Sakura!

We have lived in Okinawa 4 years now, and today was our 5th time to see sakura (cherry blossom trees)!  You can only see the blooms for about 2 weeks, but somehow each year we have managed to have a 'sakura day' where we spend time together as a family and enjoy God's beautiful creation on our island.  We're really bad at keeping track of how the boys grow on a regular basis(height, weight, etc.), but we do have pictures of them every year with sakura. :)  It's so fun to look back and see how they have changed.  Each year's pictures bring back wonderful memories - we are so blessed!

Sakura 2010 - we had only been in Okinawa a few weeks, and I was still pregnant with Noah!

 Sakura 2011 - Noah was just a baby and Justin was 3 years old...

 


Sakura 2012 - Noah was 1 1/2 and Justin had just turned 4...

 

Sakura 2013 - we went to a different area of the island that year and don't have as many pictures, but you can still see how they're growing...

And sakura 2014 - Noah is 3 1/2 and Justin turned 6 last week... we had tons of fun walking, running, exploring... more adventures every year! :)

Again, thank you Jesus for our family! :)

Our garden!

Last year we moved into a beautiful house that our church purchased for a parsonage.  One of the only things on our 'perfect house list' that our house doesn't have is a yard for the boys to play in... but it's not typical to have a yard in Japan, so we are fine.  We're spoiled with beautiful parks everywhere, anyway. ;)  But we do have a nice walkway that leads up to the front door.  The former owner had some landscaping, but after a year of doing nothing with it, it was overgrown with weeds and did not have the inviting look we wanted for our home.  So when we got back from home assignment last summer, it was time to tackle the front walkway and make it our garden.  We enlisted the help of a wonderful friend from church who has made gardening in Okinawa her hobby.  She continues to teach us how to plant, when to plant, and nearly every plant in our garden has come from hers!  Tara, we can't thank you enough for your help and joining us in our adventure!
It has been a really fun experience over the last few months, so here are some pictures of the process...

Before (looking from the door to the street)
 
and AFTER!!!

Here's another before shot looking toward the front door (this is after hours of weeding, by the way)...
 

 

and AFTER!!!  Quite an improvement, don't you think?
 
So here are our pictures of the process....
First we had to make our dirt better... so we dug up a lot of the dirt we had and mixed it with many kinds of 'good dirt'... this took about 4 hours... it made our small space seem very large. ;)

 

Then we laid out covering to minimize weed growth and covered it in mulch...

 
 Noah found a praying mantis friend during the process. :)

And then we started planting!

We've been slowly adding plants as we buy them or as Tara gives us more from her garden. :)

My favorites are our water plants... we even have fish in one of the pots!  We are loving the blessing of living in a house and having a small garden to take care of... we pray that God would use this garden to help us get to know our neighbors a little better.  I also love the time of watering our garden every day - it has become one of my favorite prayer times. :)
 

Justin's view of the world... today

This post comes to you from our smart and creative 5 year old son, Justin.  We've spent the last couple days working on a small garden along the walkway to our house (separate blog post about that will come soon with before and after pictures).  Justin and Noah have been great troopers in that we've basically ignored them for hours while we were working... they have helped us dig in the dirt, played games outside, and managed not to kill each other while playing alone inside. ;)  While our garden will always be a work in progress, I finished the first major portion this afternoon.  Justin had my iphone and asked if he could take some pictures of the new garden.  I let him take a few pictures and he had so much fun, it was difficult to get him to stop.  When we first moved to Guam 10 years ago, buying a digital camera was one of the biggest purchases of our life at the time.... it's so funny that digital has become so normal, kids all around the world ask to 'see the picture' as soon as you take it.  So I thought it would be fun to share what Justin saw through the camera this afternoon... pictures of the garden, plants on our balcony, and normal things around the house... with the world's greatest younger brother as his model, of course. Enjoy! :)

I survived teen camp... in Japanese!

[If you follow this blog with any regularity, you know by now that most posts are written by Julie... but this is a story from Brian!!!!  Please send him lots of encouraging messages so he'll continue to post. ;)]

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of attending the Osaka area teens camp.   I was really excited about this for many reasons.  First, I don’t get many opportunities to meet and build relationships with people from mainland Japan.  Second, this would be a great opportunity for me to thoroughly embarrass myself by being immersed in Japanese.  When I found out that a new Japan budget airline was practically giving seats away it was set, I would spend three days at camp!

Our church secretary, Mutsuki, has been more than an answer to prayer for so many reasons.  When I looked at the camp registration and information form, I was only able to read “…… in the….. from…. so (or maybe that’s because)…. Camp.”    Mutsuki was there to help out.  Then I began to send emails to Shinozawa-san, my pastor-friend from Kyoto who offered to pick me up from the airport.  Other than perhaps calling myself a goat in my Japanese emails, we worked out the arrangements and I couldn’t wait to go!

During our time in the States for home assignment we felt strongly that God was saying it was time to hunker down (again) with Japanese.  We live in Japan not merely to pastor an English-speaking church, but to support the Japanese church, and seek to reach the millions of Japanese who have never understood the good news of what Jesus can do with their lives.  We were blessed with some additional financial resources to help in language study, so Julie and the boys let me go for three days to jump into whatever God has in store.

When I got to the camp I was surprised about a number of things. First there were only 4 campers.  Second, there were 16 adult sponsors.  Third, it still all worked!  In Japan the reality is that youth (even the 40 and below age of the sponsors) have largely disappeared from Japanese Christianity.  But here I was singing songs I didn’t quite understand around the campfire with middle schoolers, high schoolers, and young adults who did want to be like Jesus. 

My Japanese has (by God’s great help) come a long way in the years we’ve lived here.  I can maintain simple but lengthy conversations.  But here I was linguistically out of my league.  But it’s amazing how much people can still communicate without words; with a smile, a pat on the back (perhaps culturally inappropriate, but I did it anyway), or in laughing together as I blundered through many things. 

So I did get some tremendous Japanese practice.  It has launched me into a new season of high-Japanese-language-motivation.  But far more importantly, I got to see God is still active in Japan.  He is working in the hearts of people.  I get to be a part.  So thank you thank you Shinozawa-san, thank you Kouki-kun, Mai-chan, Fumi-chan, and Ri-kun, and all the others at the camp.  And thank you, all the churches and supporters who have by prayers, donations, or both, enabled this time.  God uses it all.