Work Visas!!!

We are back from Japan and we have shiny, new work visas! It is such a great feeling. God continues to be so faithful at every turn. I'll let Sarah write about some of the details of our trip. It was such an interesting outing. Japan has an oppressive feeling, at least the area we visited. Our hotel was in an area saturated with bars, nightclubs and gambling parlors. We escaped to our hotel room at around 8:00 Wednesday night. We made sure to pack a Bible and it came in handy. In order to ward off the bad vibes, we prayed and read our Bible a little extra that night. I'm afraid most of my pictures might include some sort of wierd religious symbolism that I am not aware of. Hopefully, they look cool. Check them out by clicking on the flickr link on the top right.

Thanks for sharing in our glee about our new visas. Praise God!

Back to Japan

We are going back to Japan on Wednesday morning. We finally have everything we need to receive our work visas! Thank you to everyone that has been praying about this situation with us. We will go to the Korean consulate in Osaka, Japan as soon as we leave the airport. After we leave our information with them, we will head to our hotel. We will wait until Thursday morning to go back to the consulate to pick up our passports, freshly stamped with work visas. Depending upon when our return flight...returns, we might be able to do some sightseeing. There is a huge aquarium in Osaka and two giant ferris wheels. If I promise not to rock the gondola, Sarah might ride one of them with me. Sarah and I just got a new camera. It's a Canon G9. It takes great pictures and really nice videos and it's much lighter than my DSLR. We will be posting pictures from Japan soon! Stay tuned!

Heaven on Earth

Merriam-Webster defines inclusion as the act or practice of including students with disabilities in regular school classes. According to the 'special needs' coordinator in my building, "Inclusion is like heaven on earth." She was afraid that I wouldn't be able to understand her broken English but I think she got her point across quite effectively. Instead of spending their entire day sequestered away from the other students, the special needs students at Central Christian Academy spend much of their day in the regular classroom. It's hard to tell who benefits the most from this situation, the special needs students, or the students that learn to help the weak and the less fortunate, not to mention the English-speaking teachers from Southeast Kansas that have the great fortune to witness it on a daily basis. Heaven on Earth? Yeah, I think so.

From Japan to Prince Caspian

What an awesome weekend we had! We began our Saturday cleaning the third floor of the new building. We cleaned with Kevin, Kate, and a few of the other members of our homegroup. We were in charge of windows and walls. After we had all cleaned about ninety percent of the walls, I got in trouble for cleaning the upper part of the wall that was painted.(the bottom half of the wall was some sort of waterproof covering). I just took the blame and when the cleaning police guy was gone we all had a good laugh because we had all been cleaning the top and bottom for about two hours. At 3:00 we headed outside for the festivities. It was the 13th anniversary celebration of the church. The kids had an inflatable slide and a bouncy castle. Sarah had some cotton candy and we each enjoyed grape slushees. The soccer area had been converted into a concert area with hundreds of plastic chairs. At around 5:00 the worship started. One group of church members had prepared a couple of songs with only horns. There was also a more basic worship team and an all men's choir. The highlight of the event was a group from Tanzania that came to worship in their own unique way. It really reminded us of times that P.S.U. students from Africa would do similar presentations. It was amazing. They sang in English and worked on getting the crowd into it. (a little beyond a typical service). I put some of the pictures on flickr.
That evening we loaded up in Kevin and Kate's beautiful new car and headed for the mountains. We went to an old lodge about an hour away from our apartment. Our church scheduled an ice breaking, relationship building retreat. We go to church six. It's the best one of several services offered at Wonchon Baptist Church. It's quite a bit different than any baptist church I've ever experienced. Much more like Covenant Harvest. Anyways, back to the retreat! We traveled well off the beaten path and finally arrived at almost 10:00 Saturday night. By the time the rooms keys were all sorted out it was 10:15 and we were completely exhausted. Then we found out that we had a meeting at 10:30. We were running on fumes but it was still fun. God's grace. The fact that Kevin and Kate were there helped. We slept on thin mattresses on the floor. (Korean style). We stacked up all three that we had in our closet. Our homegroup leader and his wife shared a room with Kevin and Kate so we could have our own room. We were fine sharing, but I think he just wanted to be extra accommodating. We slept likes stones, became part of the mountain that rested beneath us. Sunday morning we all gathered in an amphitheatre that had been built into the side of the hill. Pastor Joseph Kim preached for a while and then we moved to a shaded area and broke into groups to perform team building, ice breaking exercises. Lunch was followed by an afternoon of free time. Sarah and I hiked throughout the entire resort. The view of the mountains in the distance was beautiful. After our hike we gathered for a meeting for couples. The pastor and his wife tag teamed the meeting. Then we had dinner and headed home. It was a great weekend.
On Monday, we went to Japan. No big whoop. Oh, you've never been to Japan? I hadn't either. It was very nice. We were on a God-trusting adventure. We don't quite have our work visas, so we went to Japan for a few hours so we could re-enter Korea with a new thirty-day tourist visa. We also got stamps in our passports that said we overstayed our first thirty-day visa. Immigration may or may not push us to pay the penalties. The school is looking into it, but we know God is in control of the situation. (the penalty is $100 per day per person, we overstayed about 57 days, You do the math!!!). I can't wait to see what God does. He is so amazingly and abundantly awesome! I think the worst case scenario is the school paying the fines, but we don't want that to happen either. Pray with us and rejoice with us when God shows His power in this situation.

