Author: David

Hey, this is Tomo again. 

My church had VBS last week.

It was a five-day program and it was a pretty good turn-out.

We had many kids from the neighborhood. Most of them were not church kids. Some of them were first-comers and there were some familiar faces too. We had English songs, games, Bible stories, English lessons, snack, and craft time. And we had hot dogs for lunch on the last day after the program was over.

Here’s a group picture! This was the picture with most kids. I like how half the kids are not really looking at the camera.

And here is a picture of one church kid (on the right) and his little friends at preschool showing their Daniel in a Lion’s Den craft.

I helped 4 days and I had a great time working with kids because kids are so much fun!! 🙂

We’ve been having for the past about 10 years what we call “summer workers”, which was originally students on a missions trip from the Master’s college in southern California. David was one of them. A couple years ago the college stopped sending a team to work with my church, but some graduates are enthusiastic enough about the ministry to come back at their own expenses to help out. This year we had four guys who had come before as “summer workers” helping out with VBS. It has been extremely helpful since the VBS has been focusing on English lessons, which attract young mothers who want their kids to learn English. There are in fact many people in Japan who are very eager to learn English.

Here’s a picture of Tony and Frank doing English lessons for 2-year-olds. Outreach programs for kids like VBS is very good because we can also reach out for mothers.

It was a busy week for me with VBS in the morning and work in the afternoon (I work part-time at a preschool.) but I had lots of fun and most importantly, more kids and moms in the neighborhood were able to come to church and hear about God. A lot of Japanese non-Christians that I’ve talked to said that they don’t want to go to church because they feel intimidated. Many people seem to think they need to be really good people to be able to go to church. There’s a Japanese expression that literally translates into English as “threshold is high”, which is an expression to describe a place that is intimidating for certain reasons. For many Japanese people, church’s threshold is high. Programs like this might help to lower the threshold.

So it was a really great week! Oh and I put up some more pictures from VBS so I hope you can check them out!

And I hope you’ll have a great week too!

Jaane 🙂

Hi everyone!!

My name is Tomo. I’m David’s fiancee.

So this is David’s missionary blog, and right now I’m not raising support yet because I’m not a SEND member yet, but since I will be soon, I’m going to be writing on this blog as well. My posts will basically be about what I’m up to, and also what my church is up to. I’ll try to post as often as possible so please come visit and check what’s up in Tokyo!

I live in Tokyo and I attend a church of about 100 people, which is a huge church in Japan!This past Sunday was a clean-up day. So we cleaned the whole church building. (We have a four-story building) Cleaning is always fun J especially when you do it with the whole church.

And then the most exciting part was, we installed a new rice cooker, stove, and a microwave/oven!!! We had had the old ones for years and the oven didn’t even work and was just taking up space, so it’s really exciting that we got new ones!

After that, a church elder took some of us out for dinner.We have four American guys helping out with VBS this year so they all went too.And David’s brother Jon, who is in Japan as a SEND missionary, was there too.We ate a lot and had a good time JWe had Okonomi-yaki, which is kind of like pancakes with vegetables and meat and sometimes seafood, and Monja-yaki, which is… hmm I don’t know how to explain, it looks kind of gross but it’s soooo good!! There’s a lot of food like that in Japan, looks gross but really good! So if you ever come to Japan, don’t be intimidated by looks and just try them.

You’ll be surprised how good it is in spite of how gross it looks. I think.

And we’ve been having VBS this week.

More about that next time.

Thanks for reading!

Jaane! (‘See ya’ in Japanese)

Tomo =)

Pray that I will be faithful and diligent to spend time in the word and make God’s glory my top priority.

Pray that I will be faithful and diligent to do my part in support raising.

Pray that I’ll have the courage to ask people to support me financially.

Pray that God will move the people that I talk to to partner with me, and provide financial support so that I can go to Japan as a missionary in Summer 2010.

Pray that God will bring some churches on board to provide larger financial support.

Pray for Tomo and I as we’re apart for the next 5 months (I’ll be going to Japan for a few weeks in December). Pray that we’ll be able to get her a Visa so she can get back into the states when we get married.

The last two months have been extrodinarily busy, but that’s no excuse. I should have been posting here more often, and I intend to be back posting regularly from here on out. For now though, I figured I’d best give you all a recap on what’s been happening the last two months.

