2020 End-of-Year Update

Happy New Year!

2020 was a year that we will never forget for more reasons than one. As with all of you, we had to make many adjustments to our everyday lives. Our ministries also looked a bit different from the time Japan declared its first State of Emergency in March.

You'll find a link to our latest e-newsletter here, which tells you in more detail about some of the new and wonderful things that took place during the past few months. Despite everything, through everything, we could see God working. 

We are so thankful to be here and to be able to be your hands and feet here in Fukuoka, Japan.

Thank you so much for your love and prayers!

Spring 2020 Update

Hey!

Here's our Spring 2020 e-newsletter, finally being sent out towards the end of Summer - doh! >.< For those of you who didn't receive it into your inbox, click here to see the full newsletter.

Thank you as always for your love and prayers. We wouldn't be here without you~! :)

Grateful to be serving our wonderful God together with you in Fukuoka, Japan <3

Winter 2020 Update

Here's a link to our latest newsletter.
As always, thank you for your prayers.
Stay healthy!

Christmas Update

Merry Christmas!

Here's a quick update we sent out on Christmas Day (maybe Christmas Eve in the US?).

We celebrated Christmas together as a family on the 26th, after our final event on Christmas Day. Our kids were blessed with many presents sent by many of you. Thank you!

We really are so grateful and honored to be here and to have been able to share about Jesus Christ's birth with many here.

Thank you for your continued prayers and support that allows us to be here.

May you have a wonderful CHRISTmas celebrating our Savior's birth and an amazing New Year full of God's goodness!

Fall 2019 Update

Click here for our Fall 2019 Newsletter. Warning: it's pretty long! But we have a lot on our minds and hearts right now, a lot going on in life and ministry. We wanted you to be able to have a real glimpse of what's going on and be able to pray for us generally and specifically, especially for those of you who like details and being able to pray for specific things.

Thank you so much for praying! We need lots and lots of prayer! :)

Quick Prayer Request Update

We sent out this prayer request in the bullet train. That was a first! :)

Here's a link to the email.

Need lots of prayer!!! Thank you for praying!

Home Assignment 2019 Newsletter

Four and a half months have absolutely flown by and in less than 24 hours we will already be airborne, on our way back to the other side of the pond. Our hope was to get a newsletter out to you soon after we first arrived. Unfortunately, this did not happen :( As Peter spoke about so often on Sunday mornings at so many different churches, we are often disappointed by hopes and dreams that do not materialize, and sometimes even by those that do. We are thankful that we are able to return to Japan to share of the living hope of Jesus Christ (see 1 Peter 1:3) to the millions there who do not yet have this hope, those who have not yet even had the opportunity to hear of this hope.

Here is a link to our latest newsletter for you. It doesn't have as many photos as usual but we really wanted to get it out to you before we left and that meant sacrificing photo collages!

Please pray for our arrival. We have natural and political storms to get through and then hit the ground running when we return. We have so many amazing photos I wish we could share with you!

We are so thankful for the partnership we have in Christ to share the Good News.

Thank you and God bless you!

New Prayer Card

We made it to the US in one piece, our house in Fukuoka is being taken care of by Chris, and after the initial few days of jet lag, general disorientation, culture shock, size shock, variety shock, choice shock, sticker shock, and many other "shock"s, we finally got ourselves organized enough to book a family photo session with Janice, and had a great time taking photos with her at a park nearby in Santa Clara.

After professional help from Janice, Marina, and lots of good advice from friends and family, I present to you the final version of our new prayer card. Ta da~ (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Please make sure you receive one when we come to visit your church! If we don't, make sure you get one from us when you see us. If we don't even do that, send us an email and we'd be happy to send you one.

And as a special thank you to our blog readers, here are a few more of our favorite photos from that day. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

As anyone who's ever tried getting kids to sit still for multiple photos will know, it's not easy!!! As anyone who knows our kids will know, they're really not good at sitting still! There's a reason why we don't have many photos of Sungjae and I promise you it's not because we excluded him^^; It probably didn't help that we were at a new park with lots of things to see and do and it was right before dinnertime... :P

This was a fun family one that started with Juhee and Jiyeon playing peek-a-boo behind the big tree. Obviously not an appropriate photo for our prayer card, but it was (kinda^^;) fun :)

And here below is the one you'll see at the beginning of most of our ppt presentations introducing our family, second runner up for our new prayer card.

