Japan Short-Term Ministry 2007 Picture Update #1

Hello everyone, here are some pictures from my first 2 days in Osaka. enjoy!














Here is the team sitting inside LAX. From left to right: Timothy Jin (team leader), Tricia Lam, Deborah Wong, Ashley Louie, Priscilla Chang, Brandon Jones, and Beland Huang (that's me).

there's a secret to this picture... can you see it?

Yes. I am actually not sitting on the chair!!

Long story short. We were supposed to take a flight from LAX to SFO to catch a 12:33pm flight to Osaka. However, due to a "disappeared" flight and a delay, we arrived in SFO at 12:45pm, just in time to sprint across the airport terminal to see our plane glide away from gate 96. (the name of the airline company shall remain unrevealed......)
Yeap, there goes our ride our Osaka mission trip.... what are we gonna do now???



This is me praising God with my passport and boarding pass in hand. After standing in front of the United Airlines (oops, did i say that??) counter for 2.5 hours begging the service rep for any possible way to get to Asia, the supervisor finally showed up and decided to give us seats on the 8 o'clock flight to Shanghai. From there we would be able to catch a connection flight to Osaka. The problem is, the Chinese government doesn't like people who don't have a visa to stay around too long, so we weren't sure if we were going to get into any trouble. But as you can see, I was pretty ecstatic nontheless.





















We arrived in Shanghai safely and we did not get in trouble with the Chinese government... our flight to Osaka was set to leave 8 hours after our arrival, so we all got free hotel rooms to rest in for about 4 hours.


I told everyone to look Chinese in this picture....then I realized there was only one person who wasn't Chinese.... the rest of the team seemed to not have too much trouble figuring out what I meant by "acting Chinese."



Yes, we arrived in Shanghai safely, but I was still pretty confused as to why I was there.... there I am again, holding my passport and scratching my head.

As little as I saw, Shanghai was a pretty cool city. It was like Taipei (the city I grew up in) except everything was written in simplified Chinese and people spoke in slightly different accents. This was my first time stepping on mainland China soil.









Jesus said that if we drink from the Living Water, we will never thirst again. But I guess they have Saving Water in Shanghai.















A bird's eye view of the beautiful western Japan.

It looks like I'm riding in a World War II Japanese fighter jet, but it's not... It's just a Boeing 767-300 of Japan Airlines, a MUCH better airline company than the aforementioned.


Two hours after our arrival in Osaka, we've already met our first group of unbelieving college students, here are two of them.

Left to right: Ashley, Kazuma, Hiroshi, Deborah

Kazuma and Hiroshi are both engineering students (shout out to Steve Tu) at Osaka Prefecture University, which we will be visiting on Tuesdays and Thursdays whil we're here.
















Being a Christian in Japan often comes with a social stigma: you subtly become a "westernized social outcast." It's pretty big step for these college students to even come inside a church to attend an event..... such as our food-tasting game.

we had a very fun afternoon playing games and getting to know the students.

my "mystery food" was a mix of ketchup, kimchi, chocolate, and taco-flavored Doritos. (sounds like things my roommates like to eat)

This is the Sunday morning worship service of Hamadera Bible Church. Pastor Kondo is the Senior pastor and missionary at HBC. He's really cool. They call him the "Japanese John MacArthur."














During lunch, each of our team members were able to have some fellowship with HBC members.

here's Tim talking to two very sweet elderly ladies.





here are the team girls hanging out with the church's girls.... most of them are in jr. high or high school.










after 2 days without her luggage (because United left her bag in SF), Priscilla is pretty happy she can now wear her own clothes :)


























Me, Brandon (the non-Asian dude) and some of the church's young guys. It's always a highlight for me to see them in the summer.
On Sunday night, the team guys and the church's guys had a guys' night out at the bowling alley while the girls stayed at church for a cooking competition. It was a very fun night and it helped build our relationship with the church's believers, who will be the people continuing the ministry with unbelieving college students long after our team is gone.

This is the special Mario Kart arcade game at the bowling alley. It takes a picture of you and puts your face in place of the characters'. Yoshi and I won first place in this race!



