Groundbreaking Ceremony (from Facebook)

 Hello, world!

I haven’t posted anything in such a long time!

As many of you know, God did some pretty amazing things in our life last year. We received permanent residency in Japan and started the process to create a Ministry Center and “Free School” in Fukuoka. The journey to building a Ministry Center has been long and hard, but God has been faithful throughout. We found land at an amazing price and were able to go view it even though the property had been taken off the market, and finally got a loan that only God was able to make possible. We experienced so many miracles during the past year! Thank You, God!

The blessings and miracles continue. Yesterday, we had a prayer-filled Groundbreaking Ceremony. It was a simple one, but one filled with so much joy and love as we celebrated this momentous occasion with some of the people who have been such an encouragement to us and have helped us so much, especially my four mommy friends standing behind me/Jiyeon in the group photo. I love them so much and am so thankful for them! I wish I could tell you a little bit about all of the special people in that photo. There were more whom we invited but couldn’t come and many more whom we wanted to invite!

We are, of course, so thankful for the many of you who have been praying for this Big Project and have supported this cause financially too! My Facebook post has two objectives today – one is to give praise for God’s amazingness and the other is to ask for your written prayers. We’re collecting prayer cards to put in a jar and bury in the foundation of the Ministry Center and “Free School”. It is literally going to have a foundation built on prayer! We’ve created a Google Form for you to send us your prayers. The link is below. For those in Japan, send us your address and we’ll send you a card to write your prayer on, or you can use the link too. Please send us your prayers by February 20th. That’s less than one week! Sorry for the short notice. We look forward to praying with you as we collect your prayers!

Our friends at Showa Kensetsu (construction company) came to prepare for the ceremony and also greet our neighbors to let them know of the ceremony and the construction work that will be starting soon, to ask for their understanding, and apologize in advance for any disturbance or inconvenience this may cause. Juhee took the photo on the far right from about halfway up the steps to the Shinto shrine next to us. The kids went up and down the steps to the shrine many times before and after the ceremony! I have no clue why they would torture themselves like that

Left two: Peter welcomed everyone and Pastor Kim translated from English to Japanese. Right two: Kikumi-san prayed the opening prayer and Pastor Miyauchi prayed the closing prayer and benediction

Peter did the ceremonious weeding with the ritual scythe, I did the ceremonious digging with the ritual shovel, and then our friends from the construction company did the ceremonious hammering in of the cornerstone (per se).

Prayer cards! We prepared little goodie bags with prayer cards and chocolate. Jiyeon had written hers before the ceremony and I read it out to those in attendance while explaining the prayer cards. Jiyeon wrote, "God, please make no spiders or cockroaches come. Amen. Jiyeon" There are a lot in the old white house on the property  In the evening, she wrote another one, this time focused on the kids who will be coming, "God  help the kids to be healthy" My point was, prayers don’t have to fancy, they just have to be from the heart