But anyway! Since it's almost Christmas and the next couple of weeks are going to be crazy, I'm going to try to stay caught up while I can. So let me first talk about yesterday.
Yesterday morning, a couple of our students took Carol, Becky and I to a local Catholic church that has some artifacts from the period of Christian persecution in Japan. (You may remember that this is what we learned about on my first weekend in Japan. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read about it here.) The main artifact that we went to see is a comb that belonged to Hosokawa Gracia, a Christian woman who lived during that time of persecution. There was lots of other interesting stuff there too, and we were able to meet the father of the church, who's an American and was really nice and explained a lot of the things to us. I took some pictures~
The comb. See the cross?
Reflection pictures! Yay!
Bein awesome all by myself.
What are these called? Guards? Anyway, they went on swords.
One of the signs saying that Christianity was prohibited. This one is from Mie. Where I live.
Statues of Mary. I thought these were really interesting.
A lot of the stuff had IHS on it. It has some kind of Christian meaning in Latin? The faces in the pictures are Western.
See all the crosses?
You get the idea.
After leaving the church, the ladies took us out to a really excellent lunch at a buffet in a hotel here in Tsu. (The word for buffet here in Japan is, evidently, viking. I...yeah. I don't know either.) The food was really excellent!
I spent a big chunk of the rest of my day working on the Power Point presentation for Christmas Day, which...was kind of a lot of work, but it came out pretty well. I did take a break to do some reading though. I was also able to catch up with a few people via Facebook and Skype as well, so overall it was a nice, productive day!
Today was also quite nice. Becky and I started making a video for one of our supporting churches, which was actually pretty fun. Later in the afternoon, we went over to Carol's for our usual Tuesday meeting, where we did some tweaking on the Power Point I made yesterday and discussed a few other things related to Christmas. (None of us can believe Christmas is this week!) Carol had us over for dinner, so we spent some time chatting before Becky and I came home. Since then, I've pretty much been working on my computer, so nothing too terribly exciting to report. But don't worry, I'm sure there are exciting blog posts coming up during (or after...) the holidays!
And please, if you think of it, keep us in prayer as we continue to plan and work on everything for Christmas, and that God will bring the people on that day that need to hear the message. Thank you all so much for all of your support! I am blessed beyond measure. <3
Hey it's Sara aka twilightmagic from lj Sara Jean from Facebook lol the list goes on from where you know me from lol
ReplyDeleteGlad you're having a good time in Japan ^^ your lunch looks amazing! Urayamashi! I miss eating Japanese food all the time. I agree Japan needs to embrace the wonder of cereal I often ended getting something called "big flakes" or something like that. It was supposed to be like frosted flakes
The thing that goes on the sword is called a tsuba it's basically just a hilt guard lol I use them in kendo on my shinai and bokken.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the cheereos. We'll be sure to send more maybe in January. The artifacts were pretty amazing. Thanks for the people pictures. It's nice to see the people you talk about.
ReplyDeleteMy friend sent me a box with Capn' Crunch in it when I was in Japan. It's kind of strange the things you end up missing.
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