Rivendell

Konnichiwa!  For those of you who might be unawares, I am preparing to go to Tokyo on a one-year mission trip with Campus Crusade for Christ.  This past week I was in lovely Chicago, IL with 400 other STINTers from all over the U.S. to get trained in serving as a missionary in another country.  We got to hear from some amazing speakers about the four “L”s of STINT: Love the Lord, Love your Team, Launch a Movement and Learn a New World.  These will be our overall objectives as we do ministry in Japan.

The whole conference was incredibly encouraging.  I’ve been spending the whole summer preparing to go to Tokyo, and I’ve focused so much energy on the preparation that it can be easy for me to forget that the culmination is actually going to be my return to Japan.  This week reminded me of my commitment to God and to the Japanese people we will be going to reach out to and serve.

The conference also made the oncoming trip that much more real because I got to meet my team in person for the first time!  We had been getting to know each other on Facebook up to this point, but that doesn’t really compare.  Let me introduce you to the 2011-2012 Tokyo STINT Team:

From Left to Right:

Albert-Albert graduated this May from USCB with a degree in Chemical Engineering, giving him the valuable position on our team of being one of the few people who are good at math.  He was originally the only guy on an otherwise all-girl team (more on that later).  Albert is also one of our team leaders.

Christine-Another USCB recent grad.  Christine got the pleasure of celebrating her birthday at our briefing conference, and we managed to light all her birthday candles without setting off a smoke alarm in the hotel room and incurring major fines.  She is Japanese American, and she is shorter than I am, which makes me feel like we are already compatriots.  (Short people gotta stick together).

Amanda-Amanda is my friend from ASU, who after much praying and prodding, was convinced to go on STINT with me.  She is the only member of our team who has never been to Japan before (brave, no?)  Amanda is an English major like me and she is addicted to all things Star Trek.

Nikki-Nikki got her BFA in theatre from Texas State University.   She wants to work in television and film.  Nikki almost didn’t make it to briefing, but God brought in 30% of her support in a week’s time in order to get here there.  Yay God!

Kimiyo (Kimi)-Kimiyo was on my summer project team in 2009.  So cool to get to work with her again!  Kimi is the only re-STINTer on our team, meaning she spent the last year in Japan with Campus Crusade as well.  Kimiyo is half-Japanese and 100% Texan and 100% USC Trojan.

Katie-Graduated from USCB with Christine and Albert.  Katie’s parents were on staff with Campus Crusade, so she was born in Japan and lived there until she was 12 years old.  Super cool that she’s coming back to share God’s word with her birthplace!

Me-Hiya.  Did you notice I’m the only blonde on our team?  I did.

Sarah-Sarah is also re-STINTing, but she spent the last year in East Asia.  She decided to come to Japan after visiting her sister, who studies in Tokyo.  She has a degree in Equestrian Science from a small school in Missouri and enjoys riding horses.  Sarah is our other team leader for the year.

Kylan-Kylan graduated from Berkeley with degrees in Anthropology and Japanese Language and Literature.  He studied abroad for a year in Japan before coming on 2009 summer project to Tokyo with Kimiyo and me.  Kylan joined the team last minute after Kimi and I sent him a flurry of emails and phone calls when we realized we needed at least 2 guys to have a full STINT team.

This team is awesome, but we left the conference with some frustrating news: our paperwork for our visas got delayed, which pushes our departure date back 4-8 weeks.  Not only do we want to see each other and get to Japan as soon as possible, we also want to make sure we’re in country before the Japanese semester starts in October.  One of the best times to meet students and have outreaches is at the beginning of the semester, so we don’t want to miss this opportunity.  Please PRAY PRAY PRAY that our paperwork gets processed supernaturally fast and we can leave for Japan quickly.

 Also, I need to raise the rest of my support in order to leave for Tokyo in time.  I still need to raise about $750/month, or roughly $9000 in order to be able to get on a plane to Tokyo.  If you would like to help change the lives of Japanese students, please help support me financially and in prayer.  The easiest way to give is at this website: https://give.ccci.org/give/View/0646366.   I can take monthly gifts or single gifts to help with upfront costs.  Any donation helps.

