So much

Well there's a lot going on over here...

Keep checking out e3missions for all the updates on everything...

Life is running full speed and every day slips away so quickly...

Truly, we are but vapor in this life...

So much on my heart..."My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." Psalm 73:26

In everything, I can do nothing but run to the arms of my Father. You are the comfort of my soul, O God, in you and you alone I find peace.

True peace...



I was blessed today by a chapter on "The first word of the Gospel" in Beautiful Feet by Danny Lehmann. Check it out.

"While God's love for us is unconditional (see John 3:16), His salvation is certainly conditional. His two conditions are repentance and faith."

"True repentance is the outworking of true faith...The call to faith and the call to repentance are one and the same."

"Can you imagine Jesus going up to His disciples and asking them to accept Him as their personal Savior and not require them to follow Him as Lord? No way! The Gospel is God-centered, not man-centered. It revolves around the glory of God, not the happiness of man. I get deeply concerned when Jesus is presented simply as a personal Savior who will meet people's needs. He is not some sugar daddy in the sky, a washing powder that washes whiter, or a trip to end all trips. He is the Lord of the universe, and He demands our total surrender."

Repentance and Faith. Repentance and Faith.

Lord teach me Godly repentance and true faith!

かみさま は すがえ です！！

Kamisama wa sugae desu!! (title of blog)　God is awesome! I don't know what I really want to write about, I think I just wanted to write something in Hiragana...

Well here's some pics from the last week. Not extraordinarily eventful, but a blessing none the less and one that I have at least a couple pictures for...
Here's Keegan's beautiful face.
And Joel getting his hair cut!!! Whoa!! He's really is a new man... He was hiding under some thick hair so far this semester, but now the true Joel Coronado will finally be coming out!
And finally, we have Aaron waring Joel's hair around...I don't think there's anyway I could have passed up such a great opportunity...it would be pretty awesome though to be able to have a giant handle bar mustache thing, or whatever that bushy thing is on my face.

Other than just good times and random nonsense, this week has been a great time of both stretching and blessed vision! The Lord is truly desiring to purify us for His work, and while the results are precious and the dross being burned away such a liberating experience, I so often lose sight of the beautiful hands of my maker when surrounded by this refining furnace...Oh that I might not be an unbelieving, untrusting servant!

Please keep myself as well as everyone else over here in prayer as the Lord is desiring so greatly to conform us to the 美しい　image of His Son!

イエス　は　主！Jesus is Lord!

神様は　私たち　 を　愛しています！ or in all hiragana (the only thing I can read)
かみさま　は　わたしたち　を　あいしています! -God loves us!


(so much studying to do!)

This past week

私は　日本語が　好き　です！　Or、　わたしは　にほんごが　すき　です。　I found out that I have a foreign language program thing on my computer that allows me to type in other languages. With Japanese, I type out the word in what is known as "Romanji", which is just the english equivalents to the sounds of the Japanese words. Fun stuff. I can only read hiragana and katakana, Kanji is way to much for somebody who can't even have a conversation in Japanese. Hiragana is like writing Kanji characters out phonetically, and katakana is an alphabet used to sound out any foreign words. So if you were walking down the street and saw "コーヒー" you would know コ＝ko and　ヒ＝hi(sounds like he), and the ー marks mean to stretch out the vowel sound. So, koohee, meaning "coffee". It's a fun language. Oh, and what I wrote at the beginning is just me saying "I like Japanese!". In Romanji, "watashi wa nihongo ga suki desu". watshi wa, me being the subject, "nihongo", the Japanese language being the object, "suki desu" being the verb to say that the object is liked by me, the subject.
Anywho, this past week....

This is a picture of an area of a Buddhist temple place, where they have restored different buildings that have existed on these sites for hundreds of years. Nearby to this site is the Naha port where the first official missionary to the Ryuku islands, landed. His name was Dr. Bettleheim (I forgot his first name), and they've actually built a kind of monument to him as the picture below shows. It's interesting that they would do such a thing because most people hated him tremendously and he was forced some 7 or 8 years after beginning ministry here on Okinawa, to leave because of successive maulings by Okinawan people. I would encourage everyone to do some kind of reading on this guy, it's fascinating to say the least. Check out the E3missions video that Tom put up about Bettleheim.

As for the pictures below, I just thought they were amazing so I had to put 'em up. Last Teusday Kayo performed a traditional Japanese tea-ceremony for us and used Jeremy, Djurdji, and Keegan as her volunteers. Jeremy loved it and did his best to be some Samurai-san. Fun stuff.

There's been a lot going on spiritually over here, so continued prayer is always much needed. There's so much I could say, I suppose, about all the things God has faithfully been doing; but to do much more than simply say, "all glory to our God and King for His faithfulness" may be too much.

So then, all glory to our God and King! He has redeemed us by His blood and made us a kingdom of priests unto Him. May my heart only grasp the overwhelming grace of our King...

