First Impressions

Its been a LONG time since we arrived in Japan 27 years ago. My first impressions faded long ago. And, since I had a two year old and a baby and a very bad case of culture shock - two kids in diapers and no dryer! no car! no central heating! - I didn't have time for diary. So its kind of interesting to watch Joy.

Mary Elliot & Joyanne Baab

She's full of the same enthusiasm and purpose as I was 27 years ago. Just without the extra baggage and quite a few years younger. I was twenty-three turning twenty-four, married with two kids. Joy's seventeen going on eighteen.

She borrowed my camera two days after she got here and this is what she snapped with it. (It all looks very normal to me now! But I might have taken the same photos 27 years ago if I'd had email and a digital camera.)

Squid

Mary's the cook this year so we eat Japanese style most meals

Rice, miso soup and fish for breakfast

Take off your shoes!

You can't really see how deep the tub is in this photo.

(We had my favorite stainless steel tub

- until we discovered the foundation rot.)

Our Japanese toilet. (By choice!)

Straw mat (tatami) floors

Futon (bed) on the floor

(If any of Joy's family are reading this, she's now cleaned her room and packed away the suitcases.)

More Birthdays

My nephew Aaron's birthday is the day after mine. So we partied several days running.

Aaron's 17th Birthday marked by cake...

Presents, balloons,etc

And, of course, family! (Bethany Ghent & Mary Elliot)

It's been a long time since my nephew gave me these prayer requests but I think they still hold. (Are you there, Aaron? You can addend changes if you like!)

1. That I will be able to concentrate while I study at home, so that I won't daydream. (He's homeschooling for high school.)
2. That I will keep contact with my Japanese friends and invite them to church, so that eventually they will be saved!
3. That I will grow spiritually.

And I do pray for him - that he will become a true man of God, faithful to the very end.

Rights of Passage - I want a Personal Retreat

51rst Birthday Party

I turned 51 this year. I had a nice birthday party but otherwise turning 51 wasn't really a very remarkable milestone - I thought I was 51 already! A quick calculation proved otherwise. I don't mind. But 50 was also quite rather unremarkable - and I did want that to be a little special.

My Unremarkable 50th

Afterall, shouldn't there be some right of passage for passing half a century?! I wanted to celebrate by looking back and by looking forward. I wanted to have a "Personal Retreat". I did actually try... I sat on the porch looking over Matsushima Bay (not a bad idea in theory) and used these instructions but it was too hurried and much too much like "going through the steps"...

So this year I want to try again.

Someway, somehow I want to mark 50 years of life. And I want to try the personal retreat thing again in a way more suited to reflection.

Definitive Quotations

I realize that I did not necessarily choose the most definitive quotation when I wrote my last entry - I chose instead what spoke to me. But when I tried to find the definitive quotation I couldn't quite narrow it down.

So here is a not-quite random selection:

p. 78 ... the recent Christian pursuit of relevance has all too often led to transience... Many years ago, Dean Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral in London remarked, in words that could be the epitaph for many trendy church leaders, "He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower."

p. 79 As the French writer Charles Peguy wrote a century ago, "It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive."

p. 104 Or as Winston Churchill wrote simply in words that go a long way to explain his farsightedness as an unheeded messenger, "The further back you can look, the further forward you can see."

p. 106 The fact is that nothing is finally relevant except in relation to the true and the eternal. Unless something is true, its perspective will at some point be wrong and its practical value in the end will be nil. Only truth and eternity give relevance to "relevance."

p. 112 For Weil was right: It takes the eternal to guarantee the relevant; only the repeated touch of the timeless will keep us truly timely.