If you are praying for me, please pray for the following:

-Pray that our visa paperwork gets processed quickly

-Pray for all my support to come in, and for my team’s support to come in quickly

-Pray that my team remains strong in faith and encouraged during this waiting period, as we don’t know when we will be able to get our visas and go.

P.S. Those of you wondering about the title of this post may have already gathered that my team has 9 members, and 2 men.  That’s right.  We’re the fellowship.  (For those of you less nerdy in my reading audience, “Rivendell” is a safe haven in the Lord of the Rings series where the Fellowship of the Ring is established.)

The Support and the Passport

Let's start with briefing. 3 days before we left for Tokyo, everyone on the team went to LA to get trained for the trip and to meet our team. Jack and I set out in the early morning, driving across two states in his recently tuned up pick-up. Just after we crossed the state line and entered California, I happened to ask Jack, “Hey, did you pack your passport?”

Silence.

Jack had left his passport at home. We thought about trying to get someone to bring it halfway, or even drive back, but both of those would delay us for at least several hours and we had to get to briefing in just a few hours. With the help of our parents, we eventually decided the best thing to do was to have Jack’s parents overnight ship his passport to a leader’s house near where we were staying for briefing. We started praying and continued to California for briefing.

At briefing we learned that not only were we missing a passport, our team of seventeen was missing more than $19,000 of support. We had two days to raise all of that, or we could not all get on the plane. We went into overdrive on calling our supporters and especially on prayer.

By the next day, (Praise God and thank you supporters!!!), we were only $8,000 away from our goal. Support continued to come in throughout the day and we were sure that God wanted us all to go to Tokyo and to show us that it was only by His will that we made it there. But the night before we were supposed to get on the plane, we were hit by another blow. Jack had received a delivery confirmation of his passport, but for some reason, it had not reached the house it was supposed to. The family searched all over their neighborhood for houses with similar numbers and streets, but with no luck. We couldn’t even contact the postman to see if he misplaced it because it was his first week on the job or something and they didn’t have a way to contact him before 9:30 the next morning, when we were already supposed to be at the airport.

As stressful as all of this seems when I describe it, it was an amazing time to learn about trusting in the Lord. Nineteen grand is no small sum, and we were praying constantly. And while we had a knowable way to try to raise our support money, there was absolutely nothing we could do to try to get Jack’s passport. But what amazed me and what I learned was the remarkable confidence our team had in the Lord. These prayers were not frantic, desperate, begging cries to someone who we had to plead with to earn favor. They were requests presented in earnest and in confidence to someone we knew loved us and had the best in mind for us. We knew God was in control of the situation even when it was completely out of our control. I have never felt such peace in a situation that seemed so precarious as when I was praying for the support and Jack’s passport to come in.

By the morning of our flight, we had basically all of our support raised, but still no passport. Then, one hour before we had to leave for the airport, I got a text from Jack: They found his passport. Talk about a Hallelujah Jesus moment. It was amazing.

Leaving the passport behind for sure was a mistake, but it was totally part of God’s plan. Now, as we left the airport and flew to our strange new home for six weeks, we knew for certain that we were in God’s hands and that our strength was totally in Him. What a bomb way to begin the trip.

I'm going to try and make up a lot of time....

Ahem. So, I did report quite a while back that I was going to be consistently blogging here, which clearly I have not done. Well, I hope you will all forgive me; it has been a very busy trip and I have had very little time for blogging. I am generally a rather verbose person so I am always worried blogging will take me too long to do. Well, it's time to stop worrying and just start writing, because I have some fantastic stories to share.

I’ve decided that for ease of reading, I’m going to break these stories up into individual posts, even if I am posting several stories at once. Here we go!

I'm Blogging in Tokyo!

Hey everybody!

So this is my blog for while I am in Tokyo.  This is where I'll be sharing photos, videos (maybe) , and stories about what I am up to over here in the other hemisphere.  I'll try to make note of it on Facebook when I update here.  I should regularly be updating this on Sundays, but, as you can see, sometimes I will get a chance to put in a quick mid-week update.

Alright, hopefully I'll get some posts up here in a hurry. I've already got a lot to share about what God has been doing just to get us here, but it's going to take some time to get it all written down.  So for now, just please keep us in your prayers as we go out to minister to Japanese university students.

Jamata!