Febuary 26th 2006

I just wanted to start out this blog by telling you of God’s faithfulness in my life over the past few years. For the past three and half years I have been attending the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, on a full Bilingual Education scholarship. This has been a huge blessing to me, and I probably could not have gone to college without it. The first year and a half I commuted back and forth between Arlington and Denton. The last year and half I have been living full time in Denton. I only made this transition after finding a wonderful church called Hope Fellowship Church. Hope is a unique church that has the vision of sending mission teams to plant churches around the globe. This church is a GCM church (for more information about Great Commission Ministry please visit http://www.gcmweb.org/).
At Hope I have been highly involved with an international home-group where about 40% more or less of our attendees are from Japan. This summer the majority of the leadership team which I had been working with went overseas on a variety of mission trips. I, however, was unable to attend. I was disappointed because my heart is always to go overseas. But God really used this time by allowing me to meet and help organize follow up on about 20 Japanese students. I did not realize that God had changed my heart until we had a summer outreach called the Blitz. During this time we slept in a gym and shared the gospel daily on campus. God gave us the opportunity to share with the Japanese students we had met earlier. The last night of this one week outreach we had a barbeque and invited everyone to come together to play games. I kept meeting and talking to Hispanic people because I was one of the few persons who could speak Spanish at the church, but I realized that night that my heart was not in it. I was most happy when I was talking to the girls from Japan.
My top three reasons for going on this trip are: 1. to seek God’s guidance for my future mission work., 2. to follow the dreams that God has placed in my heart, and 3. to do whatever I can so that the Japanese can be reached for the gospel.