A few weeks after getting engaged in May, Tomo finished her last quarter at UCI, and went to stay at my parents house for a month before returning to Japan. This was pretty nice, as I got to see her almost everyday before we’d be apart for 5 months after she went back to Japan. I also kept busy leading a high school Bible study on Thursday nights and a college Bible study on Tuesday nights.

June started getting a little hectic as my brother’s wedding approached. Jon was in Japan until a week before the big day, leaving most of the preperation to us, so I had a good time making phone calls, organizing tuxedo rentals, and doing whatever else was needed. Also, as some of you may know, Tomo is the little sister of Jon’s wife. We both became good friends with Tomo, Maki (Jon’s wife) and their parents over the years, so it was exciting that they were all going to be staying here for a week or so.

The wedding turned out beautifully, surpisingly so, thanks to much help from friends and family. With all the last minute preperations I sort of figured more would have gone wrong, this being a Robison wedding and all, but it all came together. The only thing that was noticably flawed was our lack of exit strategy for the bride and groom, who got stuck being the last ones at their own reception.

The next week was spent haning out with Tomo and her family, who decided to take advantage of being in California by taking a week of vacation after the wedding. And I started packing up all my things, getting ready to move back into my parents house once Tomo went back to Japan. First Tomo’s family flew home, then Jon and Maki returned from their honeymoon, and after spending one last day with us, they flew back to Japan, and a few days later, Tomo left as well.

It was pretty rough saying good bye to her, knowing that I wasn’t going to see her again till December, when I’m planning on participating in the same Jesus Film trip I’ve been a part of for the last four years. However this couldn’t really be avoided. We both had things we needed to do before we could get married; she had to finish her last year of school in Japan, and I had to raise a lot of support here in America.

So that brings us roughly up to date. I’m here, and she’s over there, and we’ve both got a lot to do. For me I’ve got to get back to support raising. The last two months I’ve only done a minimal ammount of that, and now it’s time to start a concentrated effort. I’ll keep you posted on my plans for doing that as I go along, but this post is getting a bit longwinded. So I’ll just give you step 1: Prayer. I’m going to spend more time in prayer myself, and I’m going to try to get as many people praying as possible.

This was originally made for my group over on Facebook, but it works here too.

Last June, when I was accepted as a missionary with SEND international, it was one of the most exciting events in my life. I suppose it was what graduating from college should have felt like; I could see exactly where God was calling me, and what He wanted me to do with my life. He was sending me to Japan to be in full time ministry as a missionary. That calling rang true with all the desires God had been cultivating in my life up till that point. My anticipation and excitement at the thought of going to Japan as a missionary could not have been any higher.

At least that’s what I thought until about a week ago, when I proposed to my girlfriend, Tomo, and she said she’d marry me. Now I’ll be going to Japan, married to a godly young woman who shares my desire to serve God and reach out to the Japanese, a young woman I love, respect, and enjoy every second of time that I spend I’m around her. I mean, come on, how could things possibly get any better than that? I guess I’ll have to wait and see; God’s proven to be infinitely more creative than I am.

I met Tomo almost five years ago, on my very first trip to Japan. If you haven’t already figured it out, she is Japanese, and normally lives in Tokyo with her family. Her father is the pastor of the church that we went to work with, and my brother Jon and I stayed with their family for six weeks. Oddly enough Tomo’s older sister Maki was also living there, and my brother is marrying her next month. So, in the summer of 2003 Jon and I both met our fiances at pretty much exactly the same time. I swear, neither of us had any idea at the time. Especially not me. I didn’t even think that was an option. Tomo was a senior in Highschool, and I had just graduated college. I wasn’t planning on going back to Japan, and as far as I knew, I would never see her again. Still we became very good friends over the course of our stay there, Tomo has a real gift when it comes to languages, and speaks amazingly good english, which meant that we dragged her along everywhere we went and she spent a lot of time with our team.

That trip was a real turning point in my life, and God used many aspects of it to instill in me a desire to serve Him in ways I hadn’t previously considered possible. I went home no longer trying to see what I could do for God, but rather what God wanted to do through me. He began to show me. One thing He did was bring me back to Japan. A lot. In fact I’ve been to Japan once a year ever since that first trip. Which meant I got to see Tomo at least once a year. Not only that, she came and visited here a couple of times as well. And I really started to like her. Still, it didn’t seem like anything could come of it. She wasn’t going to be moving to the US, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. So I just set it aside to wait and see what God would do. And then I got accepted with SEND.

