Hello Everyone! We arrived safely into Japan a little over a week ago after one extremely long day of traveling. It is beautiful here in Norikura, snow is everywhere and it is freezing cold. A quick few random facts to get started, the Japanese in this region don't believe in insulation! Did I mention it is freezing cold here? Also, everything is plugged in! The toilet seats are all heated and the toilets themselves have a variety of options to choose from: get squirted with water here, get squirted with water there, etc. Monkeys have been known to play around the streets here so we have seen our fair share of wild monkeys messing around. There are vending machines everywhere here and they serve hot and cold drinks in a can! You can get your daily morning latte right out of the vending machine each day! It's crazy. God is so good. Now onto the important stuff.
We have had an amazing first week here getting to know the other Northstar staff and building up the snowboard park here. Like our YWAM team, the other Northstar staff come from all over the world and are really sweet people. Our primary job for the duration of our time here at Northstar is to make their snowboard park bigger and better than ever before. When we arrived here, the park consisted of three features (two rails and a rollover). In the last week that we have been here, we've added six new features to their park! It looks much more professional now and it is only going to get better. We received an awesome encouragement the other day from a guest pastor who came to speak to all of us. While he was driving, he listened to someone on the radio mention Northstar and share how awesome their snowboard park is becoming! This was a huge encouragement to us working the park and trying to make it look great. For most of us, rather, all of us, this is our first time truly building, creating, and grooming a snowboard park. So hearing this came as huge inspiration to all of us.
The people we have met in the park while snowboarding have been a blessing to all of us. We meet new Japanese snowboarders each day and it is really cool to watch these relationships grow each day. It has given us a deeper purpose hear than simply building a park. Our hearts have opened up for other snowboarders on the hill and this includes the guys working the chair lifts. We have developed friendships with most of the lifties and have learned different phrases in Japanese to say back and forth with them. Due to the fact that we won't have any contact with the actual camps that come through Northstar, it is another huge blessing that these relationships are developing. We desire to continually show the love of Christ to these people and hopefully we'll have the opportunity to share that love with them.
Now for a few prayer requests. A few of our teammates have been really sick lately and are now finally starting to feel better. If you could pray for their perfect healing that would be awesome. We all would really appreciate it if you could pray for strength and continual motivation for us each day, given that shoveling snow everyday could get old fairly quickly. Also, if you could pray for the relationships that are being built to continue to grow and develop. Thank you so much!
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