At Kanazawa Castle on a cold and snowy day in February
Hi everyone,
Thank you for your prayers during what has been an unusually busy start to the year. In February, after having just gotten our new missionary (Mickey) settled, we hosted a potential new missionary couple on their vision trip. This involved some travelling, meetings with pastors, site-seeing and ministry.
One highlight of the vision trip was a visit to the Noto Peninsula where we would learn more about the 2024 earthquake and take part in an outreach at Anamizu Volunteer Centre with Noto Help. There was a food truck where some 150 hamburgers were given away, while we mingled with guests, a few of whom came inside to play games, eat snacks and practice English with us.
It seems like the vision trip was a great learning experience for both Mickey and our visitors. Please pray for this couple’s next steps, for Mickey’s continuing learning curve, and for Yoko and I as we continue to work on preparing a stronger foundation for future GP missionaries to Japan.
And now it’s March all of the sudden! Here’s some of what’s going on and what you can be praying for:
1. A new Waypoints manga just posted to the website this week. You can check out the English version of “The Test” HERE. Please keep praying for this project to help open hearts to the Gospel!
2. The annual conference of Immanuel General Mission (our partner denomination in Japan) is taking place later this month in Yokohama. Please pray for the pastors and leaders taking part in the business, worship and learning during the conference. As usual, we are also planning to attend as guests, so pray for our travel as well.
3. Related to that, annual conference is where new pastoral appointments are made and transition season begins, so please pray for the IGM churches, pastors and families who will be going through changes post-conference.
Hope your year is off to a good start. Ours has been busy. It turns out that onboarding a new missionary is a lot of work. It’s a good reminder to me to be grateful for all the people who helped me out when I first came as an English teacher and later as a missionary, and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The good news is Mickey is in Japan, settling in nicely and already diving into learning Japanese.
In February (starting tomorrow, in fact!) we are hosting a potential missionary couple who are visiting on a vision trip. We’re also planning on doing an English outreach event in Noto, and traveling for some meetings too. Your prayerswould be much appreciated, especially since we’ve been getting lots of winter weather lately (see below).
Thank you for praying for our Christmas ministries. Yoko and I were privileged to do preaching and music ministry at two different churches during Advent. Also, we went with a group from our church through Noto Help to help distribute free Christmas cakes to people living in the area affected by the 2024 earthquake. In total, Noto Help distributed cakes to around 4,000 households! It is a small act in the grand scheme of things, but we are thankful that we could be a part of bringing encouragement in Jesus’ name to so many people.
It occurred to me during our visit that while our contact with the evacuees was short and seemingly insignificant, our real role was to support the local pastors and missionaries who connect with those evacuees on a regular basis. And that is meaningful, even if we don’t see the results. Please pray that God will lead, sustain, bless and use these local workers as they reach out to people who have lost so much.
After Christmas, Yoko and I enjoyed taking some much-needed holidays, and this week we’re getting back into the swing of things. We are diving into a very busy season of ministry: We are preparing for the arrival of our new teammate Mickey this month. We are also preparing to host a team of potential new missionaries on a vision trip in early February. On top of that, we’re of course trying to plan ahead for the rest of the year. We would appreciate your prayers for these things over the next month.
Thank you as always for your partnership! We hope God blesses you abundantly in 2026.
Autumn has come and almost gone, so it’s about time for one of our big, bi-annual newsletters. This one is a bit of a year-end reflection piece with a bunch of points for your prayers.
Thank you for your continual prayers! We could smoothly sign a contract for our new office space this week! In the midst of the process over past a few weeks, we had some travels and ministry opportunities, as we shared in October prayer letter.
One of the highlight was last weekend. We attended a Christian conference that was held by CBI (Christ Bible Institute) in Nagoya, where we lived before. We were blessed and encouraged through several conference sessions, catching up with old friends and promoting Drawbridge Creations. More than 500 people attended the conference and we could get new connections who showed interest in our ministry. The conference also celebrated CBI’s 20th anniversary. I thank God that I could be involved in the 1/3 of their history as a student and a staff there. So we were very happy to celebrate this milestone with CBI folks!
Another highlight was ministry opportunities in Noto, where the big earthquake took place last year and Christian relief work continues. Robin preached at a church whose current pastoral missionaries were in States and we had a fellowship lunch time there including a non-Christian neighbour of the church. One couple at the church shared with us that the repair of their house finally started more than 15 months after the earthquake happened.
Still about 20,000 people live in temporally housing. There was some sad news that elderly people who lived alone in temporally housing and lost their community after the earthquake died lonely and were found after several days. With some members of our home church in Kanazawa, as a part of volunteer work of NOTO HELP, we visited a temporally housing town, Fugeshi, that has about 100 housing units. We could have some conversation with some residents there. The time and energy of our team is limited, but we hope to visit there monthly and to build relationships as a neighbours.
November will be busy for setting up our new space, and some ministry opportunities are scheduled. Here are some prayer points.
We’re excited how God will lead us to start building a new good relationship around the office space.
We have opportunity to attend an active listening seminar for disaster relief worker on Nov. 9th and we are scheduled to visit Fugeshi temporally housing again for NOTO HELP volunteer work on Nov. 22nd. We hope to learn well and serve at Fugeshi more effectively.
We are scheduled to host a meeting with Immanuel Church leaders and WGM missionaries in Kanazawa on Nov.25th.
Advent Sunday (11/30) we’re at Immanuel Fukui Church , where Robin is scheduled to preach and I will lead worship.
We are waiting for a document from the immigration office for our new missionary. We hope to get it soon so we can make a plan for his moving.
