A Curse, A Blessing and A Cop

Thursday, as I wrote before, was a great day of sharing where I got to share my love for Christ with Ryo. Please continue to keep him in your prayers. Later that day though, was a very different. It was a free night so we all did different little relaxing things right after our campus work days. But when I got home, and Beau walked in, I heard something pretty disturbing. Apparently Beau, Bo and Chad had gone to our usual park to go running and to work out on the jungle gym. Well, this woman appears, goes over to them and starts mumbling what sounded like gibberish towards them. All three of them got a very eerie feeling, and after a little bit, Beau started realizing that she may have been cursing them. So they kept on runnin around the park and after a few minutes, the woman suddenly appeared again, and this time walked over to them, grabbed their hands, and started mumbling again but pointing into their eyes this time. That was it- they ran away. When we translated what they remembered, we realized she was talking about creatures and calling them American monsters and was definitely cursing them. They came running home and we were all able to pray for them. It was weird though... we weren't expecting people to come and curse us directly... Hey, Jesus said this would happen, right? We should feel blessed when we are hated for His name's sake! But yeah... we're definitely being attacked.

After that though, we had a fantastic night! Well... a huge thunderstorm came and it was raining cats and dogs, so that kinda sucked. But my campus team was picked to go to the Japan Campus Crusade weekly meeting that night (it's small, so we don't wanna overwhelm them... we're sending one campus team at a time). The meeting is called Student Impact and it was GREAT! They worship so passionately, and it was beautiful to see a bunch of Japanese college students, CCC staff, and interns from the US and Singapore lift up their praises for our Lord in Japanese! There was a testimony and a talk and both were about discipleship and accountability and just helping each other grow as believers in the body of Christ together. One little thing about the testimony and talk though... I translated! I walked into Student Impact and Joe (Texan who is on a year-long mission trip with CCC there, who is also my team's Waseda liaison) immediately says to me, "Gen, come here. I have a job for you." Then he hands me a wireless microphone and asks me to translate the entire service for all the non-Japanese speakers throughout the room who were wearing their earphones.


He told me that if I didn't wanna do it, someone else could, but wanted to give me the opportunity. I TOOK IT! It was SO much fun! VERY difficult, listening-processing-talking all at the same time. It was funny hearing the speaker say something funny, hearing all the Japanese people laugh, then I translate, and THEN the English speakers would laugh! It was great! There were a good forty people or so there that night. It was fantastic! It was such a huge blessing being able to use my language skills to serve God. :)
This is the post service hang out time with dinner provided! It's totally a community



Friday was rather uneventful. We had an English lunch at Waseda which was pretty cool. My team and four staff/interns at CCC went out onto the lawns at Okuma Garden and invited Japanese students to join us to practice English with us.


LOTS came, and there were lots of great conversations. Ryo came, but again, it wasn't the best opportunity for deep conversation.

Saturday was a free day, and of course Beau hurt his foot. But before that, Mayo (the lady I talked about earlier) showed me, Christina, Kristin and Cherie some REALLY nice parts of Tokyo surrounding Todai. We saw two spectacular mansions- one was Japanese style


and one was Western style.


Mayo is such a sweet lady. She's so excited to show us around Tokyo, and has now gotten us a private Tea Ceremony/Class from a professional that she knows, and a professional origami presentation. She's well connected.

Sunday we went to a GREAT church- New Hope Tokyo. It's funny cuz last summer when I visited humu in Hawaii, we went to New Hope in Honolulu! Same church family. It was great. Really, the worship is so alive here! I think cuz faith and religion are so rare, those who have it do not take it for granted at all! So we were very blessed at church. I took a TON of notes on the sermon which really spoke to me (it was about peace). We met a Korean CCC team from NY, and the one I met was from La Crescenta! I told him I was from San Marino, and we cheered, and then I brought Chad over cuz he's from La Crescenta, and it turns out they had middle school Spanish together! Small world...
This is us all spiffed out for church, waiting for the train



Well, that night our entire team of seventeen got together in room 204 (Steve and Bo's room/common room) for a night of worship and briefing for the new week. We were gonna go to the Mitaka CCC center, but since Beau was injured, we stayed in. But our voices were definitely raised still! In that tiny little apartment, we had a glorious time of singing praises to our God! It was very passionate, and though the sound of it was beautiful, it was getting a little loud. As we ended a song, we heard a voice from the door, so I ran over and it was two cops, telling us that there were noise complaints (though it wasn't yet 8pm) and so we had to be quiet. Steve had to show his passport, the cop wrote down his information, VERY kindly asked us to consider our neighbors and keep the noise down, and left. VERY cordial exchange. But our worship got shut down! How awesome is that?? Our voices were raised to Jesus and Satan did NOT like it. :-)

As you can tell, everyday ends up being pretty eventful here. There've been some very heavy times, but through it all, each one of us is learning so much. It's totally worth going through the speedbumps and the pains. Thanks for your prayers! They are creating a wall of protection around us and we appreciate it much.