First of all, thank you everyone for all of your prayers and support!!
This past Sunday, we had our first weekly service! Here is how it went from my perspective...
To be honest, I was super stressed out!! The previous night, I was at the building working on the musical worship slides using a program called Pro Presenter and being a Macbook newb as I am, it took me foreeever to finally get the output on the projection right. At home, I added more slides and finished the whole presentation.
The next morning, I went to the church building early around 10 am (our service doesn't start until 2 pm) to make sure the presentation was working properly and lo and behold, of course it wasn't!! No matter what I did, the output wouldn't change and words were cut off or the display wasn't scaled. I was feeling the pressure more so as it was time for our prayer meeting at 12:15 pm and I still didn't run through the worship set yet AND I still hadn't figured out the projection problem. During the meeting, my mind was still preoccupied about trying to figure things out, but as the meeting went on, I became less stressed about it and I just felt a sense of peace come over me, knowing that God is in control of everything and that I needed to trust Him more. Don't get me wrong, I was still stressed out, but a lot less. After prayer, Kevin and I ran through the worship set, ending around 1:30. I quickly went back to the computer and readjusted the program settings like I had been doing a million times before, but this time, it finally worked!!
God had proved his faithfulness yet again and everything during the service went as smooth as possible, maybe too smooth. This definitely showed that God was at work and all the credit goes to Him! For the service, 49 people came, including supporters, volunteers, kids, and non-christians. We had 3 non christians interested in joining a small group and 1 non christian meeting up with our launch team member to do an intro to christianity study! It is so easy to get preoccupied with different problems that arises, especially technical ones, and lose sight of why I'm here. For a moment, I had forgotten of the blessing of having a place to regularly meet at and for the privilege to proclaim the Good News of Jesus to a nation, in which the majority has never even heard of Jesus' name!
Please continue to pray with me that God would bring many to hear the Gospel and for his Kingdom to spread in Japan!
P.S. If you would like to listen to the sermon Kevin preached, please GO HERE. It's in Japanese, but there is an English manuscript if you want to follow along or just read it.
