Global Hymn Sing 2018

Have you ever participated in a Global Hymn Sing? It is something that OMF and Getty Music have hosted on one Sunday in the past two years. It simply means that churches (and other gatherings) across the world all sing a selected hymn on a designated Sunday. What makes it more interesting is that you can register that your church is doing it, so it appears as a dot on a world map.

Why? The goal is to raise awareness of the many across the world who haven't heard the Gospel, and to "inspire thought, prayer and action towards global evangelism."

Here is the official blurb:

29% of the world's population live in places with little or no access to the Gospel. That's over 2 billion individuals worldwide who need someone to share the good news of Jesus with them.

For two years Getty Music in partnership with OMF International have hosted a Global Hymn Sing, inviting churches to come together in their worship gatherings, in solidarity with brothers and sisters all over the world, and sing a hymn to inspire thought, prayer and action toward global evangelism.  Nearly two-million people in more than one-hundred countries have responded to the call to sing together with one voice, and this year we hope YOUR church will join that chorus!

This year the Global Hymn sing is on February 25 and the hymn is Jesus Shall Reign. 

Jesus Shall Reign has been a famous missionary hymn for generations and was sung by the great missionary and Olympic sprinter Eric Liddell (Chariots of Fire) at the train station in Edinburgh as he embarked on a missionary journey to China. While interned during World War 2, Eric served alongside China Inland Mission (now OMF) workers, along with other organizations. He even gave his running shoes to a CIM mission kid named Steve Metcalfe, who he challenged to become a missionary to the Japanese, which he did! Register your church to sing this great hymn and receive all resources FREE, including sheet music, orchestrations, audio, videos and MORE.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please email us (Global Hymn Sing Team) at globalhymnsing@gettymusic.com. Last year I participated in an unusual way in this hymn sing. I was asked to be the pianist for an OMF missionary choir at a memorial service for a Japanese missionary who passed away last April. The memorial service was held on the Global Hymn Sing date last year and the choir sang the designated hymn. You can see a short montage video of last year's Global Hymn Sing here (but we don't appear). Our Japanese home church is planning to be involved (the hymn is translated into multiple languages), as well as my parent's church in Australia. Maybe you could get your church involved too? The best thing to do is to register your church and they'll send you the resources you need.

Creative problem solving in Japan

This is not an uncommon sight in Japanese train stations. The maintenance "fix" on a leak is a plastic sheet taped strategically to keep the drips on the wall, not dripping on customers. 

It always strikes me as a little incongruous, with the amazing efficiency that we enjoy with Tokyo trains. However it is still very Japanese: practical and resourcefully fixing something in a budget-conscious way that prioritises the comfort of the customers.

This type of "fixing" is not unusual in this society. It is very common to see bikes with DIY fixes, like tape covering a hole in the seat, or a crate strapped to the back of a bike for carrying groceries. Nor is it unusual to see something like a Tokyo resident clearing snow with their dust pans or breaking up dirty ice on the road with a chisel—making do with what they have.

Everything perfect and beautiful is one of those images that Japan has portrayed to the world that isn't true for the majority of "real Japan". This is a photo of real Japan, and while it isn't so pretty, it is creative problem solving that I love.

One boy thinking about home assignment

I found one of our younger two boys making this table the other day. He's processing what home assignment this year means in his life. I asked his permission to share and he asked me to block out the items he'd listed.

It is, actually, not too different to how we decided if going on home assignment in July for six months was going to work for our family. Following on from my post yesterday about making it up as we go, this is part of it: weighing up the pros and cons of any decision according to the information you have. The key difference, I think, to parenting in your home country is that you often have a lot less information to work with and a lot more unknown variables.

What's interesting about this list that you can't see is that some items appear on both the pros and cons list, for example "food". Yep, there are things about both Japan and Australia that my boys enjoy and food is one. But when we're in one country they do miss the other!

Making it up as you go

"Making it up as you go."

Yep, that's what we're doing!

Often parenting as a missionary feels like you are all alone with little
to guide you. It can be scary. We're praying for this young man as he
transitions to the next chapter of his life: settling in Australia for university.

This was a phrase that an experienced TCK (third culture kid) mum said to me recently about an excruciatingly difficult decision that she and her husband had to make last year. 

