Day 16

Friends! Day 16 is officially over in Japan!

This week is a week of challenges, and all seventeen of us on Tokyo A team have three goals for ourselves:

- First, our ministry goal, and the number of gospel conversations we want to have this week.

- Second, a personal goal, which is basically a faith goal for ourselves this week. An extra hour of prayer per day, doing an inductive study of a book of the Bible, learning to pray continually.. whatever the case may be.

- Third, is something dubbed by the wonderful Greg Triplett (our Cru Campus Director at USC, and 2007 Tokyo A Project Director) as "exceedingly more." Exceedingly more is the goal that we can do little to nothing about, and just have to ask God that we would be able to see it.

And praise God, one of the guys on the team, Andrew (a friend from USC), already had his exceedingly more answered! Only six hours of campus time after praying through the goals for the week... God is so good! :) Hopefully Andrew will talk a little more about it in his blog (linked at the right, ooh, ahh), and I don't know the whole story, but: Apparently God had really imprinted a certain Japanese student on his heart, a guy he really wanted to meet up with again but had been unable to get in touch with, so he asked God that He would set it up. And voila! Today on the Gakugei campus, Andrew ran into the guy and was able to talk with him again! The student had tried to email him back and had even been researching USC in order to know more about him for the next time they met! How encouraging is that? I love it.

Sitting next to Andrew, getting to be part of Team One's English lunch at Hitotsubashi last week.

(Me, Andrew, Jeremy, Kimi, and a Hitotsubashi University student)

Anyway, it's been a great day. I was able to explore a new campus (Gaidai: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) and meet individually with our three Team Two girls (part of my three goals for this week). They each have such encouraging hearts. Today was one of those days where there was no room for doubt to creep in as to why I'm here, doing what I'm doing.. And even more than that, why I'll be where I'll be next year, doing what I'll be doing as a campus intern with Cru at USC.

Please be praying for us during this week of goals, for the students especially, but for Gen and me as well, that we would all trust the Lord with our goals and seek out our rest and strength in His shadow. And even for Friday, when we have a "Discover Friends!" party, a Student Impact outreach which we get to participate in. Details to come!

But for now, it's time for bed. I hope you all have blessed Mondays back at home! If you're in need of encouragement, feel free to open up Zephaniah 3. Especially verse 17. Seems to be coming up a lot lately :)