Sayonara

Dear Family, 

 

Last weekend some members of our English language class took us out to dinner at a wonderful Japanese restaurant. They ordered everything on the menu and it was all delicious – we loved the sushi and sashimi, the lotus roots and the seaweed, the okonomiyaki and the sukiyaki, and we even liked the squid and the octopus, though we had a little trouble with the slimy shrimp. Their expressions of love and gratitude were overwhelming. We are going to miss this gang. 

with Miya, Starr, Koji, Tom and Watanabe san

            We spent much of the week training our replacements, the Kobersteins. They are quick learners and will do a great job, and if we do our work well we will be quickly forgotten as the church in Japan rolls on. It’s amazing how things that absolutely need to be done pile up as you near departure.  Last Tuesday as I spent nearly six hours with a young missionary at the medical clinic, I had ample time to reflect on the past 18-months work and to list all the things that need to be completed in the next week. It’s a long list. Somewhere in the midst of all this we visited a beautiful Japanese Garden, participated in a Halloween Party and enjoyed a wonderful afternoon and departure dinner with our son Dan and his family. We are seriously thinking about taking little Raiden and Anika with us if we can just fit them into our suitcases and if we can somehow slip them past their parents.

We feel greatly privileged to have served in the midst of the great up-swelling of the missionary work as an army of recruits swarmed into the field.  Growing from 58,000 to 80,000 missionaries within one year brought a regular tsunami of young, eager faces arriving to inject a spirit of enthusiasm and an attitude of can-do into the work.  We marveled at how so many hit the ground running, amazingly adept at the language and filled with the Spirit - and within a very short time many found themselves trainers and senior companions, and then leaders in the mission.  The experience has left us breathless and amazed. Perhaps we are witnessing the acceleration spoken of in scripture, the hastening of the work in these latter days.  Likely we are present at a greater moment than we know. 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday will be our last full day in the mission, and fittingly it will end with the English class in the evening.  The next day we board the Shinkansen, the bullet train, and speed north and east for 625 kilometers to Nagoya where we will meet and spend a few hours with our grandson, Matthew Naylor who is serving there. We are very excited to see him. We plan to stay overnight there and come back to Fukuoka the next day. Saturday morning we will fly to Tokyo and then on to Portland. Wow, we can hardly believe it.

From Japan, we bid you an affectionate Sayonara.  For those of you unfortunates who waded through our dispatches, we gratefully acknowledge your patience. To those who didn’t, well you’re not reading this anyway.  To all we express our love and best wishes. 

 

Closing out another portion of our lives, we were your faithful far-eastern correspondents, 

Mom and Dad