I can't imagine making such a decision, but the experience of making it up as you go rang true. It is, indeed, what we've been doing our whole parenting journey. All, of which, has been done in the context of mission. We began applying to be missionaries with OMF before our eldest son was conceived, so when we announced my pregnancy there were questions from spectators. Even though we were still in Australia.

So this week as we head relentlessly towards saying goodbye to our son as he heads off to university in Australia, we especially feel as though we're making it up as we go. Questions like these have arisen within our family:

• What will we do about his birthday in May?
• Can we text him in Australia?
• How much should he take with him? 
• Should he take his wrestling trophies?
• When will he next be in Japan?
• Should he take all his shoes, even the grubby work ones since they still are in otherwise good condition?
• What kind of farewell should we have on Sunday? A family one? One with a bunch of friends?
• What food would he like in his last week here?

Parenting, I suspect, even in a mono-cultural situation is always about "making it up as you go", however there are many less cues to call on when you're doing this in a country you  didn't grow up in with a child who is having a very different childhood than you had.

I remember talking to a Southern US dad last year at wrestling. He said if he was bringing his son up in the US, he'd know exactly what sport his middle-school son would be doing. It would have been the same that he did when he was a boy (baseball?), and the same as a lot of his son's peers. But he was raising his son out of that context and to his surprise found wrestling had entered the mix and he was scrambling to catch up, to find out what this unknown sport was all about.

We've made lot of different decisions to what our parents made, purely because of context, not because our parents were wrong. I'm sure they've looked at what we've been doing, at times, and wondered at our wisdom.

The additional challenge to making it up as you go, is that you have to "back yourself" (an Australian phrase? Meaning "to have confidence in one's self"). Despite others, yes, even other missionaries, around you making different decisions you have to make the best decision you can come up with and stick by it. Getting to know our kids as well as we can has been important here. For example, knowing that some of our boys hate rapid change has informed lots of our decisions, for example not taking short home assignments.

As any parent knows, there is no laboratory for testing your decisions either. You may never know if you've made the right decision! That's hard.

Making this big change means that we're making it up more than usual in the next month. We're praying that we "get it right", which, of course, is what we always do: praying for wisdom and then doing the best we can.

Sticky snow

From Monday. The naked twigs on our backyard tree were decorated
beautifully during the snowfall.

Last Monday it snowed in Tokyo. Usually that is a rather non-event. It snows and either barely makes it to the ground, or melts soon after. Occasionally it sticks around. This year is one of the "occasions". It snowed about 30 cm in our area, which is quite a lot for this region. The complicating factor is that the temperature then went south and stayed there. It's barely went above zero between Wednesday and yesterday. As a result the snow has stuck, especially in the shade. But it is no longer nice, fluffy snow. It is slick, slippery ice that is hard to remove from the roads and paths it has covered.

Our backyard on Monday.

This photo I took on my way home from church today.

It is one of the riverside paths we frequently ride.

I've stayed off my bike all week. Because of the way the streets are configured around our house, it is difficult to find a non-shaded street to get out to of our local residential area and therefore a non-snow-covered street. So I've walked or driven. But many Tokyo-ites are very dependent on bikes and it has been rather alarming to see even elderly Japanese people riding on ice. A decidedly risky endeavour, although walking may not be much safer as the ice is very slick in places.

But today, to get to church, we decided to brave our bikes and David and I took a rather round-about route to find clear paths. These three photos below I took on my way home, but the paths aren't ones I rode today.

Another photo from my ride home today.

One of the two "rivers" in our city. I rode on the path along the
right-hand side, the side that got the sun during the week). It was
mostly clear of ice.

This photo is of one of the houses behind our house. I took the photo yesterday, but it looks pretty much the same today. We've been watching the snow slide of this roof since Monday. Any bets on how long it will take for this to fall?

Anyway, I'm hoping that we get some higher temperatures this week (up to 8C is forecast) and that all this cold, slippery stuff will go away.

Counting isn't hard, is it?

As I mentioned on NYE, I've started studying Japanese again, more consistently and intensely. A friend introduced me to a website that I can access on my phone that consistently teaches and reviews vocab and kanji (complex Japanese characters that make up many words). My goal is to improve in my reading, which shouldn't be hard because my level is quite low. But I hope it also overflows into my daily conversation too. 

