What's your ministry?

This was part of our presentation last time: my "hat story"
describing briefly some of my roles. I need to figure out another
creative way to do this this time...or maybe I should just do
hats again?

In preparing for home assignment, we have to pull out a whole lot of other tricks. Things that involve telling people about what we do and about Japan—both written information and spoken information. We also need to pull out our schedule coordinating skills!

In our January prayer letter we called for people to start scheduling us to speak at churches or other groups from July, and we've already had enquiries. One person asked for a short blurb about our ministries. So, because I like writing here so much, I decided to write a blurb here and get your feedback. What do you think? Is it sufficient for someone who doesn't know us, but might consider having us speak to their group? Honestly I do so many little bits and pieces it's hard not to find a nice middle ground (not too much or too little) in describing what I do. (Noting that, of course, the audience is Australians and that it will mostly be used after our son starts university.)


David and Wendy are Queenslanders who have been OMF missionaries in Japan since 2000.

Since 2005 David has worked at the Christian Academy in Japan, located in Tokyo. He's a maths and science teacher and an administrator at the school that supports many missionaries by educating their children. In 2017 he took on the role of Director of Teaching and Learning that includes overseeing curriculum and professional development and membership in the leadership team of the school.

Wendy is an editor and writer. She's the managing editor of a quarterly magazine by and for missionaries (Japan Harvest). She also is the manager and editor of OMF Japan's blog and social media content. Her role includes project management of various publications by OMF Japan. She's been a regular blogger about missionary life and ministry since 2009 at on the edge of ordinary.

We have three sporty teenage boys who are thriving. The youngest two are with us in Japan and at the school where David teaches. Our eldest has graduated and started studying at the University of Queensland this year.

This year's phrase to ponder

On New Year's Day I pondered here about selecting a Scripture passage to ponder for this year (and especially committed to writing about it here monthly), like I did the last time we went back to Australia (2014). Last time I pondered the first three verses of Hebrews 12. Really, those are verses that I never don't want to ponder, like a life "verse", except it is longer than one verse.

So I wondered if there was a different verse/verses that would be good for this year of transition, thinking perhaps there wouldn't be. But on Monday I went to our monthly regional OMF prayer and fellowship day and the short devotional was on Joshua 1. These words especially impacted me:

"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go" (Joshua 1:9 NIV).

Great words that struck me as very appropriate. God said these to Joshua after Moses died and before he led Israel into the Promised Land (after they'd left slavery in Egypt and wandered in the dessert for 40 years). Imagine how much impact that would have had!

It turns out that these phrases are often repeated in various forms in Scripture and thus aren't just good for meditating on, but allow scope for studying a bit more over the year (or at least some of the year) in blog posts.

This isn't a new year's resolution, just a theme that I want to keep coming back to as we go through a big year of transition.

I find it easy to be fearful in the face of transition, as I encounter big changes and challenges. And that's obviously where Joshua stood when he heard these words. What we're doing isn't nearly so big (leading a nation of more than one million people into an occupied land to live!) So these words were obviously well chosen by God.

Yesterday I was riding home with a bike-full of groceries and feeling tight around the chest with all the things on my mental to-do list as well as some relationship issues that I'd been reminded of during the previous couple of days. Maybe you could sense that anxiety in my blog post yesterday. As I sat at a set of traffic lights I repeated to myself: "Be strong and courageous. Don't be afraid or discouraged. God is with you." I could feel the tension releasing, even as I rode off.

It was excellent self-talk and timely.

I'll be circling back to these phrases in the coming months around the start of each month. Stick around and see where it leads me!

Ordinary life over here

I like the calmness of break-time. Not having people going all directions
is really nice (though less common as they get older and have their own
plans with friends). I took this photo as we travelled back to Tokyo last
Tuesday after our day in the park. I always find these signs amusing and
slightly scary (especially if you aren't sure where you're going). But
they are also a nice metaphor for life with older kids!

In "ordinary life" over here, everyone has started back at school and work this week. We're nearly to the end of first semester and between now and the end of the school year (June 12) we have but one week of school holidays. That one week won't be restful either, as we're attending our Japan conference in Hokkaido for four of the days. So it's going to be a long slog till June, but not as bad as when the boys were little. They do have more stamina for these long school terms than they used to. 

The big regret for them this year is that they'll not get a long summer break, not in the middle of the year, nor at the end of the year. They'll have to wait a long 24 months until they get a longer-than-one-month break from school! (Though perhaps over Christmas they might get closer to six-weeks, the details haven't been sorted out yet.)

Yesterday I was at a mission meeting and today done some computer work (email and editing), I've gotten some exercise, and done some shopping (mostly for groceries). Yep, life's back to normal again.

