day 4!!! let it rain let it rain let it rain

DAY 4 --- :)

Today was Sunday which in most countries means CHURCH!!! Well we had our own church service today in the park! It was lots of fun :) We brought out the guitars and had a great worship service in this huge park! It is amazing to see how Christ will draw Japanese to him! We were able to share with many people what we were doing, why we were there and so on! It was a blessing for sure :D So while we were at our church we got to have a bible study and it went really amazing :) We looked through Acts 1 and 2 and talked about what it is really implying about our lives and our calling to Japan. Summary = greatness :) So we had a Japanese christian share his testimony with us today during our church service and it was amazing :) Brought tears to my eyes!

After our church service today we had park ministry time till about 3:30 when we would head to our train stations. WELL! The Lord had some different plans and he let the rain come down!!! It poured and when I say poured I mean rained like I have never seen rain before! There were so many families at the park under trees and their food and their tents and everything was gonna get wet. Apparently this pouring of the rain is so normal though because they bring out more stakes for their tents, get their whole family inside, let the fire just get put out by rain, pull out tarps for the food and act like it is not raining! It was amazing to me... so anyway our team really had a hard time with park evangelism, so I just decided to prayer walk until I found an undercover place to sit down and pray for people :) I found a great place to sit and pray so I sat their and was able to pray for the families, the many families!!!  God blessed us with a few families who joined us under the covered area and we were able to share just a little bit of God's love with them. :D I met a new friend aka dog :) and he was cute and he even had a raincoat on! His owner was able to ask why we were there at the park and one of my teammates and I were able to explain to him we had our own church service this morning at the park and pointed in the direction of where we would be next Sunday if he wanted to join us! :) Well we were able to sit and stay dry well some of us! :) 

Today was a scheduled bible study at our train stations if we had contacts! Well my team and I didnt have contacts that could come so we went ahead and went to our stations to pick our locations. We were able to find our 5 minute english location, our spot for our bible studies and our karaoke church!!! I am so excited our first team comes TUESDAY and we are so ready! They are a group from California and they are a choir.... AWESOME!!! So I found out my day off and it is TUESDAY :) So I am pretty excited ready to rest and enjoy my day in Tokyo.. I haven't decided what I will do, but I will figure it out! :D Anyway so I have some prayer requests to share!!!

PRAYER TIME!!!

-We had a girl come to Christ from Korea!!! She lives here and goes to school and her parents were Christians and HOW AMAZING is she that now she is!!! Please pray for her heart that she will follow through with baptism and sharing with her family and friends :)

-Our journeywoman has a contact that she has been working with the past year and a half and this girl has just continued to turn away the Gospel but really allowed our journeygirl to pour into her! This contact told our girl last night that she felt like she could now see clearly. Everything she was learning about was now clicking in her head and she was seeing the Gospel clearly! How amazing is that!!! Please pray for her heart and that she will continue to seek the understanding of all these lessons! Praise God!

-One of our girls was wearing a japanese shirt we wear given that says jesus christ loves you! in japanese! anyway a man read it and came up to her and with astonishment was like me? and was so excited :) :) how amazing is it that Christ would use a shirt to get one of his children to question the love he has for them! Please pray for this man to understand the tracts we gave him and put it into the mail for us to come invest in him the word of God!!

Thank you guys so much! I love yall and thank you for reading :)

Haley Michelle

MAY 30... day 3 :)

So today was a pretty sweet day and Crist really showed my team today how amazing he can truly be to us if we constantly seek HIS name!!!

We started off our 3rd day of oreintation and learning about our different evangelism methods and all sorts of other things! We had our worship service which was different than the past few days, but still God speaks still :) I love it! So today was a pretty nice day an dit didn't rain! I went running this morning at about 7 and it was just great weather :) I wish I could be that motivated at home to wake up and run in the morning in such beautiful weather :) Anyway after I ran I got dressed and started my day and it really kicked off slow, but ended up amazing :)

We found out our summer teams today who we will be with all summer and though I do not know either of my partners very well, I will get to know them really well all summer! lol My summer partners are Rachel and Brian and it will be a great summer :) We will be at the university I went to yesterday and the same train station that I was located at yesterday... So I am pretty excited about being a tour guide in a few days for my new partners because they have never been :) lol We also got our positions assigned today and I am the WIGTAKE which stands for whatever it takes to get the job done :) So my mail job is to organize the distribution of the Gospel of John getting into every mailbox in my train station! Crazy!!! I am ready :)

Today was scheduled for park evangelism but our M decided to give everyone a day off allowing them to visit their university if they were not aware of where it was and or anything on the campus! :) Our only scheduled event was at 6 pm today and it was a karaoke party with any of our contacts that we have made in the past 3 days. Well we hall had several contacts, but no one on my team had anyone showed up for our karaoke party which was upsetting, but through HIM we found why we were remaining in the area of our station and continueing to wait for people. Christ set up an mazing divine appointment with two of the guys on my team with an older Japanese man and it was amazing! This older man has a mentor who is a Japanese christian and is telling this man we were talking to about Christ!!! So how amazing is it that Christ already has set up someone in his live that is investing in telling him about Christ and then we are apart of his path today and get to share more! The friend we made would not share his mentors name but please pray for these two men! The Christian and the new contact we have made!

