10 more days…

Only 10 more days until I will fly to NY to meet Hannah and Ezekiel. The last few days here without them have been busy, cold, lonely and a bit stressful. Coming home and not having Hannah and Ezekiel there to great me is just no fun. And the house is so cold now because it’s been staying around 45 degrees most of the days now. The stressful part comes form the fact that we have a to-do list that is at least 3 weeks long and we only have 10 days to get it done…..

On another note thought, I was able to get our new prayer card done today which you can find in the previous post.

Here are a few photos form our recent trip to Tokyo.

New Prayer Cards

A lot has been going on for us the last few days. Hannah and Ezekiel flew to NY to be with her family and I had some meetings in Tokyo last week and now am back at NORTHSTAR working on final preparations for my trip to NY in just 10 days. It’s coming fast.

Today I got our new Prayer card done, you can download the PDF version below. We will also have printed ones to hand out at Church when we go to share about the last year. It’s going to be fun to see everyone and to let people know what’s been happening here.

 

2010 McAllister Prayer Card

US or bust

You may have heard that we are planning to come home for a visit to both NY and OR this Fall. We have our tickets and we are getting things packed for our trip. We will be staying with family on both coasts during the times written below so if your around during those times in the NY or OR area please contact us via email, we would love to meet up with you.

NY TRIP
Hannah & Ezekiel – November 3rd ~ 25th
Seth – November 17th ~ 25th

OR TRIP
Seth, Hannah & Ezekiel – November 25th ~ December 13th

Winter is coming

The other morning I woke to a crisp cool Fall morning here in Norikura Kogen. I didn’t know we had gotten any snow as my home is hidden from the mountain. As I walked to work Dan came out on the front steps with a huge smile on his face and was just looking behind me and saying “isn’t that great”. I waswondering what he was talking about and then I turned around to see Norikura with a fresh layer of snow on it.

We are looking forward to the snow season, thanks for your prayers.

Somethig cool

So I know it’s been a while since we have written much and we are sorry for that. I can say that it’s not for a lack of things to write about.

The thing I want to share with you now is something that happened last week. Almost every Thursday we have a time of prayer and worship with our staff and anyone from the comunity who want to come. We invited the Raicho family to come and have dinner with us and then stay for worship. We have invited them before and actually their son has come many times to Church and our staff worship nights. But the other night Mr. Raicho came with his son Toru and stayed to hear the message which was about how we as a body need to keep encouraging each other (Phil 1:1-3). This was the first time that Mr. Raicho had ever come and the message was very timely for him. And Mr. actually took home a bible that we gave him. And we later heard from his wife that he was very encouraged by the message and he has been reading his Bible.

Please keep the Raicho family in prayer. We work with them from time to time and have a good relationshi with them so we are praying that we could speak more about Jesue with them. When this kind of thing happens it really reminds me of why we are here and that we must keep pressing on toward the great commission.

Prayer for a friend

I am writing now to ask you to pray for a friend of ours who’s father recently passed away. Dan Junker’s wife’s father passed away two days ago after having a sergury. Dan’s wife Tina is flying to Hawii tomorrow to help with preperations and details for the funeral. This all happened very sudden and has been very hard for their family. Please pray for the Junker family and the Takeuchi family as they go through this time of mourning.

Love from Japan
Seth & Hannah

Soba Festival in Matsumoto

Yesterday Hannah, Ezekiel and I headed out for a day in Matsumoto for the annual Soba Festival which is held at the Matsumoto Castle Grounds. It was a beautiful Fall day and we had a great time enjoying time with each other and seeing the sights around the castle. The funny thing is that we didn’t end up eating any Soba because we didn’t want to wait in line for like an hour for food. So even though we went to the “Soba” festival we just ended up eating some Gelato and some BBQ beef and our bento that we brought from home.

Hannah was in heaven of corse because there was some street vendors selling stuff and also this cool old antique shop that we found which had a lot of neat old things. Hannah found some cool old sunglasses from the 70’s that she got and I ended up getting a cool old TLR camera from the 50’s. I will post some photos when I get some of the film processed.

For now here are some photos form the yesterday.

Summer Season Starting

These last 3 weeks have been kind of slow. We finished our Spring season but because the weather is not so good until July so don’t get many guests. Most of the staff have taken some off time to be with family and travel around a little bit. From tomorrow we are all back and ready to start our summer prep which consists of a few key things.

1. Training New Short term staff (this summer we have 1 new staff from the US named Andrew)
2. Cleaning, Cleaning and more Cleaning in under and around the lodge.
3. And of corse we will spend a good amount of time in Prayer about the upcoming season.

Summer is one of our longest seasons and should have a lot of people coming to Norikura but this year has been a bit slower than normal I think partly due to the state of the economy. Please pray for us and the staff as we desire to have guests to serve. We have started to feel the hit that the economy has taken and things are getting tight for us.

This photo was taken from our living room window. The summer skies here are so beautiful.

Starting to Grow

We hope your all doing well and enjoying your start of the summer. Here in Norikura things are going well and we are enjoying some down time before the summer season really gets going.

We have been talking and talking about starting a garden (hatake in Japanese) to grow some of our own vegetables and so finally the other day we went and asked our landlord if it’s okay to use a small plot in front of our apartment. They said it was fine and so this morning we went out to cut some weeds and clean it up a bit. We didn’t have a lot of time so I thought we would maybe work for 30 min or so and they I would go to work. About 15 min into cutting small branches and not really know what was okay to cut or not cut, our landlord shows up with a machine and clears a plot 3 times bigger than we were thinking. Needless to say I was not able to get to work until a little later. He pulled out a bunch of small trees that were blocking the sun from hitting the garden area and dug down so we could sift out all the rocks. And boy is there a lot of rocks. The soil is about 3 pars rock and 1 part dirt so it will take some time to sift through it all.

Kayo, Brad and Michie all came over this afternoon and helped us with the digging and sifting out of all the rocks. It’s a real blessing to have their help. This week we hope to finish our plot and then next week we will work on the other plot for a garden near NORTHSTAR. Fun fun fun. We will let you know how it goes.

Spring BBQ

So a few nights ago the staff decided to have a BBQ at NORTHSTAR. The only bad part was that it started raining that day and so we couldn’t have the BBQ outside. Instead we had it on the front steps of NORTHSTAR which is still outside but out of the rain. It was a lot of fun to just hang out with the other staff and hang out together.

At the moment only the full time staff are here which is Ken, Kayo, Michie, Brad and I. Dan is in the US on a support raising trip and will be back next week. He is speaking with many pastors and missions leaders about NORTHSTAR and how people from the US can get involved with ministry in Japan. Good stuff. If your interested in hearing more about that please let us know and we would be glad to give you some more info.