Contrary to what you might expect moods have been pretty good (that might change when the sleep deprivation kicks in in the next day or two). In fact in the last couple of days we've had the sort of interactions over a meal that I'd like to bottle and reproduce for daily enjoyment! The moodiness that teenagers experience is not just a pain to them, but to those who live with them.

What lies ahead of me in the next few weeks is causing me to feel a bit tight around the chest. There's a lot to be done. But I'm trying to stay calm. Tomorrow I'll write about the words from the Bible that I've been repeating often to myself.

As things stand now, it is three weeks and six days until I board the aeroplane with our eldest to take him back to Australia for the start of his university studies. A deadline that is looming. 

It is also now less than six months until I board a plane with the rest of the family to fly to Australia for the rest of the year.

This Saturday we have a wrestler on the mat again. It's a shorter middle-school tournament. It will be good to get mat-side again. I'll try not to bore you with too many wrestling posts :-)

The remainder of my week includes, aside from working at my desk, a language exchange time over coffee and a trip to the orthodontist. So I should be able to get a good amount of momentum going on my desk-work.

So, back to ordinary life. At 5.30pm it has been dark outside for more than half an hour, and though that says "winter", it has felt like a spring day, with a heat wave of something like 16 degrees! Soon I'll be in the kitchen cooking up some chicken, and cutting and grating salad so people can add them into tortillas for dinner tonight. And ordinary life continues: tidying up the kitchen, showers, relaxing, reading, bed.

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!

When you didn't come by car

It's quite common in Japan to go shopping via public transport or on your bike. What happens, therefore, when you buy something larger, something awkward to carry by hand?

Last Saturday David and I had a date "in town" and stopped off at a nearby electrical store to buy a new printer (our old one was being less than helpful). We had caught the train there (along with a few thousand other people  . . .  and had to carry this home. 

When we bought it one employee spent a few minutes packaging it for carrying. They had a special heat-sealing machine that sealed these plastic straps, then added a handle and padded it the handle. It was still a bit awkward to manoeuvre through the crowds with it, but at least it was carry-able.

Do they ever do this in Australia or elsewhere? Understanding that most times you buy things like this in Australia you are in your own vehicle. But what about those who use public transport?

Big park fun

Several weeks ago we looked at the Christmas break, a three-week holiday, and decided to include a big get-us-out-of-the-house outing after Christmas and NYE. The parks that our teenage-family can visit these days and have fun have decreased in number and increased in size (and distance from our house). One park we knew our boys could have fun in is called Shinrin Park. It is a large park an hour drive from our house and a bit of a blast from the past. We were introduced to the park by a friend I met when my 15 y.o. was at kindergarten! We've been here a handful of times, but  not since 2011 (with visiting Australian friends, who wrote a guest post that included a mention of the park here).

Location of the park from our city.

We decided that it would be even more fun to invite some other families with teenagers. Actually it's a good strategy for entertaining teenagers, invite their friends! That part of the expedition got a little out of control, but we ended up with three other families and nearly 20 people to enjoy the day with.

The flaw in the plan was that in order to get the most out of the day (it is such a large park that it takes a whole-day to enjoy it), we needed to leave early. Especially considering the temperatures these days. Once it hits mid-afternoon (around 3) temperatures start to dip and the sun goes down soon after 4.30. But actually the park shut at 4 anyway. So, in order to get there in time, we needed to get the nocturnal teenagers up for an 8.30 leave. They've been staying up really late recently and the early rise wasn't appreciated. I think one got about four hours sleep that night.

The main strategy for enjoying the park is to hire bikes in the park and ride between the various attractions. It has 17 km of riding paths, I rode 15 km of them.

Here are some photos from the day. In the northerly part of the park we found this dragon head.

And a lot of lights, unfortunately not so attractive at this time of the day (apparently these are accessible after dark, but we're not quite sure how as the park in general shut before dark).

Pretty cool looking dragon/Loch Ness?

A section of the bikeways. They are wide and smooth, great fun for riding on. But strangely the whole park is "ride on the right side"! Very odd for a country that drives on the left.

The view from the northerly part of the park.

This was the main attraction for the bigger kids (we had ten kids with us, ranging from 7 to 18 in age). Huge trampoline-hills. Unlike most of these sorts of attractions we've found in Japan, there is no age limit (so even I could jump on it). It was so funny that when I first hopped on I had comments from our kids: "I can't believe you're doing this!" But I've always loved trampolines and these are soooo much fun.

A fun place for wrestling. (No photo evidence, but I actually did a little bit of wrestling with our eldest too.)

Or balancing (these were the oldest and youngest of our kids).

 And more rumbling.