Today (Thursday) was Teacher's Day. We received hand made cards from our students that reminded us very much of a package of letters that we got in the mail yesterday from all of our young friends at Covenant Harvest School. Thank you so much! It was great to read all of your letters over lunch in Blooming Beans. We love you all so much! Your thoughts and prayers mean so much to us.

I'd better get some rest. Tomorrow I'm going with the sixth graders to see Prince Caspian. I have such a rough job! ; ) ~Micah

The Life of a World Traveler x2

First of all, it was amazingly great and wonderfully fantastic to see and speak with everyone on your Sunday morning. We were able to watch and listen to the rest of the service. I fell asleep on camera toward the end of the message. It was great to hear Scott Parish, it was just 3:00 a.m. here. We had Monday off, so we slept in comfortably.
Now, it's already Friday evening. Our week has gone by in a flash. Last night, Sarah and I went with Kim Soo-hyun and Sejin(say-jeen) to a concert in Seoul. Soo-hyun is a Special Needs teacher in Sarah's building and Sejin is one of their students. His mom was playing the piano in the concert. Things did not quite go according to plan. Soo volunteered to drive her car.(we don't have one). We left the school at about 5:17 p.m. Seoul is usually about an hour or an hour and a half away. Last night, for some reason, it took us over 3 and a half hours! We got to the auditorium about 2 minutes before the last song was over. Sejin had slept almost the whole way so he was full of energy. I tried to keep up with him with my camera. I'll post images of our adventures. His parents came out of the concert hall a few minutes after we got there and we all went to dinner. They paid for our meals even though we missed the concert. We had Japanese noodles at Saporo at 9:30. After dinner we went to Cold Stone Creamery! Sejin couldn't wait for Cold Stone, so he was sitting with his dad in Baskin Robbins with a huge ice cream cone. On the way to CSC he saw a case of ice cream outside a small store. He gave up on the Baskin Robbins cone for a convenient store cone. It was pretty amusing.
Soo was very upset that we had taken so long to get to Seoul and that we had missed the concert. We assured her that it wasn't her fault. Then Sarah prayed for her as we drove home. It was almost midnight when we got home. I was a little tired today, but I don't regret going. It was so much fun to spend time with Soo and Sejin and his parents.

This weekend is going to be very full for us. Saturday will begin with calls to our families. Then at two in the afternoon we go to clean the church building.(sound familiar). : ) Saturday evening we have an outdoor gathering on the grounds then we load up and head to some sort of retreat area where we will have dinner, a meeting, and spend the night. We come back Sunday afternoon. Monday is yet another day off. (buddha's birthday). Instead of sleeping in and taking it easy, we're going to Japan! We will have to get a taxi at about 5:00 a.m. to take us to a place that has a shuttle to the airport. Our flight leaves at 8 or 8:30. We will land in Japan at 9:15, spend the day doing very little and head back at around 3:00 the same afternoon. This trip is to obtain a new ninety-day tourist visa. We are still patiently awaiting all the paperwork for our actual work visas. It makes me wonder if Master Card was the way to go. (hi, Kelsea).
Thank you to everyone who helped to push us well over 9 comments on the last post. Maybe this one will hit twenty! We love you, goodnight!

Dear Heart: For Pop Dan

A miracle of God's creation
the human heart is vast,
its capacity unrivaled.
It pounds and pangs and pines
beats and breaks
And the heart loves
Oh, how it loves!
Without bound, without self,
Without end
When flesh and blood and bone are gone,
The heart lives on.
The heart that houses Christ lives on.
Live on, Dear heart.