Half-cooked bars, 40+ people, and a house church?! aka An Incoherent Posting about Exciting Things God is Doing

So, today was the church's typical "Coffee House" day...the third Sunday of the month. Coffee House is the monthly English event that is held and run by us teachers and usually involves attempts at connecting students and church members, etc. However, this month we decided to do things a little differently, and we decided to hold an open house in our new home in Niigata city.

Notes/advice for those wanting to hold open houses:
1. Don't do all of your baking at night.
2. When you do all of your baking, check the oven to make sure both the top and bottom is going to be heated.

So, I really can cook...promise!...but Friday night as I was making bars and breads and the like, I was struck by the fact that almost all of my food was coming out a little raw on the bottom, while the top seemed quite done. I'm not going to go into detail about the different attempts that were made to make the food edible...let's just say it involved different ingredients, a microwave, etc. It distinctly reminded me of living in Kawasaki, when we didn't have an oven and tried to make a batch of cookies with our microwave and fish frier. :) (note: the fish frier works really well...honestly!)

Anyway, so by last night, the night before the open house, when we realized that the church members were mostly going to be busy preparing for an event for the next week (and they were going to be using the room we wanted to use for icebreaker activities), I was just a little bit nervous. It was definitely one of those nights where I was thinking, "Why do I work for the church? Why couldn't I get some nice 9-5 job where I could just minister to people without leading events and having to act like such an extrovert..."

Anyway, so that was me complaining. Which my coworkers took very graciously, I might add (as always...thank God!).

Thank God that He doesn't just let me be complainitory for too long also, because He definitely had crazy plans for today. Somewhere around 40+ people crammed into our house, and the originally-planned 2 hours of icebreaker activities, food, and talking turned into 6-7 hours of talking, laughing, games, music, the beginning of a liturgical dance group, an impromptu evening worship service and prayer time, the singing of a newly-written song, connections of multiple people to multiple other people who can possibly bring them into the church, and, to top it all off, the discovery that two of our junior high girls who have randomly been coming to Coffee House and hearing the devotions, etc., have been praying to find out whether God was real or not, God somehow answered their prayer, and then they prayed that they could be forgiven and believe in Jesus!!!!!

- insert dancing for joy here -

I'll back up and take this a little more slowly. So the normal Coffee House time is from 1-3pm, which is not a big deal, and we sometimes do evening worship afterwards made up of Taize songs and the like. About 2:45pm at the house, some students were getting ready to leave, and they requested that before they leave Atsushi and I play through some of our random music repetoire. So we sang through half a dozen worship songs, etc. Then I had to leave to connect some student's mother with her daughter, who had left just a few minutes prior to her mother coming...anyway, I was a little worried, so I walked back to the church with my student's mother, which provided good talking time. By the time I made it back to the house, more people had cleared out a little bit, and I was greated with the news that the two junoir high girls believe in Jesus! After saying "Yay!" for a few minutes, I was grabbed by another student who is a song writer who'd given me a song that he wanted me to write lyrics for...which started another 45 minutes of singing random Japanese pop songs, worship songs, etc. After which a church member brought over her newborn baby to pass around to meet people, and then Sensei called saying that a new girl who's bilingual and a dancer was going to come over to the house. So then we all started talking about liturgical dance and I pulled out my computer to show Atsushi examples, and since he's studied dancing, he started dancing along with my youtube songs. :) Bets joined him, and by the time the dancer actually arrived, we had a whole house full of people wanting to meet her and wondering what this strange new form of worship really is about...

Sidenote: the reason that I keep coming back to liturgical dance is because I've seen the role that dance plays in this culture, and it's much more important than it is in America...anyway, so I was struck with the possibilities that liturgical dance would have in terms of connecting with the younger generation here...so, as of last week, was praying for something like that to happen (kind of praying in this "and if you really want to do something crazy God, there's always this option)...low and behold, a dancer SHOWS UP AT OUR DOOR a few days later! How's that for crazy!!!!!

Anyway, so with the dancer at the house (did I mention that she's a Christian?), we decided to do an evening music worship service as a send-off for Atsushi moving to Oosaka for awhile. And then we prayed for him...

As people slowly trickled out, I talked with a church member who literally was glowing as she described her chat with one of my students. The two ladies seemed to hit it off well, and now the church member is already thinking of how she could involve them in different worship times or activities...

Anyway...I'll stop and catch a breath here for a moment! :) Sorry for the incoherentness of this! I wish so much that I could capture for you some of what we saw here today...I can put down some of the words, the schedule, the cool things that took place. But I can't even really begin to explain, for example, the look on one of my student's face...he was curled up in the corner, feeling very odd crammed into a house with all these other people that he didn't know necessarily...and he never ever sings with us as we worship...but he just sits and listens, and his face relaxes, but it relaxes out of it's constant, forced smile into lines of pain...
So, basically, we shoved him into a house with a lot of strange people, and then we made him sit through worship and prayer times with a God that he doesn't believe in...and when he finally did leave around 6pm, you could practically see the hunger on his face when he said something to the extent of, "I'm looking forward to coming again."

"The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few."

Today was like being surrounded by the harvest. I'm seeing it in all different stages, and at all different times. Cindy, Lindsey, and Betsy and I sat around for awhile after everyone finally had left and had to talk and worship and pray and process...and the only thing we can come down to, again, is simply, "God is doing something big."

So we have people coming in and out; friends, relatives, neighbors, students...people who are non-Christian mingling with those who are...not really set schedules or anything, but just times of singing praise and reading the Bible and praying together...people becoming Christian right under our noses...people who are hungry being drawn in...this afternoon was, yes, very house-churchish and crazy and totally--TOTALLY--God's Spirit working.

Sigh. Is it any wonder that this post is incoherent? :)