Misawa Family

Our small group in Misawa became our family for the remainder of our stay in Japan. Since it costs quite a bit of money to fly back to the states from Japan, not too many people can afford to do that on military pay. So, unlike the states, people did not travel to be with their family for holidays too much. We spent Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays and every other holiday in between with our Misawa family. It kind of reminds me of the early church in Acts where they would meet together to pray, eat, worship, and help each other out. We met every Friday night for Bible study and saw each other at worship on Sundays, but that wasn't the extent of our time together - we had movie nights and game nights, went sledding and out to eat together, laughed and cried together.



Because we were now saved, Mark and I began to change the way we lived our lives. It would have been really hard to make all these changes still living in the states with our old friends, but God knew what we needed and I believe that is why HE put allowed us to find HIM in Japan. In Misawa, we had the support of our Christian brothers and sisters and we were away from a lot of the "wordly" influences that you find in the states. Some of our changes included:

*Instead of going out to a club or a bar on Friday nights we were playing games or going to Bible studies. We enjoyed the Bible studies and were (still are) thirsty for more "truth".

*We changed the way we celebrated holidays in our house because we wanted to focus on Christ during Christmas and Easter and not on the secular "Santa" and "Easter bunny". Also, we did research on many of the holidays and decided that we didn't want any part of halloween because of its history and because we couldn't find a part of it that would be glorifying to God.

*Mark and I began to change the music we listened to and the movies we watched because we wanted to have "good" things going into our heads and hearts so that "good" things were more likely to come out. Plus, we couldn't really find anything in our current collection that would be pleasing to the LORD. So, we threw away hundreds of dollars of CDs and DVDs.


All of these things may sound a little drastic, but a big change is what Mark and I needed. We wanted to serve the LORD and we wanted to share the gospel with others and if we were going to do that, we didn't want anything in our house or on our tongues to be hypocritical about what we were sharing.

If you want more information on holidays, specifically Halloween
www.ucg.org/teenstudy/halloween

Here is some information on music and movies
www.exministries.com
www.hollywoodandgod.com