Omede to gozaimasu!

We're in the middle of our first holiday season in Japan. Thanksgiving was our first big holiday to face apart from our families. We got to celebrate a good ol' American Thanksgiving twice! I'm so thankful we walk and ride our bikes so much, so the effects of the two feasts are lessened.

On Thanksgiving Day, we had a break from lessons, and chose to head to IKEA to get a rug they were running on sale, as well as a few other little home items. IKEA is definitely the cheapest place to get things for the home! It doesn't hurt that we can get free coffee with our IKEA card, as well as some really awesome cheap dark chocolate. While we were in line, we decided to make it a Thanksgiving lunch of French fries, cold green tea, cafe lattes, and dark chocolate bar. We looked so American scarfing down our huge plate of French fries, but didn't even care. We've been away from home long enough at this point to relish a chance to be American.

Since we don't own a car, we normally would have something as large as a rug delivered, but after testing the weight, Jason decided if I could handle wearing Finn and carrying our bag of other things, he could get the diaper bag and the rug. So yes, we decided to haul a huge area rug home. On a train. Of COURSE I documented it! 

We had dinner that night with another American couple, and some Japanese friends. Thanks to care packages, we were able to have stuffing, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, and other traditional Thanksgiving foods. The pumpkin pie was definitely the best part. We made sure our Japanese friends knew that it's tradition to stuff yourself on Thanksgiving.

Saturday was our big meal with all our American team mates. It was great fun! We played bingo and a trivia game for prizes, which included American candy, and feasted on American food. I paced myself Thursday, but on Saturday I ate sooooo much! It felt good to be full. We joke about how we stay hungry all the time here because Japanese portions are so small. 

I was thankful that we had our gathering scheduled for that particular day, because Saturday was the day that being away from my family during the holidays caught up with me. My family has always had the tradition of going to Little Rock the Saturday after Thanksgiving for a movie, Christmas shopping, and eating in one of the hundreds of restaurants we were lacking in our small southeast Arkansas town. It made me sad that Finn wouldn't get to grow up with that experience. 

But as always, God has a way of showing up in the hard times. He spoke to me that day while I was praying and telling Him about my sadness, and said during this Thanksgiving, be thankful for the hard times I have here, because they make me dependant on Him in a way I would never be in America. God knew what He was doing when He called me to make my life outside of America. He knows that I'm too stubborn and independent, and that living in Japan is what it's going to take to best conform me to His image.

To end on a lighter note, here's a picture I took of Finn and one of our teammates. Apparently, the turkey was just too much for him. I love it because he looks like a little man after a large Thanksgiving meal. He just needs a recliner, the remote, and a football game on TV.

Grace Full

Yesterday morning, after taking a quick moment to scan through my phone, I came away grieving. Between email, Facebook, and texts, I saw people needing prayer for wisdom while dealing with a difficult situation at their daughter's school, friends grieving for friends lost during the current crisis in their home in the Middle East, a prayer request from my home church for a husband that lost a wife and a young daughter in a car accident, not to mention thinking about my own team mates who are struggling to learn an insanely difficult language, all while trying to make sense of a new culture.

The day before yesterday, God had impressed a specific verse on me while reading John 1: "For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace." (v. 16) God has taught me so much from the book of John since we arrived in Japan, and that morning was no exception. 

Tears came to my eyes as I started to pray...not for deliverance from their current situation, but for grace. Only grace. The grace to bear the trials that God alone allowed to be placed in their lives, and for the grace that He alone can give. "Grace upon grace."

When I feel like the worst mother/wife/Christian/[fill in the blank] in the world...grace.

When I struggle with language...grace.

When all I want to do is go back to America and familiarity and English...grace.

Because He has enough and He IS enough. 

Why Japan?

If only I had a hundred yen for every time we've heard this since we began our journey to Japan...

A Facebook friend recently posted THIS incredible video, and I would highly encourage you to check it out.

So my new answer is..."Why NOT Japan?"

Oyasumi!

Rain and Sting Rays

This past Thursday kicked off tsuyu, or rainy season. It's supposed to last for about a month, mostly during June. It's been raining almost non-stop since Thursday morning. 

It's been somewhat of a challenge, since life must go on. There are still groceries to be bought, which must be done on foot or bicycle, lessons to go to, laundry that needs to air dried, and you have to get out and have some fun every now and again. But we're making it, and we're definitely thankful for the cooler temperatures that have come along with it.

