How sweet is this photo of Noa and three precious friends at the CCSI sports day?!? It was such a great day of fun and fellowship and community building. Eric planned the whole day and did a great job! I hope to put up more photos of this day in early October later. I’m a little behind.
Eric and I had the opportunity to attend Passion Tokyo (also in October). It was a great evening of worship and encouragement. Highlights included worshiping and hearing a message in English. We went with a group of other missionaries and Japanese friends, and it was soooo encouraging to see how many people were there, filling the C.C. Lemon Hall. I was so refreshed in my walk with Jesus, convicted of my often lukewarm response to the Gospel, and I was burdened for the lost in this land in a new way. It was an added bonus that T.G.I.F. was only a few blocks away and we could have “American” size burgers. It was a very special night. 
Noa and Martha have been growing so much in their little friendship. One thing that has been especially sweet recently is that Noa wants to “match Martha” everyday. She just loves it and gets sad when they don’t match. I have done some pretty good convincing and told her that when they are both in pants, or both have pink on their clothes, or (if I’m really desperate) are both in diapers, they ARE matching. For now, it seems to work on the days that we can’t come up with some “pair look” (as the Japanese say) clothes. I can’t blame her, though. I, myself, LOVE it when they match and pull it off as often as possible. 
I’ve mentioned before about our babysitting swap with the Pfeils. Here is one such night when we “played house” with a family of five. It is always such fun for us to have the free dates and for the kids to be together on these nights. We really enjoy our little arrangement.
A few weekends ago we enjoyed going onto Campus for their annual festival. It was such fun and a wonderful day as a family and with our friends. Noa experienced many first, including her first cotton candy and chocolate-covered banana. Both are treats she will gladly partake of again, given the chance.
Our neighbor’s daughter has the sweetest twin girls who are right in between Martha and Noa’s ages. We so enjoy it when the come to their grandma’s house because we can see them too!
Eric had a great time with these three good friends camping a few weekends ago. It was great male-bonding, apparently, and a good chance to be out in our beautiful autumn weather. He loved it and I hope he’ll take me and the girls sometime soon…well, if it doesn’t get too cold around here!
While they did their thing, me and the girls had a girls’ sleepover with Chizuka. It was a great time for us ladies. Here is Noa and Chi-chan showing off their Hello Kitty tattoos (sent by cousin Liam for Noa’s birthday).
The girls have had some big milestones recently. Martha is learning her shapes.
Noa is learning to drum
They both still love to read their books
Yikes. Last week as we were leaving church we discovered our tire was flat. All of us girls really enjoyed watching Eric fix it and get us back on the road. Noa was particularly interested. Future mechanic? Maybe.
And I’ll leave you with this photo of our youngest, totally entranced by the Gospel music at our college ministry Livehouse event last week.
Hope you’re having a great week. God bless!
Just thought I would take a minute to write about what life is looking like these days for us. We are back in full swing, with both school and English classes having started last week. Robert Stewart, Eric’s boss and the highschool teacher, had to go to the States to be with his mother during a surgery, so Eric got to be the high school class teacher for the week. He really enjoyed that. Some of his elementary students told me yesterday, though, that they were happy to have him back this week. I was excited to see that my Tuesday kids class has grown by 3 students this semester, 2 of whom have never had any association with church before now. I also help with Oyako Club (mom and kids club) 2 mornings a month, and yesterday we had a mother and daughter who came to church for the first time to a Christmas event and have decided to join the Oyako club. Its exciting to see fruit from the hard work many people put in to do the Christmas outreaches, and I’m thankful that we serve a God who really does the work – in the hearts of poeple. We only have a few more weeks of IMPACT before the college students take their spring holiday and several of our students graduate. We are excited for a new school year to start, along with some new vision/strategy in this ministry, but we are also trying to enjoy the time we have left with the students who will graduate. You can pray for Eric as he will be giving the talk this Friday (he offered to do it in Japanese but one of the Japanese staff said she could translate. Eric thought that was better, as now he can make it more than 2 or 3 sentences long…)
Noa and the baby are both doing well. Noa continues to be on the brink of walking but not quite there. Martha is making it hard for me to sleep at night but continues to be very active and, from what I can tell, healthy and comfortable. Its hard to believe that d-date is only five and a half weeks away!
