Konichiwa Lighthouse! After 18 hours of travel we finally made it to Nagoya! Here’s a short recap of the last almost 24 hours. Our team met at LAX at 11 am to check in our luggages and supplies for VBS. We were joined by Pastor Gavin and Pastor Kelly who came to pray and send us off. As we were boarding our flight, Cindy whispered to me “Oh my gosh, I think that’s Michael Phelps” and sure enough he was on our flight to Tokyo, we all took a brief glance at him as we passed him in first class. 11 hours later, we landed at Haneda with very little sleep and felt a little stressed as our connecting flight to Nagoya was only 1:15 mins away. Cindy taught me a new phrase on the plane today called “giri giri” which means “cutting it close”. In that 1 hour, we had to go through customs, then wait for what felt like an eternity to get our baggage from baggage claim, go through immigration, then attempt to re-check in our bags but because we missed the 1 hr deadline we then had to lug all 13 luggages on the bus and go to a different terminal to check it in ourselves. At this point we had maybe 15 minutes left before boarding started and the bus ride was an 8-minute drive. This entire time we were just staring at our watches panicking as the time boarding time for our next flight was quickly arriving. We made it to the domestic terminal and ran to check our bags in, ran through security, and ran to our gate right when boarding was about to start, it wouldn’t be a trip without running through the airport 😉 and me whispering giri giri over and over again in my head. We enjoyed the 38-minute flight from Tokyo to Nagoya, it felt like a hop and a skip and we were there. Praise God we made it here safely and all of our luggages made it! Afterward, Tim and Hide met us at the airport and drove us to our hotel. We are so thankful to be here 🙂
Here are some ways you can be praying for us until the next update:
-our registration numbers for the VBS have gone up in the last couple of days, please pray for all these newer families that have been added on
-please pray that we would help support good connections between Logos and the VBS participants and their families so that they are able to foster good relationships
-everything is new this year because it is the first time that we are working with logos. please pray that all the logistics will go smoothly and that VBS would run smoothly.
Arigatogozaimashita!
This is the first entry of a series that will be updated during our trip on the church’s website. Please check out the church’s blog for more updates during the week. Thank you!
