Musashi-Sakai

We spent our morning today doing more distribution of some Gospel material in the Musashi-Sakai area. It's one of our target areas while we're here, its a small suburb of Tokyo and is really beautiful. We decided to walk all the way to the very edge of the city limits today and work our way back doing distribution along the way. It was a tiring walk but well worth the effort as IMB believes this area has never been hit before with distribution of the Gospel. So it is quite possible that many Japanese families are seeing this message for the very first time in their life. After a bit of lunch we prayer walked the city area and then moved onto 5 minute English at the train station. One of the funnier things that happened today is we actually found a Low's here (notice the spelling), it is a hardware store though and Chris wanted some oil for the squeaky doors here. So without being able to read or speak any Japanese Beth made the motion of a door opening and made the sound "squeak" to the store clerk, who did know what she was talking about. During 5 minute English we were able to meet roughly 15 people and about 5 of them left with at least some or all of the Gospel message being told to them.

You probably notice a lot of talk about 5 minute English in our posts, this is IMB Tokyo's way of reaching people for Christ. It involves holding up a sign in a busy train station that says "free 5 minute English practice" in Japanese and in English. The sign holder is also voicing the same thing to people as they pass by. They told us when we arrived here that you will either hate 5 minute English or love it. It is definantly way out of our comfort zones, but of course that's when God begins to work. Once someone stops, we take them through a short bit of English practice, a few questions, etc. with the whole point of trying to share the Gospel message at some point with them. You may be saying that this seems to be very "cold turkey" in sharing and you would be right, it is! However, the time they spend with us may be the only time they ever get to hear the Gospel message and we have to treat each person in that manner. It is our responsibility to share the message God has entrusted us with and we must be faithful in that.

We would ask that you please pray for S-San, A-San, S-San, and H-San. These are some Japanese that we met today that are at least open to us building relationships with them. We also ask that you continue to pray for our team, it can get discouraging sometimes trying to build these relationships and getting no where.