Day 18 - The Ping Pong Challenge

Friday September 18th, 2009

The day of the big Ping Pong challenge is finally here. Well let me remind you about today. Paul is a very caring guy. He works really hard at trying to reach out to people to include them as much as possible. Well I think he has gotten himself in trouble. A week or so ago he started up a conversation with the young man at comes to church. They soon were talking about ping pong. Probably because Paul’s vocab is geared toward basic conversation like: Where were you born?, Where do you work?, What are you good at or like to do for fun? So they soon they were talking about ping pong. Don’t get me wrong Paul is fairly good. You know playing around with the boys at our house on a warped ping pong table I got from my dad. Any way Paul thought it would be a great idea if he challenged Minoru-san to a friendly game of ping pong. Come to find out, a few days later, Minoru-san is a very good ping pong player. He was the  #1 junior high player in the entire city of Takasaki. That’s like all of Wichita. Ha Ha Ha! I was rolling when I found this out. Poor Paul just trying to make a friend with this high school student.

So today is the day. The game began at 2:00pm. Minoru-san has been out of practice for awhile, so Paul was hopeful. I think they played 12 games. Paul lost all of the games, some of them zero to 11. (in Japan they only play to 11 and switch servers every 2 points) About half way through Paul asked him if he was going easy on him. He politely replied, “yes”.

So then Paul wanted to see his full ability. The games got even faster. It was pretty amazing. Paul once had the score at 10-10 but then lost when Minoru made 2 amazing shots in a row.  So close! Obata-san even took a turn against Minoru. I have to say Obata-san is really good. It was very entertaining watching the 74 year old playing the 16 year old.

Later the two young girls came by. We played with them for a little while they had fun taking a couple goofy pictures with some glasses they found. Then we had to clean the building, to get it ready for services on Sunday. We pray that we continue to grow our friendships with all the people of different ages here!