🇯🇵Homeward Bound🇺🇸
Well, that’s a wrap for summer 2025!
I’m officially back in the States and recovered from jet lag, but let’s do a quick recap of the summer’s final events. After Nagoya, we only had a few days officially left in our internship. Mostly, my time was spent working on my book translation and attending my final Japanese language lessons. It’s a difficult language to learn because it’s so different from English, but it’s exhilarating when I finally learn a new phrase to say in daily conversation!
With a heavy heart, I had to say goodbye to all my friends at Grace City Church Tokyo. What a blessing to have so many brothers and sisters in the faith that makes leaving a challenge! We even had two of our good friends attend church in Japan for the first time since we may have guilt-tripped them into attending on our last day. After service, the youth group stayed and played card games together. A perfect way to end my summer with them.
Some of the Grace City Church youth!
Once we officially ended our work with Grace City Church and the Community Arts Tokyo team, Anna and I took a personal trip to Taiwan (not using donor funds). Even though it was right when a tropical storm hit, we walked around the capital city of Taipei. The island country is known for their vibrant night markets. Rest assured, we sampled plenty of the local delicacies and drank many a bubble tea!
The Confucius Temple in Taipei
A group of MTW missionaries and the restaurant owner
On one of our days in Taipei, we were able to have lunch with three of the Taiwan MTW missionaries. We got to learn about the cultural/religious dynamics at work in the country and had a good laugh with the restaurant owner!
The second half of our trip took place in the small countryside village of Sanyi. MTW missionary, Brenda, hosted us…for a price… She’d been having a several month long feud with a skink lizard that kept sneaking into her house! They are cute creatures, but not when one of them died behind her couch! Needless to say, the little fella had to go, so we caught it in a bowl and took it far across the street to release.
Anna, Brenda, and I outside the airport at 4am!
In addition to being professional skink-catchers, we were also able to teach one of the adult English classes and perform for the kids’ bible study. I suppose it wasn’t truly a “vacation”; you can take the missionaries out of their field, but you can’t take the mission field away from the missionary!!
Once back in Japan, we grabbed a few goodbye meals with friends and headed off to Saitama prefecture! It was in a small town called Chichibu where the PCJ Pastor’s retreat was being held. With the help of Melanie, a team of college students from California, and Anna, we held a VBS style kid’s program to entertain 27 elementary and preschoolers for three days.
Learning about Daniel
The adult session at the PCJ Pastors’ Retreat
That wraps up my second internship in Japan. But don’t worry, I’ll be putting the finishing touches on the Japanese translation of Penelope Panda’s Peculiar Family in the coming weeks! Keep an eye out for that publication announcement.