The system is compelling and almost like a game. I'm enjoying it (most of the time) and definitely making progress like I haven't seen for over a decade, partly because I'm doing this more than once a day, everyday, and when I get stuff wrong, I have to answer the question again, a bit later, no escape if I want to make progress up the 60 levels.

But of course no new method makes learning a new language easy (especially for someone like me who doesn't have a high aptitude for learning new languages). So there are frustrations along the way. One is counting.

Counting in Japanese is a bit of a pain. Truly. They have more than one word for some numbers eg. 4 is "yon" or "shi". And, even more challenging, depending on what you count, the suffix (called a counter) you use changes.

Here's an explanation of counters that I found:

What Are Japanese Counters?

Japanese counters are the words used to count objects, people, lengths of time, events and so forth. Counters are usually single-kanji characters that have a special reading just applicable to their function as a counter.

Let’s think about counting in English. To count in English we usually take a cardinal number (i.e. one, two, three, etc.) and add it to an object. If we are making a plural, then we stick on that object’s plural ending. One cat becomes two cats; one fox, two foxes; one mouse, two mice.

Counting just doesn’t work like that in Japanese. Remember—Japanese has no real plural/singular endings, so it’s not going to be the same as the English system anyway.

So how do you count objects in Japanese? Japanese uses special counting words, which come in different categories according to what you are counting. The way to count long, narrow, cylindrical objects is different from the way you’d count thin, flat ones, for example. And the words for counting small animals differ from the words used for counting humans, etc.

For example (the characters at the end are the kanji):

one = ichi 　一
one person = hitori　一人
one machine = ichidai　　一台
one pen = ippon　　一本
one piece of paper = ichimai　一枚
one generation = ichidao　一台
one portion = ichibu　一部
one o'clock = ichiji　一時
first place or first or best = ichiban　一番

There are lots more counters than this. There are counters for small animals, lessons, volume, pages, day of the month, night, day, head of cattle and for objects that presumably don't fall under any special category like the more unusual ones for chopsticks, bowls of rice, tatami mats (traditional flooring we have in two of our rooms), single stem flower, and wheels.

Alas, I'm hopeful. Lots of practise will equal progress, right? I've invested money in this and  that is highly motivating for me. Not to mention the competitive side of me that wants to make progress in this game-like project.

Planning for our 2018 Australian sojourn

Today we've been doing more home assignment preparation: we spent the afternoon talking about ideas of how to communicate about our work and the elements that go into what we do when we're meeting people in Australia.

That includes:

• Elements of a short presentation that we can use in front of a church or other group that explains what we do and why we do it. Most places we'll only get around 10 minutes, so we don't actually have to prepare a lot and will recycle it endlessly!
• What to put on the display board and table that we cart around with us: it's a place we talk more informally to people after meetings and have resources to give away and sell
• A photo album: a great communication tool about our lives in Japan that we take everywhere with us, yes, even to coffee shops when we meet people.
• Audio-visual stuff that gets projected onto a screen while we talk. We've found a fun video that we're keen to use at a "Japan Night" if we can persuade anyone to hold one.

and

• Take-aways: stuff about us that we can give away, including a prayer card.

Which is where this photo comes into the story. A couple of Sundays ago we stood outside at school in 6˚C temperatures and took a family photo for the staple product of a missionary: a prayer card. We suddenly realised that we needed to do this before our eldest son left for Australia next month.

We were much blessed by a photographer friend and his assistant wife who were willing to stand out there in the cold with us and take nice photos. Once the whole family shots were taken we got an unexpected bonus of some photos just of David and I. Do you like it? 

My hair is a mess. I really should have had a haircut before the photo and the sneaky breeze finished off the mess. But nonetheless, it's lovely to have a nice photo of the two of us—once you have children photos as a couple are quite rare.

From early July we'll be in the South-east Queensland area, but closer to Christmas are also planning to spend up to 10 days around the Perth area. If you'd like us to visit your small group, youth group, young adults group, Bible study, or church, please contact me and we'll book you in. If you'd like us to run a fun missions awareness evening or afternoon for your group, they are one of our favourite things to do (aside from meeting people for coffee), let us know!