Wednesday Cooking lesson!

Hi Everyone,
Now it's my turn! Today was our first of three cooking opportunities. We are doing Italian menus each time (but why they think Chinese and a couple of Japanese people know anything about Italian cooking is a mystery to me.). Anyway, the "girls" went out to pick up the last of the ingredients for our lesson this morning, including a very long but eventually fruitful search for french bread. Our menu was chicken cacciatore, fettucini (hard to find) carbonara, salad (expensive!), garlic bread, and strawberry cake (strawberries in Japan?!!? most people laughed, but God is good and after 8 days of searching we found some frozen!). Anyway, this cooking lesson was basically an outreach for the Seiizumi church to gain more interest in their "Alpha" groups, kind of a "intro to Christianity" group. They had 5 new women who came to this cooking lesson, seems like a small number, but we have learned that this church really only has a core of about 12 people, so 5 is huge! We enjoyed our time cooking, eating, and talking (what women do best!) with the women, and the guys(Matt, Kevin, and Wil) were off in the kitchen doing dishes - how much better can it get than that?!!! The food was delicious, we had a good time, and PRAISE the Lord!, 4 of the 5 new women were interested in signing up for an Alpha group - it was a success!

After the cooking lesson, the Cho/Matt team and our team (the Chew's) both had prayer meetings at our respective churches. Don't know how about the other team, but ours was a very blessed time when the church members just come together to worship and then pray for the various needs of the church and the members. They do what they call "Korean-style" praying which is when everyone prays out loud together at once. Seems chaotic, but it is great because we can all pray together for the same need and there is no language barrier!

Now we are prepping for our next cooking outreach assignment on Friday. It is on a small island, Henzajima, and there appears to be a typhoon headed that way. Please pray for the weather and that if God wills that we do this ministry, the typhoon will turn another direction. Also please pray for the homestay visit (2 nights) for Nicole and Brittany. They are staying with a non-Christian family and the church has high hopes that the girls can lead them to church on Sunday. We also ask that you please pray that God will multiply our time and help us to finish strong. We are definitely feeling like we are being pulled in many directions and that our schedule is jam-packed until we leave on Monday. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are very full days and nights with important ministry opportunities which we are excited to do, but we are also looking around thinking . . . we never got to see anything or get any shopping done (sorry to all those expecting omiyage!). We are not in an area which has much "shopping" within walking distance, and the Cho's/Matt are even more isolated, so our hopes of finding neat things to take home is dwindling. Just pray that God would help us to deal with our expectations (some had more than others) and that we will have a sense of peace about all the other great things that we have seen and done here (and there have been sooooo many!!) and those will definitely be the treasures that we take home!

Again, thank you for your prayers and support. We compare our time here to a very extended VBS - every day we wake up there is sooo much work to do, but the work brings such great joy!
Good night and God bless,
Janet


the kitchen..yes it's that small
eating the yummy food!