While the clouds haven't cleared off, we finally got a break in the rain this afternoon, so we took advantageous of it and got out of the house for a little bit. There is a river that runs along our building, and empties into Tokyo Bay, and we had noticed some dark things swimming around in the water we suspected were sting rays. We hurriedly changed and got out the door and down to the water. Sure enough - sting rays!! We had gone to a local aquarium about a month ago, and got a chance to touch sting rays, but I think it was even cooler to see them in the wild.

This is one of the bigger guys. 

We also saw tons of tiny crabs, barnacles, and little fish - even tiny flounders! Who knew we had an aquarium literally right outside our door?! My inner marine biologist was geeking out!!!

I caught a tiny crab for Finn, but he was way more interested in running up and down the bank and stepping in the puddles :) 

I often see people out digging for clams when the tide is low, and now I'm very eager to go down to the river and check out what all there is to see when the water is low. Just another reason I love where we live!

The Hard Stuff

(This is a post I started at Chistmas, but never finished until now.)

"At Christmas, we like to see things in their proper place. We unwrap the ancient legends and the oldest truths. We like our angels unchanged and our rituals familiar. We like the right faces around the table, the right carols to be sung, the promise that this is how it is and always will be, because that is Christmas. The one still point in a world forever turning." 

The above quote are the opening lines to an episode of one of my current favorite shows: "Call the Midwife." I sat down to watch it and wasn't able to finish until I had processed those lines. 

Because...what happens when your Christmas is no longer a "still point in a world ever turning"? 

This year the faces around the table were, while still cherished, not the right ones. 

This year things weren't in their proper place.

The week leading up to Christmas wasn't an easy one for me. On top of missing my family, and those I normally celebrate with, I had a rough week in language. We had a stretch of several tough lessons back-to-back that left me feeling like a complete failure at Japanese. 

It all came to a head at our church's candlelight service. I had been asked to read a section of Scripture in Japanese, so I was sitting up front during the service with all the other readers. We sang all the "right carols", but in Japanese, so my brain had to work in overdrive to follow along with the hiragana.

Then things came to a head as I thought, "Why the heck am I doing this? Why am I here in this strange place struggling to sing Christmas carols - something that should be so easy and natural." I fought to hide tears that were threatening to embarrass me.

Then the Scripture reading started again. I can't tell you what was being read at that point, because my brain had checked out, but all of a sudden God spoke to my heart. He said, "You have no right to go home and sing Christmas carols in English while millions here don't know the reason we sing these carols." Well. Talk about a reality-check, spiritually speaking. I could go home and live in a familiar setting, with familiar faces, but I would miss the blessing of obeying God's command to plant my life in Japan, and be used by Him. So yes, I have GONE, but now I will STAY.

Cart, Buggy, Whatever

Depending on your respective area of the United States, your name for that contraption you use to haul your groceries around the store in will vary. However, the point of this post is not to argue about that, although you might be interested in knowing that if you were in Japan, you would more than likely call it a かご. Fun fact for the day.

They aren't all this way, but at our particular neighborhood supermarket, to use a buggy you must first insert a ¥100 coin, like so:

You then push in the coin, then the red thing connected to the chain above pops out, then you're on your merry way. After you are finished, you reconnect it with the cart in front of it and your coin pops back out.

Even though I occasionally have to scramble for a ¥100 coin, I have to admit, they have a pretty brilliant system going on. ¥100 is approximately $1, and you definitely wouldn't want to run off and leave your buck stuck in a cart now do ya? That's a large drink at Sonic Happy Hour!! (Unless the cost has gone up since I left the States) Therefore, you very willingly return your cart to all its little friends in the cart corral, and no cart pushers are needed. 

Fun Fact #2: Jason was a cart pusher at Wal-Mart one summer. It was the summer I spent in Romania, so I didn't see him for 8 weeks. When I came back, he was super tan and muscular from his job. Hubba hubba. Moral of the story, dudes: Cart pushing can be a very, VERY beneficial job.

Japan Life - Store Parking

I've decided to start a series of posts called "Japan Life" in order to document the things about our life here that I found most interesting when we moved here. Most of them are little mundane things, but they're so completely different from back home that they fascinate me.

First up - grocery store parking...and I guess you could say store parking in general. Most bigger stores have parking decks on top of the store, and the ground level parking is reserved for bikes. This is the bicycle parking lot at the supermarket where we get our groceries. Notice the bike-sized parking spaces.

Mr. Finn waiting to be loaded up in the bike along with a few day's worth of groceries.