Flat3D

Photos

I have put some new photos in the gallery of our snowboarding trips.

We went for the final time on Monday to Hakkoda. The last time we went only the small lift was open due to winds, this time the small one was closed due to lack of snow and only the higher one was running. So we got to snowboard through the forest. It was all pretty good fun.
The photos of snowboarding from throughout the season are here:

On another note I thought this was a crazy way to light a barbecue. But then at the Itayanagi cherry blossom barbecue I saw this… they even let a 7 year old girl have a go with it!

On Friday I had two chances to go to the Hirosaki cherry blossom festival. One was with my Japanese teacher (In total 6 of us went) in the morning and then again in the evening with the Harako family who are living at Hiraka Chapel and taking care of it. It was my first time seeing cherry blossoms in Japan and it is just incredible how big a deal they are to the Japanese people… They are beautiful though!
You can see some pictures of it here:

international

Today after the international service we had a staff meeting of the people who are working at Itayanagi Church. It is pretty scary just how busy this coming week is going to be, there is a new set of english classes starting on Friday evening, we are going to ACC to help out on Wednesday and next weekend is a missions conference at the church that needs preparation. On top of this there are the regular english classes at Itayanagi and Kanagi and a lot of tracting to be done for the new one and for the conference.

Also in the meeting we were discussing taking individual responsibilities so that there is a single point of contact for all of the things going on. I volunteered myself for the international ministry as no one is really doing anything for it at the moment, there is the Sunday evening service at Itayanagi and the monday evening Bible study, but further than that there isn’t much. Taken into consideration that there are new people who come to the service every so often, either foreign students/english teachers or Japanese with interest in English, Martin was saying he is thinking that there really should be an active ministry there.
I volunteered really because I want to be more involved with something directly rather than being bait (as in the english teaching) or indirectly with tracting etc. I kind of had hopes for the Ajigasawa youth group starting up, but it seems like it may be a damp squib. And I also had thought I was going to be involved with the Hirosaki student ministry at Itayanagi, but thats going to other people, which in some ways is a blessing as I still wasn’t 100% comfortable with how that was being done.
But yeah, I put myself forward for the international ministry thing. I still have no idea what I’m going to be doing, what’s expected of me or even how much time and energy I am going to have to put into it. But we can see about that in the future I guess.

Martin has also asked each of the short termers to preach at least once in the sunday evening international service, which I must say will be a challenge what with never having done it before (Epilogues don’t count).

Who am I?

…as Henry Kelly used to say on Going for Gold.

Some of you may have heard the joke that japanese are hard to tell apart… Well as you may have guessed, thats not really very true.

But on the other hand, apparantly some japanese people find westerners hard to tell apart. I was told yesterday afternoon by a girl from the church that when she first saw me in the church she thought I was David and was quite suprised when she first saw us in the same room at the same time.

Now that might seem a little amusing. But let me just make it clear, David is a 19 year old Englishman (from Manchester) and just over 6 feet tall….. and looks like this:

the handsome devil

Whereas I am a 23 year old Nornirishman, at around 5′10″ and look like this:

Now if this were CrimeWatch, and of course David wouldn’t be on CrimeWatch, but if he were I’d like to think I wasn’t going to have the police knocking at my door asking me to accompany them to the station. I’d like to think the red hair (or golden if you’d rather), lack of beard, extra 3 or 4 inches, totally different complexion and the facial features that set him apart from me would be enough to reassure her majesty’s finest that using advanced computer facial analysing techniques weren’t necessary and that they could be confident that I wasn’t the man they were looking for.

I really hope David doesn’t commit any crimes in Japan…