When the everyday things trip you up

Almost 4 years ago I landed in the USA with no keys and no cell phone.  My parents graciously loaned me one of theirs until I could figure out what to do.

Figuring it out was not that easy.

I had come to the USA for one year, but the cell phone companies only had 2-year contracts. 

My cell phone plan in Japan came with 30 minutes of talk time per month (and no free nights or weekends).  I think the plans in the USA started at 400 minutes (plus free nights and weekends).

I didn't know what was considered average cell phone use here, nor could I predict what my usage would be.

To say I was confused would be an understatement.  Eventually, with much frustration, I signed a contract for two years, prepared to pay the (steep) penalty, and with an option to change the terms of my contract at any point (i.e., more or less minutes, but always still in contract).

It worked out, but not without much stress.

A few months ago, I upgraded my phone (from the free-in-2009, senior citizens' flip phone).  I had never upgraded my phone before.   I felt very American and enculturated to casually walk in to the cell phone store and without thinking about it, sign up for another 2-year contract.

While I did so casually, I was constantly aware that it's never been easy like this for me before, and it isn't easy for people just visiting the USA (even for a year).

When the clerk returned from the back room, where she transferred my contacts from my old phone to my new phone (--- again, something I had never experienced!), she informed me that my new phone doesn't have a place to hang my strap.

:)

I've never seen an American with a strap on their phone, but since my 2009 model had a place for one, I hung a strap (of Mount Fuji) from my Japanese phone, and have carried around a little bit of Japan with me these past few years.

Sayonara、携帯ストラップ！  (Farewell, cell phone strap!)

1000 Gifts, Vol. 4, #61

621.  the view from a highway built on a rise, looking down onto and across a field of corn recently tasseled

622.  chicory & Queen Anne's Lace lining the roadsides

623.  a neighbor kindly taking care of a package UPS brought us while we were on vacation

624.  taking time out between leaving our vacation spot and arriving home

625.  finally reading a book Ann Voskamp mentioned years ago (Buy it!)

626.  time with family

627.  God's grace in a tightly scheduled week (In the space of 5 days last week we scheduled: 3 doctor's appointments, 2 fasting labs, 3 professional appointments, 2 Bible studies, a hair appointment, picture for the church directory, and volunteering at a summer outreach)

628.  full moon rising out my kitchen window, against the backdrop of a midnight blue velvety sky

629.  pork chop dinner in the fire hall of a nearby village, followed by sharing a bag of kettle corn while walking through the festival area of booths & games

630.  sitting in our bag chairs between the road and someone's soybean field and watching the most fantastic fireworks show we'd ever seen ... 35 minutes' worth ... put on by said nearby village (population 700)

Reading together: God's Word

How do you help your non-Christian friends meet Christ?  Invite them to a big event at church? 

How do you help your new Christian friends put down roots in their faith?  Suggest a class at church?

How do you & your long-time believing friends grow and mature?  Form a special-interest group or study a certain curriculum?

That’s how we tend to think, and while those can all be great options, I recently read a book which proposes a different idea:  the simple concept of reading God's Word with one other person.

In his 75-page book titled One-to-One Bible Reading, David Helm reminds us of why the Word is powerful.  It’s powerful for the salvation of our non-Christian friends. James 1.21 tells us it “is able to save your souls.”  It’s powerful for sanctification of believers, teaching, reproving, correcting, and training us in righteousness (2 Tim. 3.16). 

Helm goes on to say that time spent reading God’s Word one-to-one can “be used to identify & train people for greater ministry responsibility.”  And, given our disconnected culture and the hunger for relationships of substance, reading God’s Word with someone can provide community in a way the world can never offer.   

In a survey reported in the 2009 book, Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches that Reach Them, 61% of twenty-somethings said “Yes,” when asked to disagree or agree with the following statement: “I’d be willing to study the Bible if a friend asked me to.”  42% of people over 30 said, “Yes.”

What if each of us reading this asked someone this week, “Would you have any interest in reading the Bible with me for a few weeks?” 

Helm anticipates the excuses we might have, and then role-plays how to ask a friend and how to have your first meeting. He includes two appendices of questions (that you can copy):   

8-weeks' worth of questions to go with a sampling of passages in Mark, and 

lists of COMA (Context, Observation, Meaning, Application) questions specifically for various types of literature in the Bible (e.g., Gospels, Old Testament narrative, wisdom literature, prophecy, etc.).

Any believer should be able to take these ideas and handouts and read God's Word with anyone interested (no matter where their reading partner is on the spectrum of belief & maturity).

God’s plan is to use His people to spread His Word.  Would you pray about who you could invite to read the Bible with you?  I’d love to hear how God prompts you and shows up to do His work through His Word!

Paperback Swap

1-1-1-3-1.

That's what Paperback Swap tells me.

