Thanks for praying for Saturday's Hawaiian Luau. We started off the day with a prayer walk, dividing into small groups and walking around the neighbourhood to several sights like the neighbourhood playground, elementary and middle schools, community centre where are classes are held, office building, shopping centre and terrace, where many area families gather in the evening to enjoy the open space and cooler air. Meanwhile, a team of 4 people were working in our tiny kitchen to produce a fantastic meal of Rice, Kalua Pork w/ cabbage, Chicken Long Rice, Lomi Salmon, Tossed Salad w/ Papaya Seed dressing, Pineapple upside down cake and Coconut cake. What a feast!
The event started at 2:00 with a special event for Junior High kids. This is a group that we've been wanting to start a program for. Seven giggly girls arrived and thoroughly enjoyed the games, Hawaiian dance and music performed by the team. All said that they'd be interested in coming to a program designed for them. The next part of the program was to be a "community party" for all of our contacts involved in kids programs and English classes. God seemed to have something different in mind however, as those who came were mostly new contacts who came as a result of flyers handed out in the morning while we were prayer walking - and I didn't think that worked very well. Sure made me rethink that method!
There were a couple of women who attended with their children who hadn't been to my classes for some time. It was nice to reconnect with them. One woman didn't even know about the event, but had had a fight with her husband so stormed off to the grocery store with her little girl. When she came back, she found she was locked out of the house. One of the woman from our group noticed her in the hallway and offered to put her perishable grocery items into her own refrigerator and invited her to the event. God had a really unusual way of reconnecting us after not having any contact for a while. A questionairre was filled out at the end of the evening and 3 people indicated that they'd like to study the Bible in Japanese. Along with my other contacts who filled out the questionairre earlier, we now have 7 people interested. Several others stated that they'd like to join a discussion group concerning "Family Life".
So, our fall programs of course will include a Japanese Bible study and an English discussion group on Family Life, as well as a program for Junior High kids and probably English classes for elementary and kindergarten children and for adults. Please pray with us that we'll have wisdom as we prepare our materials and set up our teaching schedules.
We're happy to be working with the Loves who will arrive back from Home assignment August 13th. That's less than a month away now and they're still looking for housing. Please pray that something will become available soon so that they can be settled in by the start of the school year Aug. 27th.
The short term team who worked so hard on our Luau will be doing the same in other churches and then will be heading to Niigata to the site of the July 16 earthquake to help with clean up. Please pray for endurance (it's quite hot here now) and for safety as they clean up rubble, carry out a kid's program so that parent's can do clean up and provide some meal preparation for the relief teams. Our daughter, Laura, will be joining them.
