Blessed to be a blessing...

On Thursday of our first week in country, we got the special privilege of attending and being specially welcomed at Student Impact (Japan Campus Crusade for Christ's college ministry)'s weekly meeting. It's a rather small group- probably around 30 people show up on a weekly basis (including staff). But it's nice and intimate, and it's great seeing Japanese Christians coming together from many different campuses to worship God.

Quite a few of these students are the only/one of two known Christians on their campus. And the staff are often people who came to know Christ in college, and have stood alone in their faith as lone rangers in their communities. So it was AWESOME seeing all these people come together for encouragement and edification.

So at the beginning they introduced each one of us, and they cheered so enthusiastically for each one of us. They seem to be really encouraged that we are here- that college students from the States would give up 6 weeks of their summer to come to Tokyo and help these students and staff reach the Tokyo campuses for Christ.

We also got the awesome opportunity to have two of our students share their testimony of how they were led to come to Japan.

We chose Kylan from Cal and Kimi from USC to share their stories. Kylan spoke first, in Japanese, about how the Lord led him away from his original major to studying Japanese at college, and how that led to him studying abroad in Tokyo at Hitotsubashi University for a year. During that time, he really developed a heart for the country and has been wanting to come back in a ministry capacity. So this was a perfect opportunity for him. Now he's leading a campus team and is such a blessing to our team. Kimi then spoke about how, even though she's half Japanese, she didn't have much knowledge about the culture that her mother's patriarchs came from. But when she found out that less than 1% of the Japanese population even claims to be Christian, her heart broke for "her" people and she looked into coming to Japan on a mission trip. So last year she got to come on the 2-week Tokyo City Focus Summer Project, which got her heart beating so hard for this city, that she promised right then and there that she would be back. Here she is. :)

It was also an exciting opportunity for me, as I got to do some translating. The talk was going to be given entirely in Japanese, so I sat in a corner with all the English speakers (read our team... maybe like 2 more STInters) and translated into English as the JCCC staff guy gave his talk on Christ-like love. It was a convicting, encouraging talk, and we absolutely loved being there.

As a little bonus, Matt got to invite a non-Christian guy he met at Gaidai to come to Student Impact, and while there, Kylan got to share the Gospel extensively with him! He seemed really interested and we're praying that the relationship can continue so that he can learn more and more about our God.