Sunday Service in Neli.

chris sung giving his testimony during sunday service at the neli church.

today our missions team led worship at a newly planted church in neli. the church has been only opened for one month and has roughly 2-4 members each week. the pastor is a missionary from hong kong, pastor xu. during service, karen ai, chris sung, and marissa liu gave their testimonies in chinese to complement pastor josh's sermon. afterwards, we had a homemade lunch with pastor xu and another local pastor at the church.

the afternoon brought another trip to the local carrefour store for extra materials and to pass time until our meeting with pastor du and our co-workers for this week. at the meeting we went over all the processes and procedures for camp the coming week, along with getting to know our co-workers. after the meeting, we returned back to our home church and met within our teaching partners to prepare for tomorrow's first day of class.

please pray for us as we begin our first week of classes and house visitations!

daily member blurbs:

esther wong: chris and i finished our crafts demos. we are making sheep hats and lion picture holders. right now, it seems like a lot of this week is up in the air. my prayer request is that we will trust God and not our own planning and abilities.

elean yang:

I'm pretty sure the plane ride from from DC to Japan was the most enjoyable long plane ride to Asia that I have ever had. The difference? Most definitely prayer. I did a lot of praying and reflecting on the plane since my attempts to sleep didn't work out too well. Something that really stood out to me when I was doing my devotions on the plane was that forgiveness has a second step...LOVE. [2 Corinthians 2:5-8 & chapter 2 of "A Heart Like Jesus"] I've always thought of forgiveness as just letting go of whatever someone has done that bothers me, "forgive & forget", but it never occurred to me that I need to show love after forgiving. I can honestly say that forgiveness is something that I really need to work on. Forgiveness is really difficult, but God forgave us so we need to forgive others too and not only forgive them but show our love for them like God does for us.

My prayer request is for energy. I don't know if it's jet lag or just difficulty adjusting to the sleeping conditions but I haven't been sleeping well, constantly waking up in the middle of the night and crashing during the day. Also, I've never been a fan of speaking in front of groups of people...even if those people are kids. No matter how many times I've taught kids, the first day with a new group of kids always makes me slightly nervous. I need to remember that God is in control. Without God, we have nothing because our competence is from Him. If we give ourselves fully to God, He will give us the strength we need so there is nothing to worry about~

chris sung: for the past few days we have been doing mostly prep work and traveling to buy supplies, however i feel that there has been a bit of tension with being together all day everyday. during devotions, we have learned about forgiveness and love and i hope that we can take such lessons to heart and get along with each other. another thing we learned was that we have confidence in and through Christ and i pray that we will be confident when we teach and are with the kids.