Be the Reed- Pt. 7 - Audio
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I'm Tom Lee pastor here because it's good to have you all. We just want to give you a quick update so we have a missionary in Ukraine, his name's Bogdan, and he's going to be here next week, he's in Poland right now, so they got out of Ukraine and they're in Poland and they're in transit now from Poland to the United States, and so we'll see his family next week, which is really cool, and he's not just anywhere in Ukraine by the way, he's on the front lines, he's near, well not on the front lines, but really, really close to the front, and so he ministers to a lot of war orphans, and so we were like, what can we do to help, and he asked us for crocs of all things, crocs of the silliest of all shoes, that's what they like in Eastern Europe, and so I asked y'all the help, and he asked for 100 pairs of crocs, I'm happy to report that as of the last time Tammy emailed me, we have gotten 146 pairs of crocs for the orphans in Ukraine, thank you guys so much for your generosity and your care, you got just one more week, so if you want to just top it over 150, we only need four more pairs for that, but whatever we get, it's already more than enough and more than they need right now, so thank you guys so much for participating in that. One of the best days that I can remember was a day that turned out much differently than I expected it to, so this was gash, it's like 20 years ago now, and I'd been in Japan for about four or five months at this point, and I was teaching English, and this was a Thursday, and so on Thursdays I would teach elementary students, like K through six students, and so I'd put together this really fun sort of lesson plan where the kids would be playing games and stuff like that, and also hopefully learning some English, and I went to work, and in Japan the teachers don't have their own classrooms, teachers all sit in one like a teacher room, and then you disperse to your classrooms, and so I was used to walking in and seeing all the other teachers, and I walked in this day and there was no one in the teacher's room. I was alone, I was like, oh, okay, well this is odd, this is not what I expected, and I felt great about that because that means I didn't have to work, I could just sit there and read books on my computer or whatever, so I was happily typing away and reading books, just wondering what was going on, when one of the other teachers who spoke English came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and was like, you know, you can watch all, you can watch all, like, which I didn't understand at the time, which means let's go, and I'm sorry, okay, so I followed this teacher out, and I exited the school building, and there all the children were lined up in marching order, which is something they do in Japan's very odd, they're on their uniforms, and they were all lined up, ready to go, and so I was sort of motioned in the middle of the group, and we began marching, and we marched for several miles, these are small children, and we were in the mountains, so we were up and down, it was a pretty intense hike, and the whole time, what was happening? I speak zero language, well, very little of the language, and it's fall, it's, the leaves are beautiful, it's like it's gorgeous day, they have seasons there, which is really interesting, you should try to live in a place with seasons, just for a little while, it's awful in some ways, but it's really nice in others, anyway, so it's red, and orange, and yellow, and beautiful, and I'm just in my own thoughts, because I'm just along for the ride, and after a while, we get to a Japanese Shinto shrine, and there are all the little statues, the kami, the gods, the ancestors, and the students go, and they don't really believe in any of the stuff, they do it for tradition's sake, and they go and they make their prayers to their ancestors, and I'm just like, what, this is wild, I've never seen anything like this, we'd gotten out of the village, and so we're in the rural area, and there's random shrine, we had to hike into the forest, and there it was, and so we go, and there they have a snack, everyone gets a snack except for me, because I didn't pack a snack, because I didn't know we were going anywhere, so I watched the students eat, and then we go, our hike, our forest march
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org