8:05am JST
Just got up (Around 7:02) and wandered around the house taking pictures of everything, including Moe and Jeri sleeping :)
Last night's team meeting was really good for us and after we all prayed and discussed verses and attitudes we felt a lot better. We all want to repair whatever "damage" we may have done with our attitudes yesterday and be the 24/7 missionaries from here on out.
Pastor Ito came by last night with a keitai (cellphone) for us to use over the summer. We gave him the gift we'd brought for him and talked about what he wanted us to say in church today. He wants me to talk about the team's "vision and dreams" .... I think I will bring an IBC bulletin along as well so they can see it, and some postcards of PA.
I kinda like being up early.... not that I can do that at home.
I'm really realizing here the extent of giving each morning to God because there is NO way I could get through these days by myself. I NEED to surrender and completely rely on Him because Courtney Myers cannot do it by herself.
10:13pm JST
Today has been really cool.
We were up early again and got ready for church, then were picked up by the Yoshidas (Mieko-san and her husband) for church. Church was so cool... the organ lady played "Be thou my vision" and we met some of the folks (there seem to be 20-30 core members of the church in Kaminoyama) and then sang songs that we recognized - but in Japanese :) We then went up in front to introduce ourselves to the church, I talked about the team (Ito-sensei translated) and then we each introduced ourselves with Noriko translating. Ito-sensei then gave his sermon in Japanese, during which we all sat and prayed and read our Bibles (though we couldn't understand what was being said, it was fascinating to see the faith and devotion of the Japanese Christians). There was also a time of meet & greet, much like IBC back home.
We noticed Ito-sensei had used pictures from the photo book on Washintgon State that we gave him for the inside of his church bulletin which was really cool!
Afterwards we rearranged the tables in the center of the room for the welcome potluck and were introduced to the lovely folks of the church. The potluck was a lot of fun - people commented on our chopstick usage :) and we chatted and took photos and laughed as we got to know them all.. Ito-sensei was embarrassed to discover that Seattle was not, in fact, the capitol of WA (as he had put in the bulletin), but Olympia was!
Afterward we shuttled off to a memorial service (it was the 5th anniversary I think of the death of the husband of one of the church members) - the deceased's grave read John 3:16 and was marked with a large stone cross in a sea of Buddhist graves. We were told his birthday was March 16 (3/16), the revelation of which was extremely cool. We sang and prayed and took photos.
Then it was off to cherry picking... on the way, Moe and I enjoyed a fun conversation with Mieko and her husband about various kinds of fruit we saw and their Japanese names (Jeri and Laurel rode with Noriko).
The cherry picking was really cool. At first we just stood around and ate cherries (and spit the pits - Laurel and Moe's pit-spitting distance caused Rio, a 13-year old with us, to exclaim "sonna!" [no way!]) They also got in a pit-spitting contest with one of the church ladies, much to everyone's amusement :)
Then out came the plastic containers and we picked.... and picked... and picked....
A young family with 2 boys showed up at some point and the boys were so cute running around and climbing poles and crawling all over their dad. Overall it was fun, striking a really sharp contrast to the day before. The surrounding landscape was beautiful as well!
Afterward it was decided we'd go to karaoke tomorrow with Noriko (we tried to get Ito-sensei to come as well, but he was too embarrassed).
The rest of our night was spent taking photos (I poked my head out the upstairs windows to capture the surroundings of our house and found a nifty vine in the backyard), bumming around the house, and cleaning up shards of glass.. we also had a good team meeting where we encouraged each other and decided to get a ring that would pass from person to person each day.
We also ate 4 boxes of our cherries :X
