Day 3

Prayer Request: For Christians in Japan to be given the wisdom to explain the Gospel in a way that reaches the heart of the Japanese.

*I am not affiliated with the websites connected to the links in this post. I hope that all of the links will help provide extra context for the ministry in Japan, even though they are from a secular perspective. 🙂 Thanks for doing the extra homework! 😉

Today is Sunday! Rett and I, and the other guests staying at the TEAM center attended church at the SonRise Café. TEAM has an outreach ministry through a café that they started near Ikebukuro in Tokyo, and on Sunday a small church service is held there. The message today was on how Biblical figures dealt with fear. In some ways, the message was extremely simple, being only slightly above what we teach normally in the children’s ministry, but sometimes we all need to be reminded of basic Biblical principles. Something I was struck by in the message is that the Bible doesn’t just tell us to know the principles found within it, or the “Law” (as it would have been referred to in the Old Testament), but it teaches us to seek God’s face. In other words: along with reading about God, we should pray that we can know him as closely as the people we talk to face to face!

Encouraging verses from the sermon:

Psalm 27

Jeremiah 29:13

After the service, we had a chance to talk with some of the missionaries who run the SunRise Café and the ministries that branch off of it. I will write about more of the specifics on Day 5, but I can say that the overall theme was one of dependence on God for ministry growth, thankfulness for what He has already done, and a real sense of normalcy as we talked about life, kids, and as we joked about learning from our mistakes!

In the afternoon, we stopped for sushi with all the guests from TEAM (yellowtail is always a good choice, clam… eh), and journeyed back to the TEAM center. Most of our compatriots stayed in for the rest of the day, as it was raining progressively harder in preparation for a typhoon later that night, but Rett and I ventured out for some fresh air. We visited Asakusa, where we saw an eerily quiet Senso-ji (ji = and ending that indicates a Buddhist Temple). It was late and raining, so very few of the shops were open, but there was still a line of people, under umbrellas, waiting for their chance to offer a 5 yen piece and pray to Kannon, believed to be a goddess of mercy who resides in the Temple.

Next, we walked over the Sumida River (kawa = river) and visited the tourist area below the Tokyo Skytree. The Skytree is a new observation/radio tower in Tokyo, and we were hoping to see a view of the city at night from the top. Unfortunately, as we neared the tower, we couldn’t see more than halfway up due to the clouds, so we thought we probably wouldn’t be able to see the city from the top, and decided not to go up that night.

After stopping for dip-noodles and ramen we took the long subway/train ride back to Mitaka and settled in for our first good night's sleep in Japan.