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Japan continues to keep covid at the forefront of news and society. We are in our "SEVENTH" wave of infections. This time around the government has loosened the restrictions. Restaurants are allowed to stay open and they DO continue to SLOWLY open up the country to travel and visitors. We do find that attendance to worship fluctuates depending on the infection rate. Companies are still very leary of their employees bringing the infection to work so some of our congregation will refrain from attending a large gather at times. Let me just show you a picture of how crowded BFF can be, so you can understand why. This was our highest attendance worship this year before the current wave of infections... 40 people (including Zoom worshipers)!
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Summer Ministry...
Summer Ministry was AMAZING! We did summer school again on our own without a team from the US. It can be a challenge to plan and execute that but the amazing thing this year was that so many of our teens are now volunteer staff that we certainly had plenty of help on the days of the event. It was just planning and preparing that was a bigger project than we are used to. We had over 30 kids and we joined forces with another church in our area to pull this off. It was an amazing collaboration effort and we are excited to do more and grow next year!!! Check out pictures of this years VBS David Project on our BFF Facebook page! And enjoy the highlight video here.
In addition to this major event with our church Rocky and I were involved in two summer Bible Camps, a few special concerts, and a couple of trips to visit and minister to many people. We were able to take our two girls from Ukraine to visit another family who are now living on the south end of our island. It was a great time of fellowship and encouragement for all. See the picture below of our Ukrainian reunion.
The Fall...
Our fall is looking more and more like a normal fall, with several concert invitations on the schedule. We may FINALLY be seeing Japanese churches venture into the realm of having events and special guests again. Please pray for this. People have been so isolated and have avoided group gatherings for so long, the entire country really needs personal interaction. Pray that God uses this long time of isolation to bring people out and connect them with churches where they will hear the Gospel and believe!!!
Our yearly Fall concert event known as Gospel Alive will also be held again in October. More details for this in our next newsletter.
Personal update...
Many BIG updates for our little family. Hana is half way through her final year of high school! She will graduate in March 2023. Right now she is applying to attend Handong Global University in South Korea, an amazing Christian University where most education is in English, that we have come to know a lot about in the past couple of years. Please pray for the application process and for God's will. Pray that she will walk in HIS plans for her life and follow him with all her heart.
Kai is now an 8th grader and in what may possibly be his last year of homeschool. Right now the plan is to send him to do one year of exchange study at a new Christian school in Texas next fall (2023). He will homestay with some of our supporters and be a part of the first year of this new Christian school! Please pray for Kai as he takes this big step of faith to spend a year away from home for his high school freshman year. And pray as we seek to know what God's will is for the rest of his high school after 9th grade. If you are interested in helping to support Kai's year of exchange study and homestay with this church, please contact me. This would fall outside of our ministry funds but would be an incredible blessing as we will financially be taking on both Hana in college and Kai in private school at the same time! If you want to help sponsor him, I would like to put you in contact with the church which is starting this school so that you can send any funds for him that way!
Rocky and I are loving watching God at work all around us. We are busy and sometimes feel like we may have piled too much on our plates, but God is good and gives us all we need (including enough energy)! Thank you for your prayers. Also my broken jaw is about 99% back to normal. The only remaining symptoms are pain when yawning and a strange feeling when chewing on that side of my mouth.
My (Marla's) Facebook was deemed to have broken some arbitrary rule several months ago and deleted without warning and without recourse. If you happened to miss that this happened and would like to refriend me on Facebook please feel free to send a request, I finally started a new account. As I have now experienced how quickly and arbitrarily they can just delete your account, I am not as active there as I used to be. I was not planning to create another account, but I needed access to important homeschool information online and I need back into all of my Trim Healthy Mama responsibilities on Facebook, so I am back.
This all happened not long after we brought the Ukrainian girls over to live with us. To all of you who have supported their evacuation to Japan thank you! I am very happy to let you know that all of your support helped to get us through 5 months of helping them while we waited for the Japan Foundation to come through with the promised living support they announced they would give to all refugees from Ukraine. At this time, they are receiving full support from the foundation starting this month and we are saving any of the remaining support you sent to help with extra big expenses in the future, their return to Ukraine when and if that becomes possible, and/or others that the Lord may call us to assist in the ongoing war! Please keep praying for M and N as their future is very uncertain, and they are working hard to finish their college education and live in Japan as independently as they can. They are two very responsible and sweet girls! We are blessed!!!
As always we would love to hear from you. Please let us know how you and your family are, and how we can be praying for you!
With all our Love,
The Aroma Team
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