"As the deer panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." Psalm 42:1

Last Saturday

This last saturday was quite an adventure. Rob came and picked up Jeremy, Doug and I to go look for this "trench" cave thing located somewhere near Nishihara, not to far from our house. We didn't know where we were looking, or really if we were even looking on the right hill, but we set out to find this place in search for war artifacts. Rob and Jeremy had received some extremely vague directions as to where "Conical hill" was, and so we were pretty much wandering around in the brush of a big hill for a couple of hours, wondering if we would find anything. We found some old pieces of something and lots of bombed out little spots, but nothing special. We ended up climbing to the top of the hill, only to find a trail that led from the top of the hill to about exactly where our car was parked...needless to say, the discovery was a bit shaming and we felt pretty lame after climbing uphill through jungle for a good hour. It was fun though, and we might go back again to look for the cave.


Saturday night we headed to a festival kind of thing in Naha where some of us got to dress up. I forgot what the festival was for, but by the time we got there it was pretty much closing down and we only stayed there for an hour-and-a-half. It was a beautiful night though, and the whole thing was held in a park area up against an inlet of ocean water. : D. The Jimbay's, what Doug is sporting, were really comfortable and fit you like a bath robe. The girl's beautiful dresses, I think they're called Kimono's, were donated by Kayo. If you couldn't already tell, everyone in Japan is obsessed with throwing up a peace sign in pictures...maybe one day I'll find out why that is. Hope everyone enjoys the pics. I enjoy this last picture because it illustrates how much we've all become like a big family over here. We're pretty much always together, something that has taught us and forced us to get along and put subtle differences aside. It's a growing process for sure, but the Lord has a way of meshing us together with people we'll grow with as well as from.

Jr. High Camp recap

So from Wednesday morning until Friday afternoon we were off with the OCSI Jr. High kids to there annual school camp! It's such a blessing seeing how much of an outreach ministry this school is. There are many Japanese who send their kids to "Christian School" for the purpose of having their kids receive a private, english education. The kid's aren't allowed to speak Japanese on campus and so they are forced to learn and practice their english extensively each day. This means though that there are many kids who don't know Jesus going to these schools; which is where evangelism and sharing the love of Christ comes in so crucially.
All the CCBC students went to either the Elementary camp or the Jr. High Camp. I was blessed with the opportunity to help out with the Jr. High. We did everything with these kids and got to share our hearts with the groups they put us over. My devotional group consisted of church going kids for the most part, so I was excited to have at least a foot already in the door in sharing the Word with them.
We did all sorts of activities, unfortunately many of which had nothing to do with the Lord and everything to do with keeping the kids busy, but on Thursday night we got to watch the Lord do great things. We had a camp-fire worship time, followed by a message from the Word. The whole purpose was to get everyone really reflecting upon where they were at personally with the Lord and where they needed to be, perhaps. We led the kids in a corporate prayer time where we prayed a salvation prayer for any who wanted to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior. There was no asking for a show of hands of who prayed or not, we simply told the kids after the prayer that if they wanted prayer for anything that they could come to the counselors standing around, outside the circle. That night will definetely stick in my mind as a huge blessing of God as His Spirit truly moved in the hearts of so many. As I looked into the sky thanking God for His awesome love, I could hear kids quietly sobbing as they reflected upon God's awesome love for them; I couldn't help but sing so loudly within my heart as all the world around me just seemed like one big flowing love song to the King of Kings.
In short, I was so blessed and will be keeping these kids and the school in prayer; praying that what God did that night won't be forgotten by either the kids or us as counselors. The Lord is faithful and will continue to work out glorious things by His Spirit. I pray I might only yield to Him in all things that He might be glorified in everyway.

Thank you Jesus!

Monday, October 2nd

So a week from this last monday we went out to the Yomitan Wharf where we jumped off a huge break-water wall that protects the port there from tsunami's. the section of the wall seen in the top right image was a good 25 feet, but there was another section 10 feet higher that we started jumping off. Next time we'll have to bring our cameras out to the wall for some sweet shots jumping off. To the top right is a picture of one of the beautiful caves we got to walk back to, kind of near OCSI in the Yomitan area. The Island is filled with thousands of caves all over the place, this one actually held some 1000 civilians when the Americans attacked the island in WWII. Miraculously none of them died because of the efforts of one brave Hawaiian soldier who was Japanese in heritage who managed to get the people to come out of the cave without any harm. Thank God, because the Americans were ready to hit the place hard for fear of a Japanese regiment possibly hiding inside.

As for this bottom picture, when we went out to the sea wall there were sharp barnacles all along the concrete jacks we had to climb up, so many of us got small cuts all over our feet. Djurdji (Jew-G) shows us all, however, that even nasty barnacle cuts can be taken with a smile.

All in all, a great day for sure. : D

Saturday September 30

A week from this last saturday we went to a fellowship luau on Foster Marine Base. The Lord opened up doors for us to do ministry at the Protestant Chapel there on Sunday mornings, so they've started to try and get us plugged in with their fellowship a little more. We were blessed with great food and a fun time. Oh, and about the pig picture...yeah...definetely a one time thing.. (I accidently got too close and really kissed the thing)

Jr. High Camp!!

Today we're going to head up to Nago to be counselor's at the Okinawa Christian School International Jr. High Camp. I'm so blessed and excited about what the Lord's going to be doing in the next couple of days, so please keep this in your prayers!! The school is a "Christian school" but really a good number of the kids there either don't know the Lord or aren't walking with him. At the same time though, all the students seem to be really open to talking about God and the Bible, so I'm excited.

Yay! Aaron gets to be a camp counselor in Okinawa!