Undokai and Church

The past couple of days have been pretty exciting.  On Saturday, we experienced Undokai.  It was fantastic timing because something like this only occurs 1x/year.  Basically, the Japanese pre-school puts on an event where the kids demonstrate various skills like running, tug-of-war, shooting balls into baskets, shooting balls at something that looked like a piñata but was plastic and loosely held together with tape and when opened it unrolled a flag with a bunch of confetti.  The day went from about 9am until 3pm with an hour for lunch.  Luke ended up spending the first part of the morning with John Knox at a local school where John teaches english.  Luke met the principal and vice-principal and setup a color matching game in order to teach kids from the elementary school some english.  Back at Undokai, during lunch, everyone sat on their mats (no shoes) and quietly ate together while some soft music played.  It was all ages and it was a really neat picture of this community coming together.  Also, they would bring in all different family members to play games at various times so it was a real family event.  We met the principal, vice-principal (a professing Christian), and the charirman of the school who spoke english very well.  We are writing this at the end of Sunday and we got back from church about an hour ago.  Church started at 10:30 and about 30 members were there.  They have all been so inviting of us being there.  We sang some hymns (in Japanese), read Scripture (in Japanese), and then Dave gave his testimony (in english while John, the pastor, translated).  After that, the children were dismissed for a lesson which Dave went back to help while Luke stayed in the service.  It was the opposite strategy last week.  After service we shared a delicious meal together of chicken cutlets, beans, rice, squash and noodles.  Staying together was very enjoyable.  Luke woke up not feeling well so he did not share his testimony in the morning, but there was another service in the evening which he did along with Dave.  At the second service there were more worship songs to sing but this was a service where everyone was speaking english.  Sharing what Christ has been doing in and through us is a blessing and we are thankful to have that opportunity.  We have some more things to do this evening, but will leave you with some pictures today.  Enjoy, God bless you, and thank you for your prayers.  Luke and Dave