Some activities I was involved in

• English at Work class - Eline let me teach it! I hope I wasn't too boring :P It was very nice to see two guys who were not Christians coming out to the class @ the Budonoki church.
• Tea and testimony (testimony = explaining how I became a Christian): just a little presentation for a small group of young adults @ Budonoki church over tea and snacks
• Church plant meeting. Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York (Pastor is Tim Keller) is planting a church in central Tokyo. I visited one of their church planting meetings. One of the things Redeemer specializes in is reaching out to cities. If you include suburbs, Tokyo is the largest city in the world. The meeting was chaired by Steve Sacks - he is a professional saxophone player / Harvard graduate who, through various circumstances, ended up in Japan -- I got to hear him play at a different event, a Christmas outreach event at a church. I enjoyed his music very much.
• Visiting Tokyo Baptist Church - one of the three large churches in Tokyo. It is a very diverse 'international' church. Besides the times I was at Tokyo Baptist Church, I found Japan very homogenous! (i.e. very Japanese)
• Going to a Christmas concert at Christian Academy of Japan (the international school that the de Boo kids attend)
• Seeing the political, financial, entertainment districts, one of the big Shinto temples in Tokyo, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Building and praying together with the de Boos and Stephanie for these places and for the people in these areas.
• Having tea with a missionary couple from LA! Per the husband, he adapts to the different road rules in Japan (drive on left) and the US by just following the person in front of him... hmmm... that sounds simple... It was fun comparing Tokyo vs LA with them... While we were doing our comparisons, I commented on how impressed I was with Japanese recycling. At Starbucks, there is one recycle bin for the cup and one recycle bin for the lid (they do something similar is at McDonald's but I couldn't read the signs at McD's). But the husband made a comment that the diligent recycling is just like "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic". They are missing the bigger problem. What use is it to gain the whole world (or recycle everything in the world) but lose your own soul?
• Small group for Japanese young professional women working in central Tokyo. They using a study guide written by an American author and told me to say 'hi' to her. Judith Couchman: If you are reading this - Zumpi, Yuko and Eline say "hi!". I thought it was really cool that they were studying the book of Esther in the Bible. Esther was so brave and that's what it takes to be a Christian in Japan (where there are so few Christians and where it is odd to be a non-conformist). The girls even gave me a study guide as a gift/souvenir!
• Christmas party / outreach for young adult group: Somehow we got into a conversation about sanctification (one of the Christian doctrines having to do with progressing in maturity as a Christian) and about the doubts that come up in every (or most) Christians' lives about their faith. It was really encouraging for me to see them having such fellowship and discussing these important matters.
• "Clean the church" afternoon. It was nice to see everyone helping out to take care of their little church building.
• Handing out Christmas CDs to Tokyo-ers with a group of Singaporeans who come every year to hand out these CDs. The busy businesspeople were not terribly eager to stop and get a CD. They were rushing around (probably thinking about all the important things they had to do). There were some students, however, who were very excited about the CDs. They were on a field trip. It took me a little while to muster up the courage to walk up to the big group of them. Some of them came back to me to see if they could get more CDs (which I happily gave to them). There was one boy who asked me a question I couldn't understand.

me: "nihongo-ga wakarimasen" (I don't understand Japanese) "ego-ga...." (English....?)

boy: "ego-ga scoshi" (only a little bit of English)

me: "nihongo-ga scoshi" (only a little bit of Japanese)

At which point I think his friends were saying something like:

"Hurry up! Just say thank you for the CD and let's go!!"

Yay! My longest conversation in Japanese that I had in Tokyo!

I'm sure that boy knows more English than I know Japanese (his 'scoshi' is more than my 'scoshi')