This weekend was so incredibly healing and relaxing and wonderful. I have been feeling really down the past few weeks...which was discouraging to me because I didn't really know what I was feeling down about. My back had gotten to the point where when I finally asked a friend for a backrub she described it as more denting her fingers than her fingers denting my back. This girl gives the most effective backrubs I have ever had, and apparently the look on my face while I was receiving said backrub was making everyone within a twenty or thirty foot radius hurt as well. My back honestly hadn't been hurting too badly before the backrub, but it was starting to give me headaches at night. After the backrub, it hurt very badly, but the boulder that it had been had turned into a rather tender back with several large rocks still floating around.
I honestly have a point to all these backrub ramblings, I swear. Because what I figured out over the weekend is that the way my back had been getting was pretty much what I had been doing with all of me. I'd been taking all the stress from moving and just kind of holding it tightly and convincing myself that I didn't really feel it. The process of trying to release the stress has been painful, but I am starting to loosen up. I am starting to make friends. The real Pamela is beginning to show her face again. But loosening the stress has meant spending some time crying and being lonely and reminding myself that I really am an emotional person and really shouldn't try to lie to myself about that fact.
We traveled out to Okutama, which is about an hour towards the "out of Tokyo" direction from our house. There we saw mountains, and breathed fresh air, and spent some time walking around in nature. *happy sigh* We were in Okutama for the Hongo Bible Camp. Technically we were staff, but it was relaxing anyway. The Japanese folks there were either Christians or English students at the Hongo Center. The event was pretty much all in English.
We did several skits throughout the course of the weekend. The first was of Mary and Martha, and focused my dear housemate as Martha dashing around doing terribly important tasks such as making rice and walking the dog. Then we did a Good Samaritan skit (except we did the Good North Korean) in which yours truly got beaten up, and had her shoes and her left sock stolen.
The best part of the weekend for me, though, was sitting around the fireplace (no campfire because it was raining) and singing Bible Camp songs. We led a devotion there too in which we brought in a bunch of rocks, shared some Bible verses and then had people come up and lay a rock on the cross to represent giving their burdens to Christ. I can very safely say that it was not only the Japanese people who needed the devotion.
We roasted marshmallows for s'mores afterwards, and I think I nearly gave several nice Japanese ladies heart attacks. Apparently they don't really 'do' marshmallows in Japan, and if they do, they stick to the nice conventional s'mores. The sight of a young missionary making a blazing torch out of her marshmallow, blowing it out, and immediately pulling the charred sugar off and eating it was a little shocking. They kept saying "daijobu?" (are you okay?), so I think they were afraid the marshmallow was a lot hotter than it really was. I tried to convince them that it was the best way to eat marshmallows, but not even one of them tried it. Perhaps their hesitation was aided by the fact that all the other missionaries thought I was crazy too. ;)
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