I have one book to mail, one book I've requested, one book en route to me, three books I've mailed, and one wish list hold.

• Books to Mail (1)
• Books I've Requested (1)
• En Route to Me (1)
• Books I've Mailed (3)
• Wish List Holds (1)  

If you have any books taking up space on your shelves that you probably won't read again or won't use as reference or don't want to have on hand to loan out to others, consider listing them on Paperback Swap.

After you list 10 books, you start earning credits.  One credit = one book.  If you request a book from someone else, it costs you one credit. If someone requests a book from you and you send it, you earn one credit.

When you send a book, you pay postage.  When someone else sends you a book, they pay postage.

It's brilliant in its simplicity!

You can list 200 books on your wish list for free.  For some of the books on my wishlist, I'm first in line, but no other members have listed that title as one they have available to send.  For other books, I'm #16 on the list. 

Some months I have no activity in my account (no books to mail out, no books to receive), and then other months I feel like I'm going to the post office everyday. :)

You don't have to go to the post office everyday. When a request is emailed to you, you have a choice of accepting it or not, and of mailing it now or within the next five days. You can also easily put your account on vacation during busy times.

And, it's not just paperbacks. You can send/receive hardcovers and even audio books (though each audio book = 2 credits). 

I believe Paperback Swap is only for the U.S., but I've heard Book Mooch, a similar concept, is worldwide.

Taking a Challenge

Recently I noticed on Facebook that a friend is taking her city's 100 miles in 90 days fitness challenge.  I don't live in her city, and Tiny Town isn't having any such challenges that I've heard about.  But I printed a July - September calendar, posted it on our fridge, and started logging my miles!  Since we'll be gone so much in July, I started out doing more than a mile a day.  In the first 8 days, I logged 12 miles (mostly on our treadmill ... after months of no use), and started searching for a mid-to-late September 5K to walk.

Taking a challenge ~ even on my own ~ apparently motivates me.

Looking back, last November I took the Thankful for 100 Things challenge, though I never completed it. 

And last October, I took the Weight Watchers 8-weeks-til-Thanksgiving challenge (which I did complete successfully!).

Just a few weeks ago I also signed up for a 30-day challenge  from Revive our Hearts.  They offer several and send emails to your inbox daily.

During May, some friends and I did the de-cluttering challenge.

And, of course, there's my life-changing 1000 Gifts challenge from November 2006.

Yes, apparently I just need a good challenge.  What about you?  Do you work well with a challenge like these?  Do you have any challenges to recommend?
 

Getting my hymn fix

How do you get your hymn fix these days?

I love it when my inbox has an email from Discovery House Publishers, announcing a new CD release. 

Discovery House has consistently been a good source for me to find hymns.

I listen to all the samples, and, if I like it, it goes on my wishlist.  It may stay there forever, or it may become a Christmas gift. 

Recent releases include:

• Favorite a capella hymns   (the title song of which was based on a quote by Lilias Trotter [one of my all-time favorite missionary biographies!] who wrote, "Turn full your soul's vision to Jesus, and look and look at Him, and a strange dimness will come over all that is apart from Him.")
•  
• Hymns with harp & vocals   (which has one of my favorites, "Come, Ye Sinners, Poor & Needy")
• 
  
• Bluegrass Baroque   (which blends my place of birth and my husband's love of classical music)  :)

The Longer I Serve Him

Perhaps the biggest difference I experience between life in Japan and life in the U.S.A. is the spiritual heritage of the people around me.   

 

Less than 1/2 of 1% of Japanese people name the name of Jesus.  So, most of the people around me everyday in the grocery store, on the trains, in my conversational English classes, and in my neighborhood were not believers in Jesus.  The Japanese believers I knew were mostly first generation believers and primarily recent believers.  

 

Contrast that with living now in a "Christian" nation and in a region that has a heavy Christian influence and in a rural area where farmers from hearty German stock have been good church-goers for generations.

 

While Jim and I did not have the privilege of meeting each other's grandparents, this spring I heard a recording of his grandfather singing a solo in a church service when he was in his late 70s or early 80s.  

 

You can watch and listen to someone else singing it here:  

(The words are below.)

 

 The Longer I Serve Him

Since I started for the Kingdom,
Since my life He controls,
Since I gave my heart to Jesus,
The longer I serve Him,
The sweeter He grows.

Chorus
The longer serve Him, the sweeter He grows,
The more that I love Him, more love He bestows;
Each day is like heaven, my heart overflows,
The longer I serve Him, the sweeter He grows.

Ev'ry need He is supplying,
Plenteous grace He bestows;
Ev'ry day my way gets brighter,
The longer I serve Him,
The sweeter He grows.

Chorus
The longer serve Him, the sweeter He grows,
The more that I love Him, more love He bestows;
Each day is like heaven, my heart overflows,
The longer I serve Him, the sweeter He grows.

