Day of Rest

Today was Sunday, so we had church at the Suzuki's house. It was a nice, intimate setting with all of us [maybe 15 people] in their living room. Barbara shared a message about the Heart of God that centered on the story of Jonah. An interesting thing she pointed out was that the common assumption that we have is that Jonah being swallowed by the big fish was punishment for his running away, but actually it was an act of mercy because it was in the belly of the fish that Jonah had time to reflect and to turn to God. I liked when she shared, "God saves us from ourselves." I know that is true all too well. Haha. After church we hung out and ate lunch. Barbara gave us a rule that we were not allowed to talk to anyone we knew, only people we didn't know. That was fun navigating through the language barrier. A couple of girls stayed for a long while to hang out--we talked, played cards, and watched some of We Bought a Zoo.

Making nigiri for lunch before church service.

Yesterday was our free day, so we spent it going into the city. We braved the train system to get to our first destination, Asakusa, with a lot of help from nice Japanese people in the station willing to answer our questions and deal with our little to no knowledge of Japanese. One lady, whom Steven called our tomodachi (friend), actually told us to follow her and she showed us the way as far as she could. That was incredibly helpful. Thankfully Masa met us at Asakusa so the rest of the train rides were led by him. Asakusa was clearly a tourist spot indicated by the loads of people there and the amount of picture-taking by everyone. There is a kind of street lined with shops on both sides that leads to the temple, so most of us were able to buy souvenirs. After Asakusa, Masa took us to Harajuku street where we saw a lot of different fashion styles and Enoch bought a famous Marion crepe (we all tried it; it is really good!). Then we walked to Shibuya (the place where Tokyo Drift was filmed) as the sun went down so we were able to experience city lights and watch Shibuya night life begin. The day was a lot of fun, full of adventure, and very sore on the feet. We all slept really well that night.

View of the shops leading to the temple

Shibuya!

Tomorrow is Monday and our first school day at Jiyu Gakuen. We were told that we will be introduced to the whole school in the morning chapel. It sounds pretty intimidating, but everyone is so nice here so I'm sure it will be fine. :]