Once that happened, and I knew I was going to wind up in Japan, I started to think about Tomo a lot more. Two months after that, she came to the US to spend ten months attending UCI as a foreign exchange student, living a half hour away from me. I would classify that as “God doing something.” Tomo was pretty helpless over here, since she didn’t have a drivers license, which meant that I got to spend a lot of time with her. And I couldn’t have been happier. We started dating after she’d been here about two months, and things have been awesome ever since.

We’ve still got a bit of a journey ahead of us. Tomo has to go back to Japan to finish her last year of college. She graduates in March of 2009, so we hope to get married shortly after that. Also she will be joining SEND, and so we’ll have to raise significantly more support, which will mean that Tomo will probably have to move to the US for a short time while we raise the rest of it. Getting a Visa is not an easy process. Still, God has made it so evident that He is the One who has brought things this far, and I can’t wait to see what He does in the coming year.

It’s always interesting to watch God work. I mean, we “know” he does amazing things, at least we always say we know it, but it seems far less often that we actually step out in faith enough to witness it. Last week was a small reminder of that for me.

Human nature seems to drive people to chose the path that is easiest and most comfortable, and to leave those which are difficult and seemingly unpleasant until there are no other options. For me it appears that one of the most reliable ways of determining what God wants me to do is simply to look at the things I’ve been avoiding — usually those are exactly the things He wants me to do. Call it the Jonah syndrome if you like. In this case the thing that I was avoiding was asking people, one on one, face to face, to support me financially. I hate asking people for money; and even though I know that I’m not asking them to give me money, but to give money to God, and His work, part of me still feels like I’m asking for myself.

So, naturally, I did what most any human would do to try to raise support: whatever seemed to be the most comfortable. I wrote letters, sent out little cards, set up a website, created a Facebook group, spoke in front of church and wrote Newsletters. All stuff that is necessary, beneficial, and helpful; all things I will continue to do. In fact God has been bringing in a steady, though small,stream of supporters through these methods. But the one thing I didn’t want to do was call someone up, ask them if I could meet with them and invite them to support me. And since I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t… until last week.

Last week I met with five of my closest friends that had not yet started to support me. I talked to them on the phone, or sent them an email, made an appointment, shared about what I was going to do, and asked them to support me financially. All five of them said yes. To put that in perspective, I previously had seven financial supporters, after roughly six months of support raising. In addition to those five, God brought two additional supporters that I didn’t talk with. That means that this month God doubled the number of supporters I have, and it looks likely that my percentage of support will also have doubled by the end of the month. And to make things even better, I actually enjoyed getting the chance to share one on one with my friends where God was leading me, and was incredibly encouraged to see their enthusiastic responses.

God is good; He is faithful to reward us when we place Him first and humbly obey Him, He encourages us when we are discouraged, He causes us to rejoice at the most unexpected times. I have over 10% of my needed support! Look what God has done!

I’m not sure how many of you guys watched the “American Idol Gives Back” program on Fox last night, but if you did you probably were shocked at the song they chose to close with. They sang, “Shout to the Lord.” Now, I’m a pretty cynical guy, so when I watched it on YouTube, I sort of rolled my eyes during the first minute or so. Especially when I noticed that they changed the opening line from: “My Jesus…” to “My Shepherd…”

“Here we go”, I thought, “Now the song could be acceptable to Christians, Jews, Muslims, heck, anyone who believes in a supreme diety.” However I kept watching, and the rest of the song remained unchanged, the words were still unmistakeably Christian; the song sounded like it was being sung in a church. Not like my church, maybe more like a mega church like Saddleback, what with all the lights and the big choir in the back and the full band, but it sounded like part of a church service none the less. And this was on prime time, national television, not TBN. I decided to watch it again.

This time the irony of it all hit me. Ryan Secreast announces the song this way:

“Now, singing Shout to the Lord, once again here are your American Idols!”

And then, “America’s Idols” took the stage and sang:

My Shepherd, my Savior, Lord, there is none like You;
All of my days I want to praise the wonders of Your mighty love.

