Fall Fun and Christmas Events

Hi Everyone,
I hope you all had a great Christmas season and a very happy new year. The time here has been a lot of fun.

We finished up our Fall semester of Shine Kids on the 8th of December. This semester marked our tenth semester since we restarted Shine Kids after after I returned from Okinawa. And we were blessed to have all our old students with us this semester plus a few new faces. Above we see the kids learning their new song for this semester which they would perform at the Horizon Cafe and Bazaar the week after this picture was taken. All the kids had a great time this Semester and are looking forward to the winter semester of Shine Kids starting on the 19th of this month. Please pray that God would open up hearts more and more through this program and especially that the relationships we build through the program would lead to a deeper and deeper connection to God and his people.

Thank you for praying for the Shine English Language School as well. We have been blessed to have 24 students regularly attending classes on a weekly or bi weekly basis during this fall and winter season. God has been blessing the ministry so much that we thought it would be good make special events and times to get together with all of our students from this ministry and bless them by cooking a meal for them all. We keep it very casual and have the students come whenever they like between our starting and ending time, eat as much as they like, and leave whenever they want. We then started inviting members our church to help out with the cooking and serving as well as having some come just as guests to hang out and talk with our students. All of our students really like the events and we see this as a new opportunity to get people from our community to hang out with people in the church in a casual setting. The conversations I have overheard and taken part in during these event are awesome and God is at work in it. Seen here are pictures from our last Pancake Breakfast we had last month. Please pray for us as we continue this new form of outreach.

In addition, we were able to have our Horizon picnic during this fall as well. We invited the Japanese and English services from both Setagaya and Machida as well as the Shine Kids to come and have a picnic with games and even a pinata that I scraped together myself. It was a great time of
fellowship and even though we were unable to get the Shine Kids Members to come out with us this time, we are going to continue to do outdoor events this coming year. Lord willing, the more of these events we do, the more our Shine Kids and Shine ELS students will come out to join us and hang out with members of the church. Please pray for us as we plan for having new sporting events this year and other activities to get everyone together.


This Christmas season was also a blast with many opportunities. We started off the month with our Kids Christmas parties in both Machida and Setagaya with games , cake, crafts, and of course the Christmas message. Here you see the kids making their craft. We were blessed to have a lot of helpers from our college group. We also had our annual Christmas program and Candle Light Christmas eve service. Like last year we were able to hit the streets of Machida before the event to hand out flyers. We also went around asking people what they think about Christmas and what Christmas means to them, and sharing about what it really means. It was a blessed time and blessed events, and in everything we got to share the hope to be found in Christmas.

We are looking forward to seeing you all at the end of March of this year when our family comes back to visit Sonora and we look forward to having the Epic Japan Team this Summer. We are praying that you would have a very blessed new year.

Sincerely,
Alex, Tomoko, Daisy, and Caleb Robinson










P.S. Our son, Caleb Alexander Robinson was born on September 9, 2015. He is a very happy baby and smiles a lot. Please pray for his blessing and our wisdom as we start out life as a family of four.