What a day! Today... err yesterday, anyway, was the day of the English Christmas play. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, a background is in order. I'm teaching a bunch of English classes. One day during the summer, as I was driving my pastor around, he said, "I'd like to do an English Christmas play at the church this year." So, we decided to have the little preschooler English class and the elementary school students' class join forces to form Voltron... I mean to act in the English play. Naturally, a script had to be written, and since the script had to be written in English, I wrote it. Pretty basic script. Pulled from the Christmas story passages from the Bible, and basically simplified the English. Why? So that the parents and other guests would understand what's going on by listening. Oh, and to make memorizing the lines easier for the Japanese children.
Example: In Luke 2:10-11 it's written "Then the angel said to [the shepherds], 'Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.'"
The script has the angels say, "Don't be scared. I have good news. Today a Savior is born in Bethlehem."
Anyway, so I felt today was a great success! Not only did the children (all 21 of em) perform well, but for the first time, I saw the tiny church sanctuary filled to the brim. I don't have an exact count, but I'd probably say that there were somewhere around 60 people there. Maybe more. Keep in mind that for worship services we usually have 18 people come. And of those 60, I'd say about 90% were not only non-Christians, but non-Christians who had never been to our church before.
There's more. Before the play started, we showed the Veggietales Christmas video, and then that was followed up by a quick evangelistic message by Igarashi-sensei. Regina Hsieh, another missionary from LIFE who's working in Okinawa came by to the Date church today on her vacation. She talks to some high school students who stopped by to see the play, and after the whole program was over, the high school students said that for the first time, they understood the real meaning of Christmas. And then, one of the high schoolers said that she realized after the message, that she has sin in her life. Later, the high schoolers will be coming to the Christmas candle service, and hopefully then, they'll understand the freeing power of Jesus Christ from that sin!
PLUS... today was relatively warm! Woo-hoo! A full 4 degrees celcius I think. That's a little below 40. But when you compare that to the fact that it dipped down to the teens in fahrenheit just a couple of days ago, it felt like it was in the 70s... well, maybe I'm getting a little carried away.