Akira & Matsumoto

TEAM gave us a little extra money to finally be able to celebrate our first anniversary that was actually twelve days ago, so we are going to Disney Sea tomorrow! We're trying squeeze in as much as we can before we come home in about a week. Today we went to an aquarium. The place was pretty cool... it was fishy - what you'd expect from an aquarium. The excitement of the day actually happened as we were trying to buy our Disney Sea tickets. Earlier that day we had Midori (the housekeeper at TEAM Center) write down the information in Kanji (Japanese lettering). So later in the evening, we went to a convenient store where we thought we could buy the tickets in advance... the guy went over to the machine and pushed some buttons, but couldn't figure out how to get our tickets... of course he couldn't explain it in English, and we couldn't understand or ask questions in Japanese. There happened to be a Japanese guy standing next to us who could speak a little English. He offered to help and explained that we should just get the tickets at the gate in the park. Fine - whatever... I'm just glad that awkward feeling of incommunicability was over! :) We left the convenient store and talked for a while outside with Akira - the man who helped us with our tickets. We told him how long we were in Japan, where we were staying, and what we were doing. He told us about his business - the owner of a small record company! They do mainly heavy metal music, which wasn't hard to believe considering he had an "iron maiden" t-shirt with a skull on it and long voluptuous hair! :) So he tried to explain that his business was located just down the road, but we weren't quite familiar enough with the territory, so I said, "Show us!" He laughed... but to our surprise, he led us down the street and up to the third floor of a building where there was a tiny room with CD's, flyers, and other promotional odds & ends stacked from floor to ceiling. I barely fit under the doorway, and could hardly walk in such a small crowded place... I guess that's the way most things are in Japan, though. We got to meet Akira's partner "Matt." He spoke even better English while he explained that his real name is "Matsumoto," but goes simply by "Matt." We sat and talked with them for about 45 minutes. They want to get together and eat lunch or something before we go back to the US. These guys are not Christians. We kind of wish that we had more time to build relationships with these guys instead of having to go home, but... God's timing is just right. In our last blog, we asked for prayer about opportunities for evangelism. Thank you for praying, and thank the Lord for answering! We just wanted to share that with you all. This is a somewhat abbreviated version of the story, but we couldn't wait to share it. :)