I am very happy to report to you all that I am back in Japan and have arrived safely in Tokyo even though the airline gave me a little misinformation and I arrived not at 10:3o am but instead at 10:30 pm causing me to sprint with my suitcases to the bus stop to catch the last bus to Machida which arrived at that location at 1 am. But that is beside the point ^_^. The point is that I am now here. And as such, the time has come to figure out all that is going to be happening while I am here. I am very much looking forward to my time here in tokyo. As soon as I arrived I sat down with the staff here and have a lot of great stuff for me to do while I am here. The christmas season is a great time to outreach to friends and family for the Japanese people and as such there are a ton of events that I have been asked to be a part of during my stay. Already, I got to help out at the ladies elegant christmas women's outreach which was a great time with a great turn out. A good portion of the people there had never even been to a church before. So we praise God for the seeds He allowed us to plant and continue to pray for the growth of them.
Anyway, there will be a lot of these type of events and I will report on them as they come. On a side note though... all this fun without time for recovery from jetlag has left me with a bad cold, so if you could please pray for me to recover quickly as I am going to be baking countless cookies for our christmas children's outreach in Machida and Setagaya on Friday and this being wednesday and I still feel really bad... I am a bit worried. So your prayers would be appreciated.
Lastly, I am going to be changing up the format of my communication with you all back in America a bit. I really do like the monthly blogs that I put up on this web page as a way of giving you a linear picture of all that is happening here. However, words, no matter how much I love them, have the tendency of being a little impersonal. I mean, if communication is 70% how you look when you say something, 20% how you sound, I am only communicating within the limited remaining 10%. And that is a problem. I found it a problem with my prayer team as well and as such I create a vlog (a video blog) for them. So, starting from now I am going to create a vlog for you all. Whereas the written blog will be a linear condensed version of the month, the vlog will be a none linear compilation of fragments and portions of my time here, (ministries, activities, everyday life, etc...). I have not set up the vlog yet, so please be patient with me, but hopefully it will be up by the end of the month with this month's video and at that time, I will get the name of the site to you guys.
Anyway, that is all for now. I love you guys and want to thank you guys for being a part of my refreshment and encouragement while I was back in America. The time there was amazing. When I first got to America, I started into the book of Ezekiel which was pretty evident if you heard me when I spoke at CC Sonora. My journey though the book was a very powerful one for me, dealing with the sovereignty of God over all things, including me and all that happens to me. And at the end, God encouraged me with His vision for Japan. There have been many times in Japan that I have felt so very dry. Though there are about million people in Japan that know Jesus, the vast majority of the country doesn't and as such it tends to feel sometimes like you are walking through and endless desert wilderness filled with the dead. As such, because of my lack of faith or possibly my forgetfulness of all the God has done, I would lose hope from time to time. But then I get towards the end of the book and I read this,
(Ezekiel 37:1-10) "The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which [was] full of bones. And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, [there were] very many in the open valley; and, lo, [they were] very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I [am] the LORD. So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but [there was] no breath in them. Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. o I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army."
Now I fully understand that the Lord was speaking of the house of Israel in this passage. However. I know that what God can do for one people, he ca do for another. That he loves Japan as much as much as America as much as Israel as much as ... etc... And I know that the description given by God in Romans 4:7 is just as true today as when it was written that He is the "God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were." I truly believe this is the will of God for this country. The dead will live in Japan and those that are not ( like me - a sinner) as though they were (a holy priesthood) in this country. I can't wait ^_^!
Alex
