best alternative way was to get there: by bus or train. There were a lot of back and forth texts, and we finally decided to go by bus, thinking they were most likely to be reliable (Tokyo train lines are a bit fickle with adverse weather conditions).

The next morning I dressed appropriately and managed to get to the arranged meeting point. The snow had already melted a bit and then frozen and so there was lots of scary ice around, it wasn't fun walking. We hopped on a bus, a bus route we were both unfamiliar with, and off we went. It was a veritable tour of the nearby cities! Traffic was slow and lots of people were on the buses.

But we finally arrived at the place we had to get off. Little did we know that the most difficult part of our journey had not yet began.

We walked, and walked, and consulted Google maps, and walked. Eventually we conceded that we'd probably walked too far and we really didn't know either where we were or where we should go next. So we rang the one person we knew who should be able to help: the lady running the prayer meeting who happened to know the local area well because it was her mission's headquarters who were hosting the prayer meeting. 

Our angst at this point was amplified by the fact that I was supposed to be playing the piano for the worship times of the meeting and we were already an hour late!

It was surprisingly hard to establish where we were and, it turned out, the "pin" we had on Google maps for our destination was incorrect. We eventually found a convenience store and asked for directions to the convenience store near our destination, by which time the leader of the meeting had walked out to see if she could find us. (This was 2013, I just found part of the story on my blog here.) We arrived two hours late. 

But just like the snow camp memories that our family holds and periodically take out to enjoy, this friend and I have this shared memory of the time we got lost in the snow looking for a prayer meeting in Tokyo.

Precious!

My coffee story

I encountered a coffee story yesterday and it set me to wondering about other people's coffee stories.

How did you start drinking coffee? Who introduced you? Can you remember your first coffee?

I've got a fun story.

I made it through uni without coffee. My first job was out in a country hospital where I was the only public Occupational Therapist for a whole region. It meant a huge variety of tasks, something that I loved. One of those was doing home visits occasionally, especially for patients who had some kind of disability or accident and needed modifications to their house or lifestyle or advice about how to make changes so that they could live more independently.

This one home visit I did was a long country drive. It must have been a couple of hours from my home base. This was a visit for someone who was in hospital in the city (I hadn't seen the patient, just been referred them by a city-based OT). So I met with the patient's family at this isolated house. It was a shocking place to walk into. A hoarder! There was only a narrow path between piles of junk in much of the house. And it was filthy. The light switches had one small place of white on them: where you put your finger to turn it on or off. The rest was long-term caked-on grime.

I did my rounds: checking the bathroom and toilet and various access points. Taking measurements and making notes as I went.

When I was done they had a cup of coffee and a biscuit ready for me—good old country hospitality. No one asked if I drank coffee and they didn't offer anything else. I hadn't seen the mug before it was filled with instant coffee, but I'm sure it probably wasn't the cleanest.

I drank it. What else could I do?

I didn't get ill, but I also wasn't instantly converted to coffee. However, from that point on, I began to drink coffee—instant coffee mostly. Actually most of the coffee I had back then was hospital-grade International House coffee that was provided at work. Makes me shudder now! Drip coffee was the stuff of coffee shops only back then in the 90s. I didn't own a coffee maker for some time after that. In fact I have only owned one coffee maker and seldom used it, because I married a non-coffee drinker and the coffee maker mostly got passed around other people in Australia while we've been in Japan. 

I use a 100 yen plastic drip-brew maker that sits on top of my mug. But I love to go to coffee shops and my favourite is a cafe latte. Even better is a cosy cafe with a view. And top of the list is a cosy cafe with a friend who has time to chat.

So that's my story. How about you? Are you a coffee drinker? How did you start?

The saga of our turtle

Baby Tiny

In February 2011 we bought a tiny turtle and called him Tiny. He weighed less than 10g. My blog tells me that he grew quickly. This post I wrote three months later (with cute photo included) and he was three times heavier than when we bought him. This post was written a year later, showing dramatic growth, from small enough to conceal in a 12 year old's palm, to as big as that palm a year later.

Other turtle posts: 

• May 2014 when he moved out for 15 months while we were in Australia.
• June 2016 when we took him by bike to a summer vacation at a friend's house while we went away during the summer for a few weeks.

Other times I've wrote about him on Facebook, not necessarily here. Like his escapes:

Yes, and his tendency this year to bite. I'm the only one who was "got", but it made me quite shy of picking him up.

Then two weeks ago he permanently moved out! We gave him away at Thrift Shop and he's landed in a great situation. On the Monday after he left, I wrote a bit of the backstory, but I've since found out more.

He's gone to a small Christian school. (Yes, we have warned them about the biting and escaping.) 

Last I heard he'd become a school project. The grade Ones were researching how to look after him. Some of the other grades were going to work on building him a better habitat. They are all on a roster to care for him, grade-by-grade. The Grade Ones were excited to be first up.

I'm so happy that he's got a new home where he's obviously being cared for with great enthusiasm and joy. It had gotten to the point in our house where we weren't particularly enjoying him, just keeping him fed and clean. And that was mostly David! I hope that Tiny continues to give many children much joy.

It's a little bit sad that we don't have a pet anymore, though Tiny wasn't an affectionate pet and we don't miss him like you would a dog or a cat. It's sad that our lifestyle means that furry/feathery pet ownership has been unlikely (our landlord won't allow them). 

How can I finish this post without sounding callous to pet owners? I'm happy to see your photos and watch your videos, but in some ways am glad that we don't have that responsibility (or the bills). I'm especially glad that we don't have the angst of handing a beloved pet over every time we have to leave the country for Australia for an extended period, I think that would be very hard.