After out divine appointment with this prescious man we went to eat and enjoyed some Japanese subway sandwiches :) Tasted pretty sweet! We had the day mostly to ourselves... our lunch we went as an iWitness team to eat at Pepper Lunch! It was a little expensive but great :) I had a type of chicken and rice... how common :D You cook the meat yourself so that is pretty sweet and I had fun with it!... After lunch a few of us went to get some strawberry filled danishes and YUM! So Tokyo has a 3 story wal-mart which of course is not really a wal-mart but they sure do stuff everything into this store in three storys! It was crazy but hey I got to buy me some groceries and was happy about that :)

So today was amazing and Christ truly blessed all of our days! I will update you guys on some other teams news if I hear about it tomorrow morning and remember to post it!

PRAYER REQUESTS:
-My new team..brian and Rachel and I that we can connect and really rely on each other this summer!
-the older japanese man we had a divine appointment with! please pray for his heart and his willingness to allow his friend to invest in his life!
-Please pray for the older man's friend who is already a Christian!!! I ask that you pray for his guidance from God! Praise the Lord that he has blessed our new contacts life!!!
-Please continue to pray for our whole team as a whole and that we will all continue to prepare our hearts daily for God's amazing work!!!

Thank you guys sooo much!!!

Serving HIM
Haley Hill

day 2 :D

so i learned some japanese today and i enjoyed looking at beautiful tokyo under an umbrella all day! :)

today was a rainy day so it is really hard to do 5 minute english so instead my team and i decided to talk to people inside our huge train station and learn some japanese... we did a lot of prayer walking today, well at least I did! It is harder as a female because we only talk to girls... so I didn't have a lot of contacts today, but I was so blessed with the ones I was able to talk to! Inside the train station today I stopped to talk to a junior high aged girl about learning japanese... she started teaching me some words and I started learning a lot :) So then her friends came up and I got to share with them and why I wanted to learn some Japanese and why I was there in Tokyo! It went great and even though they had to leave after only 5 or 10 minutes. 

I ate me some wendy's tokyo style today :) I had what texans would call a bbq burger with corn, shredded cheese, and pineapple on it! It was amazing :) I love trying new food! :D We went to a new university today and find out tomorrow our teams for the whole summer... but today I was with a team of two guys, two different ones than yesterday.. These two guys were at the university with me yesterday as well but they were not apart of my team! They are great though :) So on our walk today there is a BASS PRO SHOP in japan! Please this cracks me up :) Definitely made me think of some of my guy friends back at home!!!

I went for a walk this morning about 7:30 for breakfast at a bakery and bought a huge cinnamon roll for about 100 yen which is about $1! It was great and I think a few more interns will go in the morning... :) The interns are fun and we are growing closer and it is awesome! 

God really showed me today to depend on him and to go to him through prayer! He wants me to rely on him but I really have to choose to do that! As I was walking through the train stations around and around looking for people to help me learn japanese I decided you know I can use this time in prayer! Well not too long after that God showed me the junior high girl to talk to which eventually led to a group of junior high girls! How amazing he is! 

well i need to go workout, so have a great day and thanks for everything!!!

SERVING HIM

Haley Michelle

FIRST FULL DAY!!!

awww today was AMAZING :) I just want yall to all know I love Tokyo Japan and though I will come back, I will miss this place :) Ya it is that amazing after one day!!!

okay so my base camp was awesome! My team of ten of us really connected!!! We enjoyed igosia, for those of yall that not know what igosia is ill let you know just a tad bit! iWitness the group that has sent us here at base camp IS igosia... they put us through samples of things that can happen at customs, immigration and different random cultural things that can happen... I will just finish talking about it by saying it is tons of fun! 

we got up at 4:30 a.m. to take off for the airport and flew off about ten in the morning :) the flight was a looooong 14 hours but we were all so excited to get here! i am still so excited!!! we took a train and a bus for an hour then took a 45 minute hike up to our apartment :) I will have some amazing legs after this summer! Praise the Lord for no jet lag!

