Day 197-200 Gospel Meeting

Tuesday March 16th, 2010

    Our special guest speakers have arrived from America! Derin Dopps and Tim O’Neal arrived today at Narita airport and Paul and Obata-san met them to bring them back to Haruna. We are so happy to have these two men in our home. Derin and Tim are both from our home congregation in the States, Northside church of Christ. They both spent the last 10 days in the Philippines teaching and preaching to the many eager souls there. After dinner the guys showed us all the pictures and video that they had taken during their mission trip to the Philippines. From there on we had a tight schedule to keep. We really wanted to show them around Haruna and give them a feel for where we live. 

Wednesday  March 17th, 2010  we started off the day with a big breakfast. I love any excuse to cook a big meal! After that we went to the Obata’s to have our weekly business meeting. The guys joined us to finish all last details for the meeting. Then we headed to town. To one of our favorite places, Yamada Denki. We looked around for a little bit, but our main goal was lunch. We found a sushi restaurant and headed in. Tim was a little reluctant, he was not a big fan of seafood. He sat back and watched us all enjoy raw fish. So we soon found a McDonald's and Tim was right at home.

That evening was the first night of the Meeting. We arrived at the church building early to practice singing. Each night Derin, Tim, Paul and I sang a song to start the evening. Then we would all sing Amazing Grace together with those that attended.

Derin started the meeting off, speaking in English and Obata-san translated.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  He answered the question, “What is the Abundant Life?”. We had a total of 27 people attend that night. 15 were visitors. Most everyone stayed afterwards to talk and ask questions.

Thursday the guys were really tired from the stress of the meeting and the last 2 weeks of teaching and preaching in the Philippines, so we started off the morning a little later. Soon we headed out for lunch and went to a great ramen place called Kazan Ramen (it means volcano ramen). We all had a great time at lunch and soon we headed off to today’s main attraction, the Kindergarten.

We arranged for all of us to help teach that day with Keiko-san.                                           The kids loved Derin and Tim. We all reviewed animals and all the guys played their parts great. Later that evening at the Gospel meeting, Tim spoke about “How to find the Abundant Life.”   Again we had a great turn out. We welcomed 29 people to hear Tim’s message. And again we stayed until 11:00 pm talking to those that had questions.

Another day was finished so quickly. Friday we spent most of the day at Lake Haruna and looking around our favorite recycle shop. On Friday evening Paul brought the final message to the people in Japanese, “The Abundant Life is for you!” We were happy to see so many familiar faces among the 30 people that came.

Most of the crowd, were people that we have met over the last 6 months here and were coming to show their support to Paul. We had so many nice comments from those that came and a Bible study has been started with one woman that was brought to tears every night. Her name is Asa-san. She has eagerly started her journey to finding the Truth! We pray that we can help her on this journey to find God!

Over the three days we had many new people, many friends of the Obatas and neighbors come to listen. This was a great opportunity to plant a seed. We will see in the years to come how these seeds, with God’s love, will grow!