It's always cool seeing our old prayer magnets on our friends' fridges when we visit and we look forward to giving you an updated photo! In our last one, Jiyeon was a baby. The one before that, Sungjae was a baby (don't think that one ever got printed/distributed though because it was right before we left for Japan in 2010). The one before that, on our first ever prayer card, Juhee was just over a year old. And now she's 11 and a half...

Many of you have been with us since the very beginning and some have just got to know us. To everyone on both ends of the spectrum and everyone in between, thank you for keeping up with us, your love, and your prayers. We really appreciate each and every one of you!

God bless!

Winter 2019 Newsletter

Here's a link to the newsletter we sent out on March 6th covering November 2018 - February 2019. That's so long... :(

Thank you for always tracking with us and praying for us! :)

2019 Home Assignment

It feels too soon to be going back to the US for Home Assignment as we spent most of 2015 in the US, but after a long time of praying over dates and taking many different factors into consideration, God has led us to go back again this year. Our trip this year will be for less than 5 months and future Home Assignments will probably be even shorter as our kids become older and it becomes harder and harder for them to miss school for long periods of time.

This year seems like it'll be an important year to be there for both sides of our families so we are thankful that God's timing allows us to be there while they go through transitions. From April 2020, Juhee will be entering Jr. High School, so extended absences will become less acceptable and studies harder to catch up on. God has already worked miracles with my naturalization paperwork and we trust that He will finish it during our time there. We actually had to decline our first interview offer because it was in mid-December during one of our busiest periods in Japan. We haven't heard back from USCIS since, but we're praying that we'll hear back from them again soon. When we return to Japan with my new US passport, we will be applying for visa extensions as our current visas expire in November. It'll be good to do have my new visa in my new passport under my new legal name!

Here's our schedule so far:
4/13 - Arrive at SFO
4/14 - Living Stones Christian Church
4/21 - Easter Sunday
4/27 - New Vision Church Early Morning Prayer
4/28 - New Vision Church Combined Youth Service
5/3-5 - Davis Korean Church (Davis)
5/12 - Living Stones Christian Church (I'll be at Dallas Chinese Bible Church)
5/19 - Santa Clara Valley Japanese Christian Church
5/26 - Emmanuel Presbyterian Church
6/2 - Pathway Bible Church
6/9 - Skillman Bible Church (Dallas)
6/16 - Dallas Chinese Bible Church (Dallas)
6/23 - Global Harvest Church (Dallas)
6/30 - New Community Baptist Church
7/7 - LSCC
7/14 - Orange Hill Presbyterian Church am, Chinese EV Free Church pm (LA)
7/21 - TBD (LA)
7/28 - First Light Chinese Christian Church Youth Service
8/4 - Santa Clara Valley Japanese Christian Church
8/11 - Indonesian Evangelical Church
8/18 - Embrace
8/25 - Disciple Church
9/1 - LivingStones Christian Church
9/3 - Depart at SFO

We're still waiting to hear back from a few churches and we haven't started organizing small groups and other non-Sunday speaking opportunities. If you would like us to come share at your church or small group, please get in touch! We would love to share how God has been working through us in Japan as we share the gospel here as your hands and feet.

God worked miracles during our last Home Assignment to provide all of our needs. The Bay Area is so expensive and yet we were able to live there comfortably for 7 months when we were expecting to be $18,000 in the red by the end of our time there. And that was before we realized how low our support income would drop right after changing agencies too! But somehow... No. But through all of YOU, God provided. LSCC off the bat gave us $9,000 for our Home Assignment and many of you were so generous to us!

God has already started providing for our needs during this trip and we know that we will be experiencing His provision again through His people again this time around too.

Looking forward to catching up with you soon! :)