We Laugh at Key

This Saturday at Key was a particularly sweet time, in my opinion. One of the Japanese guys was supposed to lead a Bible study. I sent him an email around 4:00 when he wasn't there yet, and it turns out he was asleep, but came right over after getting my email. We spent the first hour just hanging out, speaking broken Japanese or broken English...often both in the same sentence. In the end, Kim came up with a great game for us to play. Which is the source of all the pictures in this entry. The game is kind of a combination of pictionary and telephone. It's a little difficult to explain, but everyone started by drawing a picture or writing a phrase. So, if I draw a picture, I pass it to the person on my right. That person looks at what I've drawn and writes on another paper what they think the picture is. Then, they pass what they've written to the next person, who has to draw a picture of what was written down without seeing my original picture. The results are hilarious.

We had a woman come in to see Key for the first time. She actually walked in after we were finished. Three people were in a backrub line and we were just laying around and talking. She asked us what we normally did at Key, which is always a hard question to answer. But one of the Japanese guys rescued us from our efforts to explain and said very simply, "We laugh." And we certainly laughed a lot last Saturday. Here are some of our pictures from Saturday (and hopefully some laughter) to share with you guys:

Here is the first picture, drawn by my good friend Jenae. Later, she explained to us that this picture was supposed to represent "Allergy Season".

The next person (who may or may not have been me) wrote,
She sang a song to her favorite forest flower.
Followed by...(I think you're getting the idea now)

A hermit sings in the garden.

There is a strange man dancing in flowers.




Here's the next round. Note that we had non-native English speakers in the group, which is how this lovely situation came about. :-) :



Loving my planetes.



Save the earth.



Don't smoke for the future of the earth.





And my personal favorite:

This one started with a caption rather than a picture: A Shepherd.

An astrologer is standing with chicken.

Watching the stars with my best friend the chicken.

Yay for laughter!

Jesus Sightings at Key

Aside from all our laughing at Key, I was struck really strongly as we sat around in a group that every person there was a person who had been impacted personally by Jesus. As we were sitting around, one of the guys pulled out a book of pictures from Israel. He showed me one of Mt. Sinai--a landscape of jagged, rocky mountains that I can't imagine how a person could climb--and he told me that he had been in a prayer group and seen a picture of him and Jesus with mountains like that. He said before he'd had that experience, he hadn't really believed in Jesus. He described the picture he had seen: Jesus flying down a mountain to him.

Key is supposed to end at 5:00, but we were still hanging out and talking at 7:00. For about an hour we'd been saying we should go eat. But at this point it was 7:00, Bibles were spread all over the place, and another Japanese guy had enlisted us to help us find this Psalm he'd been meditating on recently. I proposed we bring Bibles along to the restaurant. And while we waited for food, he told us all about how his life had been changed so much...how he had gone from being a person who had been scared away from the harsh teachings of the church he was attending and had recently been touched by Jesus through the Lutheran youth gathering we attended last fall. Now he had quit his job and was considering going to seminary.

Another Japanese member of the group was suicidal and snatched to safety when Jesus found him.

It's a special group of people...a group that can sit together and say, "We have known the Lord."

Kazuhiro said it best maybe when someone said "It's like He chose you." And he flipped right to John 15 and read, "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last."

I wonder what this fruit will be. If it will be fruit that the group bears together or if everyone in the end will scatter out to be planted in a different place. But for now, the fruit seems to be that young Christians, Japanese and English, have a place where they're coming together and starting to trust each other. We're starting to learn how to communicate and how to share our joys and struggles, and it's a group where His name comes up all the time, whether we're doing Bible study or drawing silly pictures.

Kids make me happy, plus more transitional ramblings

On Saturday, the ELCA missionaries got together to have lunch, kind of to recognize me and also the new J3s who have finished language training and will be starting their assignments soon. The highlight of this time for me was teaching Aaron's daughter Cassidy how to do a headstand. I just can't help it...after several years of coaching beginner gymnastics, I see a kid trying to stand on their head with their hands by their ears and I have to help them learn how to balance. :-)

Anyway...apparently I made a friend. During church today, I received these notes in sequence. The last one was my very favorite. :-)

Tonight I rented a movie on itunes about three soldiers who are returning home from Iraq. I mostly got it because I figured I would be able to identify very well with the return culture shock. There were a couple really good return culture shock moments, but my favorite part was when they were in Colorado. There was dust blowing around. I realized I haven't been anywhere dry enough for there to be dust blowing around in about two and a half years. And something else really strange...they were outside in the Rockies, and I realized the sound their feet made on the ground was familiar...it was the crunch of dry pine needles on mountain soil. It's comforting in a way. Today, I finished my last human-given responsibilities in Japan, with the exception of moving myself out. It was nice to feel a longing for home. I'm excited to sit up on a mountain where the air is fresh and dry and the ground crunches and dust blows around and gets in your eyes...I'm excited to see the sky jam packed with stars...and I can't wait to go back to a small town pace of life if only for a little while...

I guess what all of that means is that I'm finally letting go...I've been letting go for several months now as God has gently helped me pry away one finger at a time, but it's to the point where I dare to let my heart remember some things it loves about home. I don't know if that seems like a big step to anyone else, but I was surprised to find that my heart had made it.