Today was our first full day and it was amazing! we had our orientation together with the other interns from the imb and our leaders. so today we enjoyed lunch and i must tell you i ate octopus!!! AMAZING! lol so today a small group that i was in took about a 30 minute hike and a 20 minute train ride to a university! i was with two partners inside the latte place hanging out and the Lord really allowed us to open up to people!!! i spoke with about a total of 1o girls and they were SO excited to talk to me :) The first girl I started with came to our dinner tonight! I will talk about this in a minute :) I sat down with a group of about 3 after my first contact and started talking to them, but there was small language barrier there and it was difficult to share with them. After this barrier several friends of these girls wanted to have small takl as much as they could, so I said OF COURSE! And I enjoyed some talk with them for a little bit before they returned to class. Then I was sitting there enjoy a latte (I do not like coffee well lattes for those of you who know this!) and a Japanese girl tapped on my shoulder and wanted to talk! The Lord just really set this divine appointment us because we ended up talking the rest of the time!!! 

So tonight we had dinner with new friends and I was so happy some of my girls showed up!!! The two others in my group had some of their guys show up too!!! It was amazing we had about 20 new friends show up for dinner :) I tried a new dish which was great :) even ate some seafood! Be proud! lol Our group was able to share the gospel with several of our new friends and one ACCEPTED!!! Praise the Lord :)

The Lord is doing some amazing work here! Please continue to pray for Tokyo!!!

SERVING HIM

Haley :)

EXCITEMENT~!

It is almost here!!!

Bags are packed, car is loaded, time for a wonderful drive to Dallas with my mom and an amazing learning weekend with my fellow interns! I am so excited for this opportunity and I thank everyone who has given financially, prayed for me and this experience, and those 17 prayer warriors who are AMAZING and have committed to praying for our team this summer!

This past week our leadership team went ahead of us to get everything ready for the interns this summer! Guess what! 4 people have already accepted Jesus Christ!!! How amazing is that :) This excites me so much. It is not about the numbers, it is about planting that seed in these Japanese lives and allowing the Father to do his amazing work in these people's lives! God has already started investing in lives that were shared to just last summer, proof - 4 people! Last summer the seed was planted in their lives :) How amazing :)

So I am a little worried about my bag weight :) You get one carry on and one bag! I am thankful I am not a real girly girl because there is NO WAY I would have been able to manage one bag! But, I am good and have my one bag, now just have to worry about the weight :) FYI: At wally world they have these amazing bags that you vacuum the air out of and make it easier to pack... THEY WORK!!!

In my last post I talked about Satan and how he is trying to win... Well he is fighting again so I want to share this with those of you reading. I lost both my grandmothers when I was in high school. My mom's step dad who I knew to be my grandfather passed away in October of last year... So I have only one grandparent remaining and that is my Dad's father. I have been shaken with the fact that if he is to pass away this summer, there is no way for me to get home for his funeral. This scares me and I know it is Satan, but please pray for this for me. I need a sense of peace about this and it is very hard. I am slowly releasing this and not allowing Satan to win this battle, but I need some prayer.

ON A HAPPY NOTE...IT IS SHOW TIME!!!
My bags are packed and I am off to Dallas.
Please say a special prayer at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday this is when our
team will fly off to Tokyo, Japan to do amazing work for our amazing God!
I will post again IN Japan!

JOHN 3:30

Satan can not bring me down!

Well Satan is at work that is for sure!

BUT awesome thing is, he will not get me down :)

I mentioned my debit/credit card fraud in my last post... Well I just found out last week that about $250 has been taken from my account from 2 companies! A magazine company and a video company! I spent hours calling these companies to stop charges and then gave up! I realized I don't need to get worked up over this... It is Satan trying to bring me down and he WILL NOT WIN!

So I have spoke with Bank of America and they think I have two fraud cases that can be taken care of. So it was great news to hear that :) I will call them again today to try to get this taken care of BEFORE Japan! I am thankful BOA has worked with me so far in dealing with this. I ask for your prayers that while I am gone in Japan these 2 companies will not continue to charge my account!!!

Satan - 0
He loses :)

May update :)

FYI: I am PACKED and ready to go :)

Well it is Wednesday and I leave for Dallas with my mom on Friday! I am super excited and can not wait for this weekend and the start of an amazing summer in Japan. :)

Some updates in May...
-Finals stressed me out of course, BUT I did not let them consume me like I have in the past! I did great and was happy with finishing my first semester at WBU!
-I came home with great grades for this semester and was extremely happy about that!
-I received a $400 scholarship for next semester! Anything helps pay for school when you go to a private university!!! :)
-I got to see me aunt from CALI!!! and spend time with her and family members while she was down :)
-I have a friend getting married on August 8th and I will return from Japan on the 6th and be able to make her wedding! How exciting :)
-I have 17 prayer warriors for this summer and am so BLESSED to have people committing to pray for my team and I throughout the whole summer! THANK YOU!!!
-My home church held a commissioning ceremony for me and I was truly blessed by the support within my church and from my family.
-My mom will get to take part in my commissioning with my team in Dallas before I head off!
-I have enjoyed being home and seeing high school friends and my family :)

Prayer requests
-Unexpected money is needed for Japan...
-My debit/credit card has fraud on it! I will share more about this later...