A bigger view. We ate lunch at the white dome place on the right. It was concreted and covered in artificial grass. The sun had warmed the concrete and proved to be a lovely place to sit. Thankfully this place was fairly protected. The day's temperature was around 10 degrees, which was okay if you were dressed warmly and kept moving (and stayed out of the sneaky breeze). One fun memory for me was sitting on the heaving trampoline with some of the kids and comparing how many layers we were wearing (one had two pairs of long johns!). We spent a few hours here.

Part of the walk into the trampoline mountains from the bike path. It would be fun to come back sometime without kids and hike around in the park away from the bike paths, especially in April or May when the temperatures are mild and spring is coming to life. There's so much of the park that we've never seen.

After the trampolines we went to the 24-part obstacle course. It is a little easy for our high schoolers, but still everyone found something fun to do.

Late in the day, the sun was disappearing. This pond had a thin layer of ice on some of its surface.

The other two mums who joined us, soldiering up another hill. Actually we were a little low of females. Nine boys, one girl, four dads, and three mums (though illness was why we didn't have four mums).

It was a fun day. We'd never been in winter and, while it isn't so pretty, it is much more doable. We've previously been in mid-summer and when the temperature is in the mid 30sC and humidity pushing into the 80s or 90s, it is hard to summons the energy to enjoy the whole park. Although there is a free water play feature that younger children really enjoy and make those conditions bearable.

It was also a great choice to invite friends. Most of us had more fun than we would have if we'd just gone as a single family unit.

Looking forward to 2018

My New Year tradition is not to make resolutions, but to write here about what's foreseeable in the upcoming year. We have a lot of plans already in place for 2018—it will be one of significant transition.

The big "rocks" of the year are:

Our eldest son moving to Australia in February to begin university (with me accompanying him to help smooth the way, but only for a couple of weeks)

The rest of us moving to Australia (the Goodna area, near Brisbane) in late June for six months. The purpose is mainly reconnecting with supporters in Australia, but also spending time with family and friends. 

Surrounding those are lots of smaller rocks:

Conferences, retreats, workshops etc

• OMF Japan national conference in late March in Sapporo, Hokkaido
• Workshop in Sapporo (Wendy) in April 
• Women's retreat early March (two nights)
• OMF Australian national conference in Sydney in August
• Probably others we don't yet know about

Travel internally in Australia 

• Interstate trips to Perth and Canberra to visit churches and friends.
• Within state trips to visit churches and supporters.
• With our families living at least eight hour's drive apart, and none of them in Brisbane/Ipswich, that will definitely mean some driving to see them (though hopefully some might venture to come to the "big smoke" to see us too).

Challenges

• At this stage in our lives a big challenge to a big move like this is schooling. We have plans for our youngest to enrol in the second half of grade eight at the local school he was at last time and for our middle son to do online schooling (US curriculum). 
• We're trying a home assignment half the length of our usual one. That will mean it will be more hectic than usual. I want to apologise in advance that we won't be able to spend as much time with people that we want to. This will be a new experience, I hope it works out okay (and that I don't get too stressed and unwell).
• Goodbyes are for me the most difficult thing (a close second would be packing) about moving between countries, and there will be plenty of those this year. Probably the ones in Australia will be more difficult. In Japan at least I can say to most people: "See you in six months." At this stage we're not sure when we'll be next in Australia, but with one boy studying in Australia and another graduating from high school in June 2021, there's a high chance that we'll be back in Australia sooner than four years (even if it is only for a short time).
• More immediately, in the next six months we have to figure/prepare out things like:
• what we will prepare for up-front presentations at churches and the like
• a photo album and other deputation material
• try to get some meetings scheduled for July and August
• schedule the bigger trips to WA and ACT.
• I've got to sort out and hand over some significant parts of my job, in order to leave room for all the work we'll be doing in Australia. My first meeting related to that is in January!

Thankfully we don't need to pack up our house or move out. That is a huge relief. Six months is a short time to do two international moves, and being able to leave our house as is is wonderful. OMF is allowing us to keep this lease. However there are things we need to do here to prepare for our absence.

But yes, a big year and another year to learn more about throwing ourselves on God's loving mercy and kindness. I don't have a Scripture in mind yet to meditate on, though the passage I selected last time we did this (2014-2015) is still most relevant: Hebrews 12:1-3. In the coming weeks I'll be pondering the idea of selecting a different passage.

The verse on my desk Scripture calendar for Jan 1 is "'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'" That is a good verse to remember as we start a year that could have more rough patches in it than a usual year.

So there you go. It's a strange year coming up for us. One that will make us seem even more on the edge of ordinary than usual. I plan to continue to blog as best I can and through that continue to show the "ordinariness" of our lives that might be hard to see if you are just looking on at a distance.

Happy New Year from Tokyo!