Konnichiwa from Kojima! (That means hello!)
On Resurrection Sunday, our church was able to have a large meeting outside, complete with inviting friends, worship and Bible study, a picnic, and even an Easter egg hunt. See pictures below. I apologize I didn’t get any Easter egg hunt photos. But you all know what that looks like anyway! I believe we had about 17 adults and seven kids from infant to junior high.
In the past, we have met under cherry blossoms, but this year Easter was late enough that the cherry blossoms were all gone, and anyway the place we have met in the past is not allowing picnics at this time. So we met at a beautiful park with wisteria trellises. The amazing wisteria pictures below were taken by Tomomi, not me.
Ken used a story from Japanese tradition as a redemptive analogy to Christ’s sacrifice of his own life for us. I think it resonated with newcomers.
My friend Lisa came with her three kids. It was her first time experiencing Resurrection Sunday worship and she seemed to really enjoy it. The kids enjoyed the picnic and the Easter egg hunt.
Unfortunately, the Covid numbers are going up again, so my hopes that we would be able to begin having monthly get-togethers soon that we could invite friends to will have to wait a while longer.
Four of us have begun taking turns teaching a Bible class for our one regular child so that the others can attend worship and Bible study (and teach or translate!) for the other three weeks. This has just begun, so we’ll see how it goes, we may have to tweak our arrangement a little, but we hope it will be a good experience for all involved.
Pray for us, that all the Kojima Christians will continue to grow in faith and fellowship, and that we will soon be able to begin inviting friends to activities again.
Please pray for our sister Yukiko; without going into details she is searching for a godly way to handle a personal situation.
