Hi everyone,

as a few of you may know, I’m going to Japan on Monday for eight weeks, and would appreciate prayer for the trip! I’ll be going on a mission with nine other friends (mostly through UQES) with OMF for five weeks, then travelling around for three, which hopefully won’t be just a holiday but also a time to encourage the Christians we’ll visit and meet.

This is my first trip overseas and first mission longer than a week. Japan scares me! Unfortunately I didn’t have time to learn the language either. Humanly speaking I don’t see how we’ll be able to be useful to the churches there at all, but I know God will use us in ways we can’t imagine now.

The 10 of us are splitting into two groups, the first is revisiting a church in Hatazawa (outer Tokyo) where some of the team went two years ago. My group is going to Tsugaru, the top of the main island Honshu. The Tsugaru church has several congregations and is wanting to plant more (I think they want to have 10 by 2010… seems as ambitious as the diocese mission!) and from what I’ve seen has a lot of youth which is really exciting! I’m not to sure what we’ll be doing, but I guess it will be all aimed towards their church planting efforts.

Please pray:
-That I’ll be humble and willing to learn
-That the language barrier won’t be a huge problem
-That we’ll all learn to trust God more
-Give praise and thanks for the wonderful work that is happeing in so many Japanese churches
-That the economy won’t get any worse than it is now, but also give thanks that money hasn’t been an issue for any of us so far.
-That the word of God will go out and be received by the Japanese people!

If you want to keep up with what’s happening I’ll be blogging (hopefully weekly) at http://curiousdannii.blogspot.com/
If you’re on Facebook join our group to receive prayer updates: http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=23697067435

Thanks, and see you in two months!

*scrambling hastily out of the “overworked & overbusy” panel of the woodwork*

Hi Dannii,

Sounds like a great opportunity. For those of us who are total ignoramuses about Japanese geography, how far distanced from each other are the places you & the team are going?

Regards,
Tia.

*returning to the woodwork panel from whence she appeared*

We’ll be abour 600km north of Tokyo (and the other team.) I’m hoping to visit a friend from my church who’s moved to Japan to teach English, he’s on Shikoku which is another 650km west of Tokyo! We will be using the bullet trains a lot!

Got back today, the mission was a big success I feel. Thank you for your prayers!