Fantastic News!!

So today I woke up and for some reason I felt like it was going to be a great day. I really had no reason to expect a fantastic day based on the trip so far, but still I did.

To set the stage:
-Last night I had very interrupted sleep and it was very hard to wake up and get going today. Apparently it was a similar story for everyone else on the team.

-Five days ago Beau hurt his ankle and was told he would have to use crutches for 3 weeks. And this was made even more difficult to accept because of the fact that Beau had been on crutches for 6 weeks already during the school year and had only been off of them for a couple months. No one wanted him to have to deal with another 3 weeks of crutching.

-Our entire team saw no fruit from their labors over the past week and a half and has been increasingly anxious to see God moving in Tokyo.

So basically, the day had a lot of potential to be an average or even sub par day, but we also desperately needed a good day, and God recognized that.

To start the day off, after I finally woke up and got ready for the day, I was simply feeling a lot of joy for no real reason, and I think that would have been enough to make today a good day, but God likes to give in abundance.

So fast-forward a couple hours to shortly before my team of 5 arrived at Todai (Tokyo University). Greg got a call saying that Beau was able to get a walking boot and didn't have to use crutches anymore! That news turned my joy from the beginning of the day into pure euphoria, and pretty much made the rest of my day.

The rest of the time we spent on campus we could feel God's presence and conversations where we had the chance to share the gospel just fell into our laps. No one on our campus accepted Jesus into their lives, but we could tell through the conversations we were having that we were affecting people's lives. We are pretty sure several of the students we talked to today will come back and ask us to help them receive Jesus someday soon based on how positively they responded.

Finally, at the end of the day while my team of 5 was praying and getting ready to leave campus, Beau got a call from Steve who informed us that two students had accepted Christ into their lives at Sophia!! When my team found out we all looked at each other and practically jumped for joy out of our excitement. It was so refreshing to hear that there was finally fruit from our work in Japan, and it gave us all a renewed hope in how God is planning to work through us in Tokyo. Apparently the two young women were very excited to accept Jesus and wanted to get plugged in to as many events as Student Impact (our organization) had to offer. So praise God for that.

What happened today reminded me of something Greg said to all of us before we came over to Tokyo: "During summer project you will experience the highest highs and the lowest lows of your life." I have to say, even though it only been two weeks so far, he could not have been more correct in that statement. And I'm just grateful that God saw fit to grant our team with such a blessing of a day.