Update

Whew!  The holidays are over!  I always really enjoy Christmas and New Years, but they are BUSY.  It’s strange to think that we had once planned to be packed up and living in someone’s basement by now, with our belongings sailing across the sea to Japan.  This has not yet come to pass.

Family update:  With all the unknowns at our doorstep, we are doing well.  We’ve made a sort of New Year’s resolution to get up in the morning.  Jones sleeps till 8 or 8:30 (Thank you, LORD!), and it’s all too easy to wait for his playful babbling to wake us up.  We felt like we were wasting precious time that God had given us by blessing us with a baby who sleeps late.  SO, we set the alarm for 6:30, snuggle in bed for a bit, and then one of us goes down to start the coffee.  We either read to ourselves, talk with each other about administrative stuff for the day, or pray.  It’s been lovely — and very good for our souls.  Every once in a while, we look at each other and grin, with one of us saying, “Someday, we’ll get there.  We’re going to live in Japan!”

Funding update:  We are currently 92% of our monthly budget (hooray!) and about 36% of our one-time.  In order to buy tickets and pay for shipping, our one-time needs to be about 85% — in total we have $26,000 left to raise.  Yep, it seems like a really big number to me, too.  We must be 100% of both in order to board the plane, which is a good policy.  So we will be here until that happens!  We’ve moved our date back a few weeks and hope to leave in early February, but much of this “planning” is rather fluid.  Good for my husband, bad for his planning wife.

If you visit here and have any questions about anything, please feel free to comment!  Also, if you’d like to visit the prayer request page, the password is pray.

 

Sadness

Today has been a melancholy day — last night, we attended a Christmas party, and many of our fellow Zion-goers were there.  There was laughing and singing and babies being passed around, and I thought, “Who is going to hold my babies when we’re in Japan?”  I cried this morning as I held Jones, wondering who his friends would be and if they would know Jesus.  Some of my best friends are women who were little girls with me at church, way-back-when, and my heart really desires that Jones know the same experience.

In my head, I know that Zion is not the only fellowship within the whole world that experiences deep community — but it is the first place I have experienced such, and the difficulty of leaving that is starting to set in.  Pray with me, friends, that God provides another such community, albeit much smaller, when we plant our roots in Japan.

 

Weeks

I’m obsessed with leaving.  I can’t stop thinking about it.

5 weeks till we move out of our house.
7 weeks till we leave Nebraska.
8 weeks till we arrive in Japan.

Too many weeks till we have boxes unpacked and baby settled into the next phase of our family’s life.

 

Still waiting..

So.. since we’re not actually in Japan yet, there isn’t much to write about here. I’m starting to think, however, about how different things will be on the other side of the world (duh) and am compiling a mental list of things I’ll miss:

• Deli meat
• Being able to read things in the grocery store (or anywhere, for that matter)
• Worship at Zion, particularly the confession and communion
• Community dinner
• My favorite coffee shops
• American fall — pumpkins, apple cider, etc
• Cheap fruit (it’s super-expensive in Japan!)
• Our duplex

 

Three months

Here we are enjoying a hike with friends at Indian Caves State Park in Nebraska (the state’s best kept secret!). (Jones was sort of enjoying — at least he was warm!) It’s hard to believe that in a few short months, we will be leaving our home state and traveling to a place where I (Jamie) don’t speak the language and don’t know the customs. I’m certain the moving experience will be quite different for the two of us, Bryan having lived there for two years already. I just hope that “quite different” won’t be words that will keep us outside of each other’s experiences.

We still don’t know our exact departure date, but as January approaches, our excitement increases. This is very good, as “excitement” hasn’t always been the descriptive emotion for our move for me. God has been merciful (as always), and my heart has gone through seasons appropriately — excitement, fear, sadness, jealousy of those staying, acceptance, obedience, and excitement again.

As far as logistics, we are 75% funded monthly and in-process with our one-time gifts. We are applying for visas and starting to research shipping. I’m sort of going through our stuff, knowing that we can’t/don’t want to take very much; but still, as I look at the things that make our home “home,” it’s difficult to decide what’s going, what’s staying, and what to get rid of completely. As the de-junker of our family, this really is a fun job!! (I only hope it sticks.) We still have a load of work ahead of us, but God is good to not give us more than we can handle. I think it has helped both of us to realize that this will just have to be a busy season of life — not much can be done about that!