Day 13 Worship and Paul's cell phone

Sunday Sept 13th, 2009

We woke up to a great morning. I think Paul was a little relieved to just be able to focus on worshiping God this morning and not having to speak in Japanese. We got ready and walked down to the building. The message this morning was harder to keep up with. Obata-san doesn't speak very much English in his sermons, so we have to pay attention and catch every word we know. He preached on Deut 1:5-8. “The LORD our God said to us at Horeb, "You have stayed long enough at this mountain. ⁷ Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites; go to all the neighboring peoples in the Arabah, in the mountains, in the western foothills, in the Negev and along the coast, to the land of the Canaanites and to Lebanon, as far as the great river, the Euphrates. ⁸ See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers—to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and to their descendants after them."

His central message was for us to realize that the Haruna church had been on the mountain long enough, like Moses, and needed to “turn and take the land.”  This was a call for a new start at the church and with the addition of the Herrington’s, Brother Obata was asking the congregation to get behind him in a new outreach to the community.  It was very moving.

Then after services we stayed around and had tea and a Chinese dumpling called Manjou.  It was a bread filled with meat. It was really good. It tasted like sloppy Joes. Yumm. Then about 5:00 we met up with Rieko and Ryosuke to pick-up Paul's cell phone. It only took about 30min this time. Yeah, Paul has a phone now and it's not pink or flashy gold. He has a nice blue/black phone.

After that we decided to stop by an auto store and look at a GPS, we’re a little tired of getting lost. We've seen a few but they are really expensive. But they are huge here. The screens are at least 5" or larger. Well we got some good info and Paul decided to go home and search the web for a better deal.

When we got home we had another visitor. He was on our front door this time. I guess that’s what we get for leaving the front light on!