We benefit so much from hearing those who've gone before us repeat that God is good & faithful!  Is that the message younger people hear from me?

Souvenirs

We are home after a nine-day trip to visit family, attend a family reunion, sightsee, and have a brief getaway.

Our souvenirs include:

• a lot of mosquito bites on my legs and arms,
• home-canned green beans,
• a jar of homemade apple butter,
• a set of hand-stitched days of the week kitchen towels [Does anyone know the history of these?],

• another afghan,
• a few new recipes I made for the weekend & which are definitely keepers,
• a number tag from my first 3K (except it was non-competitive, so there is no number),
• 313 photos (from my simple point & shoot),
•  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• an introduction to another world (thanks to a day of touring horse farms & the KY Horse Park and driving back roads through the Bluegrass Region), 
• gratitude for good weather (especially since my parents' area was hammered by destructive storms the day after we left),
• memories from the family reunion ~ time with people I hadn't seen in nine years & getting to introduce Jim,  :)
• and full hearts!

Warm socks & fencing rival

Thanking God today for three years with 

my man who is as comforting as warm socks on a cold day 
and as challenging as a fencing rival!

(See explanation here.)

 

Do you feel bruised?

a bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not quench,

Over a year ago, when we were feeling very bruised by circumstances outside of our control, various losses, inexplicable physical symptoms, and complete uncertainty about the future, God's good providence took us to a certain church on a certain Sunday.

In our months of looking for a new church home, we rarely visited a Sunday School class, but on this fateful providential morning we did. The scholar-pastor teacher was beginning a new series on the Puritans, and introduced us to Richard Sibbes and his book, The Bruised Reed.

Almost before we were home, Jim had downloaded the book from Amazon, and that set the tone for months and months of deep ministry by the Holy Spirit through Richard Sibbes.

An online review I found says:

Richard Sibbes writes and preaches as a man constrained and compelled by the love of Christ. He cannot know enough about Christ. For more than anything else, Christ defines his existence. And he has found Christ to be the source of everything good and needful. The Bruised Reed represents a distillation of this Christocentric world view, and in it Sibbes writes persuasively, with both tenderness and compelling urgency, betraying by his words an intimacy with the ways of God. He counsels as one who knows what it means to be broken and bruised and poor in spirit before God. His words carry with them the wisdom of one who has spent many hours at the feet of his master. He preaches as one whose sins have been forgiven, whose heart has been filled with Good News. And he speaks with the peace of one who knows what the final outcome of the battle will be. 

Read the book online here for free.   Follow along in a 9-part series here.

What books has God used to minister to you when you've passed through deep waters?

Let's talk Bible study

When you open God's Word on your own and read it, what steps do you find helpful in learning from it?  Do you journal what you learn? Do you always ask yourself the same few questions about the text? Do you look up words or use a concordance?

In addition to opening God's Word on your own and reading and learning from it, what are some good Bible studies you can recommend?  My personal favorites of the past year are the Kathleen Nielson inductive studies and Nancy Guthrie's Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament series.

And now, just for curiosity, does your church have any lay people who actually teach the Bible?  Or do lay people only facilitate Bible studies written by others?

I've noticed that DVD-based Bible studies seem to be the most popular.  Have you ever been in a DVD-based study?  What were the benefits for you?

6 months

Today marks 6 months since my surgery.

The first day, first week, and first month went really well.  From the 2.5 month mark to 5 months seemed interminable and was just. plain. HARD.

This past month has been better physically ~ partly (or maybe mostly) because I called the nurse and went in for a follow-up to figure out the root of some pain, which thankfully is mostly gone now (Here's to Metamucil!).  Obviously, in many ways, my body will never be the same. 

The emotional healing process seems harder than the physical healing process.  Thankfully I had already done a lot of grieving before surgery.  But hormones can really throw one for a loop! And being sidelined from normal activities was depressing.  Apparently I don't do waiting well.

"They" say it takes 6 months to heal 80% and a full year to get back to normal.  And a caring lady at church reinforced that to me in no uncertain terms before I had my surgery.  She was firm in warning me not to try to do too much, too.  And I'm grateful for her warnings.

I'm definitely not 100% yet, but I'd guess the 80% figure isn't too far off.  Shortly before the discovery that led to my surgery, I had started the Couch to 5K program.  Pain before surgery halted my progress.  Pain after surgery halted my starting up again.

The nurse practitioner agreed that once I'm healed, I should be able to do any exercise (well, not magically be able to do things I couldn't do before!), and that this period of holding off on strenuous exercise is just par for the course as I heal. 

So, there is much hope for healing, getting back to normal, and resuming life as I once knew it.

If you or anyone you know has to have a hysterectomy, please tell them about the HysterSisters website (it was my sanity in those early weeks post-op).  If you want any other tips about encouraging a friend who has had this surgery, I'm happy to share from my experience. 