Our big excitement before she arrives, though, is what we are calling Iverfest 2008. Starting on Friday, my siblings and their families who are not here will begin arriving. We will have one full week with everyone home in Japan for the first time in about 7 years. Danny and Kimberly and their kids, Daniel Josiah and Trinity will be staying with us for almost three weeks starting on Friday. We cannot wait to see them and get some good time with them. Eric and Danny were good friends at JMU before I started there, and Kimberly and I were roommates for two years, so we’re sure to have a great time being together, and we are thrilled for the kids to get to be together too. Daniel Josiah and Noa and Trinity are all 10 months apart, so I’m sure their interactions will be entertaining to say the least. This will also be our first time to meet Trinity, as she was born just a few days before we left for Japan. Then, on Tuesday Jonathan and Maggie will get here with Annie, the newest addition and another cousin who we can’t wait to meet. On Wednesday Joel and Mary Stuart will come and then Martha will arrive on Sunday. Starting that Sunday, our week of family reunion will begin and we are so excited. We will go to the mountains in Nagano for a few days, and just enjoy being here together once more. Also, I just LOVE my sisters-in-law and can’t wait for some good girl time. It will be great for them and the kids to experience Japan for the first time!
So anyway, that is what we are looking forward to, starting Friday. We will take time off to go to the mountains and be with the family that one week, too, which will be great. I’ll try to post pictures as our visitors arrive and we spend time together, but I am not making any promises For now, Mom, Noa, and I are off to Costco to stock up for the multitudes.
Continue reading about What’s been happening and what’s coming:
Tonight we had our first Christmas performance with the school. The Lord really blessed all of the logistics of it and everything went off pretty much problem-free. Whe are doing a living nativity, where there is music and narration (pre-recorded) and the cast just acts, without saying anything. We did two performances tonight and will do two more tomorrow night. It was very exciting to see all the people that came out tonight to watch, especially to see some of my English students from the community. Things went so well, and there was such a great response, that we are really praying that even more people will come out tomorrow evening. The narration gives an awesome Gospel presentation, and it was very clear tonight what a great outreach opportunity this really is. Please pray with us that the Lord would bring many people tomorrow night to hear the good, true news of Christ coming to save sinners. Please pray that he would prepare hearts for the message and that he would use this outreach greatly for his Kingdom work here in Japan.
I’m posting some pictures from tonight’s performance, maybe we will be able to get a video on here sometime soon, too.
Inside the school building, there was a really neat coffee house set up for people to warm up and sit and enjoy music. The kids have been preparing Christmas carolls to sing and they did great!
I (Sara-Beth) joined a Gospel group that meets at our church. This group practices and performs gospel-style music, a very poplar genre here in Japan. A lot of the people who come are church-goers or Christians, while the other people just come because they love to sing and practice English, and they love the fellowship. I am really excited because a lot of the people who come are from this community, and we live right down the street!
Here is a picture of Eric and Nagata-san. Nagata and Eric will be doing college ministry together, both at Chiba University but also the college ministry for our local church here. Today they played soccer with some of the youth for a while before my practice started.
At the beginning of practice, the director asked me to read the words of the song to everyone and let them repeat after me, in order to work on pronunciation. Since the song itself is pretty repetitive, we said a lot of the same things over and over again It was such a fun practice and I’m really looking forward to more.
After practice, the group had a barbecue. What FUN! This was Eric’s first Japanese barbecue and it was a good one. So much yummy food and a great opportunity to meet people and make new friends! Hope you enjoy the pictures and they don’t make you too hungry