Who else besides Japanese people would think of wearing bowling pin suits while you bowl???


I think Tim and I look pretty cool in them.














Tonight, I set my personal record of 170 points.... must be the suit... it gives you powers to get turkeys.






















suddenly, I became very afraid of bowling balls... must be the suit...



For dinner, 16 guys went to Rotating Sushi... you can imagine the amount of raw fish being consumed.


In this picture, I am eating a piece of horse sashimi... i.e. raw horse. yes, the kind of horse you ride on. (it didn't taste that great)

Momo(right), the sound guy at HBC, is unimpressed by horse sashimi... he's probably thinking, "i eat it all the time!"















Me and one of the missionary kids, Hikari Mortimer. His name means "light" in Japanese, and he has 4 other brothers with the names, Truth, Faith, Hope, and Word. pretty awesome huh?

That's me updating you in our Japanese-style missionary room. Stay tuned for more updates this week of our ministry time on college/high school campuses!!

Thanks for your prayers, keep em going!

The Best Is Certainly Yet To Come...

hello. It's been a while. As my college career comes to an end, I feel it's an appropriate time for me to post my testimony in order to remind myself and you that everything in life hinges upon the glory of God, and the first and foremost way of bringing God glory is to become saved by repenting of your sins and submitting to the lordship of Jesus Christ (I briefly described how I came to that point in the paragraph below). In terms of how to glorify God for the rest of our lives and with the rest of our lives in Christ, He did not leave us without instruction. God's will for every aspect of your life is not hidden, so we don't have to seek too hard: Read the Bible and obey what you DO know that God requires of you. If one can have a truly biblical mindset, then his will becomes the Lord's will, his desires becomes the Lord's desires.

Let's run hard together.

"Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it."
- Psalm 37:4,5

Since the very moment of my sinful birth, my family sought to counteract my ungodly nature with a strongly biblical upbringing. Besides intuitively calling out “mommy,” “daddy,” and “yummy,” “hallelujah” garnished my infant vocabulary. As soon as I was old enough to intellectually comprehend the words of the Bible at around the 3^rd grade, my father, in his care, initiated a 7-year-long, father-and-son daily devotion time. In addition to being equipped with scriptural knowledge at a young age, weekly church attendance was mandatory and greater obedience to elders was almost expected, to say the least, of a missionary’s child. From a human perspective, nothing in my seemingly impeccable Christian upbringing could have possibly caused any sort of rebellion in my heart against the holy God whom I have never overtly denied. Even into my early teenage years, I took refuge in my Christianized background, believing that merely acquiescing to the gospel and not verbally denying Christ as Lord would somehow rescue me from my sin and my punishment for sin, God’s wrath. I did not deny Christ as Lord, yet I neither trusted Him as Lord. Beyond the surveying eyes of my spiritual leaders, I defied God by fiddling with the lust of my eyes, the lust my flesh, and the pride of my life as much as a Christianized 14-year-old could without being completely given over to the depravity of the world. In retrospect, God’s grace to me in life through godly parenting and strong biblical influence was like a chain, as it were, binding me close to God Himself, who mercifully restrained me from breaking free in my own will and run full speed into the gates of hell. I cannot recall the exact date or even any strong sentiments surrounding the time of my salvation, but until now God has faithfully revealed to me through a more mature understanding of His Word that He saved me not based of my Christianized upbringing or the good deeds I have done, but because of His great grace that caused me to recognize my sinfulness and my need for a Savior AND Lord. Along with God’s promise to save anyone who repents and believes in His Son, taking hold of God’s promise to sanctify those who have trusted in Jesus Christ has also been a growing lesson in my Christian life. In particular, experiencing growth throughout college by means of the ministries at Grace Community Church was like witnessing myself mature through the process of moving from being nourished by little sips of milk to actually tasting and seeing the sweetness of more solid spiritual food. Praise God for His goodness!

O to grace how great a debtor

Daily I'm constrained to be!

Let thy goodness, like a fetter,

Bind my wandering heart to thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

Prone to leave the God I love;

Here's my heart, O take and seal it,

Seal it for thy courts above!