Now, how shall I celebrate 6 months?!  :)

Hospitals, Powdered Milk, and Printers

My friend Wendy recently put into words something I experienced my entire time living overseas:

In your own country, you figure out where to buy most things over time, either from advertising, or by looking things up in the Yellow Pages, or just by experience. ... We often rely on word-of-mouth ...

Her words resonated so deeply with me that I started to write a comment on her blog post. My thoughts quickly developed into a post of their own. 


One thing I noticed in my first few months in Japan was that I couldn't identify shops or offices or hospitals by what the building looked like.  (And of course, at the beginning I couldn't read any signs ... and years later, there were still plenty of signs I couldn't read!)  So, in addition to not knowing where to buy a certain item, I couldn't even use context clues to look at the outside of a building and guess what it contained.

Hospitals 
I realized this when I found myself thinking:

They don't have hospitals in Japan. 

No, they must have hospitals in Japan. 

Hmm. I must not know what hospitals look like in Japan. 

Until I actually went to a hospital in Japan (with a friend to visit another friend), I had no idea what they looked like. 

Powdered Milk
Once, as a 2-yr missionary was giving away her pantry items in preparation for leaving Japan, she was declaring the merits of some powdered milk she had available and mentioned, "You can't buy it in Japan."

Oh, but you can!  The size of the package, the location of the package in the grocery store, and the picture on the front of the package (including the brand - and brand logo) were all different, so she never realized that she walked by powdered milk every time she was in the grocery store.

It takes a lot of humility (and patience) to ask someone about every item on your shopping list - is this available? where do you buy it? where is that store? and can you draw me a map? (since most street signs in Japan don't have names).

Printers
It works both ways.  When I came back to the U.S. for a year's assignment in 2004, I was operating on knowledge I'd had in 1999 of what would be available.  I opted not to bring my computer printer with me from Japan to the U.S.  Instead I ordered a mini-printer so that it would be waiting when I arrived.

A few months later I ran into some missionaries also on home assignment and they mentioned their all-in-one printer which could scan! and fax! and copy! as well as print!  Why hadn't anyone told me?!?!  I hadn't known about these newfangled things ... and that they were just a fraction of the cost of my micro-printer.  In fact, I hadn't even known to ask that question.  (And I'm not sure how well it would work to ask, "What do I need to know that I didn't know 4 years ago?")

The reverse happened in Japan.  A missionary had been gone for a year and returned to the same town.  She was there many months before learning that there was a huge new discount store just a few miles away.  "Why didn't anyone tell us?"

Passing on a body of knowledge is harder than it seems.  The teacher often isn't aware of what the student doesn't know.  And the student often doesn't even know what questions to ask.  

July books

A new month means new deals for booklovers!

Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow is the free audiobook of the month at Christian Audio.

Amazon's list of July Kindle deals for $3.99 and less includes:

• How to Read the Bible for all its worth  ($1.99)

• Sacred Marriage ($2.99)

• Bittersweet, by Shauna Niequist ($1.99)

• Blackaby's Experiencing God ($3.99)

• and more!

What are you looking forward to reading in July?

Someone's in the Kitchen with Fannie

Aftermath of banana bread - well worth it!

What we had for breakfast:

When the bag of rotten bananas was ready to become banana bread, I decided to look for a new recipe.  The 1231-page Fannie Farmer paperback cookbook (for which I had parted with 99 cents at a thrift store) beckoned. 

In an attempt to increase whole grains, I substituted the 2 cups flour with 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup wheat germ, and 1 cup white whole wheat flour.

A curious thing about this banana bread is that it includes no oil or butter, which must be a good thing.

Though Fannie Farmer first published her cookbook in 1896, this new edition is updated, even including sushi!

I've become so accustomed to searching online for recipe ideas, but I hope to bring Fannie into my kitchen more often.  She's basic. She explains the processes that may be new.  And she uses ingredients that were around in 1896, i.e. real, unpackaged, unprocessed food.

Have you cooked with Fannie?

I'm intrigued by this children's book:  Fannie in the Kitchen: The Whole Story from Soup to Nuts of How Fannie Farmer Invented Recipes with Precise Measurements and look forward to reading it.

1000 Gifts, Vol.4, #60

611.  time together eating dinners, playing games, celebrating, worshiping, and concert-going

612.  a perfect cool day in mid-summer with bright sunshine & a pleasant breeze

613.  the restfulness of a weekend away

614.  visiting a church we love (on said weekend away)

615.  really meditating on the soul-strengthening words of "Lead On, O King Eternal"

616.  a beautiful 1700-acre oasis in the city

617.  lawn chairs & blankets filled with concert-goers on a grassy knoll

618.  an engaging conductor & energetic music by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

619.  cousins saying "goodbyes"

620.  a new book - found & read, now ready to implement