I don’t know if any of these guys are saved. I don’t know if they even cared what they were singing, or if they were just doing it because they were told to. Maybe some of them were really, actually worshiping God. But the remarkable thing to me is that here we have on national TV, these people that are supposed to represent all that America Idolizes, and worships: the fame, the fortune, the talent, the lifestyle of rock stars that we as a country lust after, and these eight peple are in a contest that is supposed to give them all this – and here they all are singing that there is none like God, that all day they want to sing God’s praises, that there is something more than what they are pursuing. And that, in itself, is something to take notice of.

Now, God knows their heart, and that is the most important part of this. Clearly Christ said in Mark 7:6-7 that worship is in vain if the heart is not in it.

And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

Maybe that was all that happened last night. Maybe all we watched on TV was a bunch of hypocrites pretending to worhsip God with their lips while their heart was set on fame and fortune. That part we don’t know. What we do know is that in front of the whole country these guys truthfully proclaimed that there is none like the Lord, and that He should be worshiped by all the earth, that nothing compares to the promise we have in Him. And with that I’ll rejoice as Paul did when he said in Phillipians 1:18

What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.

The “idols” may or may not have benefited from their worship last night, but who knows how many people throughout country may have been startled by the thought that there just may be something greater than all that they currently idolize.

Check out what my friend Mark thinks

Tachikawa = The name of the City in Tokyo
Ekimae = “Near the Station” or maybe “Accross from the Station”
Kyoko = “Church”

The near the station part usually gets a bit of a laugh from Japanese people, because it’s usually attatched to the names of things like convinience stores, or Pachinko Parlors, it’s almost more of a marketing term. So to use it to describe a church sounds funny. And it usually implies that whatever is “Ekimae” is within eyesight of said station. Now, the church is about three blokcks from Tachikawa station, one of the largest stations in Tokyo, however it’s no longer visible. It was when it was built, but the surrounding area now has many much taller buildings.

If anyone who speaks Japanese can correct me on this, please do (Tomo, Jon, or Yoshie).

A shot of the church service in progress. As you can see, most people dress somewhat formally, and what you can’t see is that the songs are mostly Hymns sung with accompaniment by a church organ, much like many traditional churches here in the US

Me standing out as I usually do when in Japan.

Well just a quick update. I moved last weekend. Now I’m in Capistrano Beach, sharing a house with the same two guys I was before, Jeff and Matt. Previously me and Matt were living in Jeff’s house, renting a room from him. Not Jeff sold his place, and Matt rented a new house, and Jeff and I are renting rooms from Matt. So, in a lot of ways, not much has changed. Except all my stuff is in boxes, and for now at least, I have my own room.

My plan is to rent from Matt until July, and then move back in with my parents for a year while I try to save up as much money as possible, and pay off my loans… or something. (There may be something else I could spend 10 grand on a year from now, but there’s still a lot of undefined varibles there.) The reason I’m not moving straight into my parents house is that it’s sort of crowded right now, and my little brother is getting married in June, which means that probably even more people will be staying there. At the very least my girlfriend usually stays with my parents on weekends, and will be there for two weeks between the time she’s done with UCI for the year and the time she flies back to Japan, and we like to keep things on the up and up.

Oh yes, for those of you who don’t know, I’ve been dating my younger brother’s fiance’s younger sister, Tomo for the last five months. She’s from Japan, Jon (my brother) and I met both her and Maki (his fiance) on a mission trip to work with the church her father pastors. I’ve known Tomo and her family for almost five years, but it wasn’t till she came to the states as a foriegn exchange student that I finally got the nerve to ask her out. I’m not quite as bold as Jon, who started dating Maki while he was in Japan, and then three weeks later came back to the US to continue a three year long distance relationship while he raised support to move to over there. I give him props for that.

My support raising goals for this month:

1. Contact 10 people to schedule a appointments to meet in person and share about Japan, how God’s calling me there and ask them to join my team as a financial supporter.
2. Contact three churches about supporting me and/or allowing me to come speak at one of their services, sunday schools, or Bible Studies to enlist their memebers as supporters.
3. Get monthly support up to 22%

That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll be unpacked by next week, and I’ll have some more to report.