Calligraphy for Christ

     We recently helped a Japanese Christian artist friend with a new English language website featuring his Japanese Bible calligraphy and art. Please check out samples of his wonderful work at calligraphyforchrist.net. (His testimony is also included.) 

    These artistic Bible texts in Japanese make great conversation starting tools to help you witness for the Lord in your home or place of business. Your friends will naturally ask you what the beautiful Japanese texts mean, giving you a great opportunity to explain the Bible message.  Each piece of art and calligraphy comes with an explanation in English to assist you in doing so. 

     In addition, our artist friend is not in the best of health and so we hope the sale of his work may help he and his family financially in a small way, as well. In this, please realize, however, that much of the price of each calligraphy work goes to pay for high international shipping charges.

Toa Wedding Bells

      On June 27th our TOA Ministries coworker, Sotomi ("Tomi") will be marring Lance Little, a math teacher at the Greater Houlton Christian Academy in Houlton, Maine. We greatly appreciate Lance and Tomi as they both are very active in the work of the Lord, sharing a great interest in, and burden for, Bible studies and Bible study texts. Lance is the adult class Sunday School teacher in his home church.  

     Tomi and Lance will continue to work on TOA Bible study materials, especially together on a new set on youth questions in the Bible, titled "In Quest of Identity." Though we will miss Tomi here in Japan we will continue to work with her on TOA projects.  Computer technology makes long distance collaboration easy today, compared to in the past. Tomi and her children will be moving to the U.S. after their visa is approved, hopefully before the new school year begins in late August.  (Please pray for the visa!) 

     Also, in connection with the June wedding here in Japan, there will be a "summer missions team" of six students from the Greater Houlton Christian Academy and one college student from California with us between June 23rd and July 15th. Various outreach programs are in the plans, as well as work on, and experimental use of, the new youth questions text. 

      

Yumi in Med. School

     By God's grace and to our happy surprise, in March Yumi was accepted into the six year M.D. program at the Toyama University medical school.  The entrance competition was very competitive, with few students being admitted (as Yumi, was) without two or three years of intensive prep. school study. Her year of study in North America undoubtedly helped her a lot in a similar way, as her ability in English improved a lot during that time. (She was a high school senior for two years, one year in Maine and the second year here in Japan.) Her university classes started a couple weeks ago on April 8th. 

     Thankfully for her dad and mom Toyama Univeristy is a national university with much lower tuition costs per year than medical schools in the U.S., such being on a par with normal state universities like the University of Maine. Still six years is a long time, and there will be two years of internship after that. This first year will probably be the easiest. An inheritance from Jon's mom makes this all possible financially, as we certainly could not pay for her tuition (as well as Amy's at Chiba Univeristy) from our missionary salary. 

     In other happy news, Yumi was baptized on Easter Sunday, having saved that great event until after the year long entrance exam struggle had ended. Her desire is to serve the Lord as a doctor wherever He may lead her in the future. As we have seen over the years Christian medical doctors can have a tremendous testimony and impact in highly vertical Japanese society. Moreover, Yumi also signed up for two optional foreign language courses this first year as she realizes the Lord may also eventually want her to serve somewhere else around the world.