Cross Cultural Engagement Skills and Love

Ambiguity tolerance
Sense of humour
Observation and questioning
Flexibility
Willingness to learn
Seeing “different” without judging
Patience
Good listening skills
Love
Willingness to risk
Setting aside “self”
Abandon independence
Drop presuppositions
Come as learners, (be teachable)
Willingness to learn like a child
Humility
Loss of one’s place and value

A list of skills needed to engage a cross-culture, as made by the attendees (mostly with experience in trying to engage the Japanese culture) at the third part of Josiah Bancroft’s core training seminar entitled Spiritual Formation and Gospel Renewal as given at this year's CPI conference.
It turns out as Josiah showed us, that these skills are transferable. These are things that we need if we want to love someone. I need to be willing to listen to my friend or need to set aside myself to love my child. It helps me step into the foreign territory of another culture or relationship.
I can’t wait to get home and practice on my wife.

The Spittin Image

I travelled to Hakone not too far from Tokyo this week for a conference. As we came over the mountain I caught a magnificient view, the view that one always sees in paintings and pictures of the landscape in Japan. Well I was finally able to get a shot myself.

A step back in time.

Kobe. A section of Meriken pier preserved as it was after the devastating earthquake of 1995. It used to sit about a meter and a half out of the water, and believe it or not those lamp posts used to be vertical. Even though more than ten years have passed, people who experienced this earthquake still talk about it with a lot of emotion and difficulty.

Yes!

The last word in The Message paraphrase of Luke is Yes!

It comes after reading all of Luke, the birth, the life, the crucifixion, the resurrection and the ascension. The word following all of this is Yes. One word, dripping with meaning.
It is the kind of Yes you feel after scoring a goal, making a great save, or slamming one down the line. It is a fist pumping kind of Yes. It is a point to the sky sort of Yes.
A lot of work goes into making that great play. Years of practicing, hundreds of games under your belt, eating sleeping and drinking your craft, and only a few times in your career can you look back on a particularly well finished play and say Yes!
But this particular Yes is the greatest Yes sitting at the TSN turning point of History.
It is the sort of Yes that can be very loud or barely audible, depending on who you are, but either way it carries the weight of Glory to God.
Soli Deo Gloria.

At'll do er.

With a little technical help from my brother Paul, I managed to get my picture up. It turns out a pushpin does the trick. Smarts, but as they say no pain no gain.

A Tad Frustrated

I will keep you up to date on my trials and errors. As a facespace pioneer it may be useful for others to learn from what I have attempted and either avoid making the same errors or do what I did if a thing works. With respect to the picture problems, tried just thumb-tacking my picture over the question mark. Not working so far and I seem to have liquid crystals leaking out of my LCD. I'll let you know how I make out.

Facespace

Having finally mastered double clicking icons in windows, formatting my big ol 5 1/4 floppies, and sending and receiving e-mail it is with some consternation that I attempt something new. I heard about this newfangled facespace or mybook or some such thing. Signed up. I am hip. I got friends now. Gnarly. Dude. The strange thing, I have a giant question mark where my face ought to be.

Happenings at our little church

Last Sunday evening at Grapevine Cell Church 「ぶどうの木セルチャーチ」we had one of those great little intimate concerts that are a rare find. Guitaurist Mark Miller came to town. No no no not that one, theothermarkmiller. We slooshied some of his handmade tunes and he also subjected us to the one about the colour coded genies and their bricks. If you have not heard it, you can listen here.

Shinsaibashi

Looking at Shinsaibashi shopping street from Dotombori bridge, on a Monday when it is not so crowded. It is a good thing they don't allow cars during the day thinks I to myself.

Amanohashidate

The other day we made our way to Amanohashidate (天橋立). It is reported to be one of the three most beautiful sights in Japan. The peculiarity of it all is that one is supposed to look at it upside down in order to fully and truly appreciate it's beauty. It is a time honoured tradition complete with do-it-yourself handrails, viewing platform and safety screening for those who might topple over backwards. The safety screening looked quiet well used which caused me to wonder how many people rolled down the mountain in days of yore before safety screening was invented.

A potrait of the author.

It has been some time since I started writing this blog and the little old moving picture in the corner no longer does me justice. I feel I am aging gracefully, and thought I could maybe give the general readership out there a taste of my current charming looks. I recently came into some excellent portaits, uncommisioned and yet smacking of Rembrandt quality. I thought I would post these as an upgrade to plain old photos.

By Tomoko

By Wako

Ninja Shoes

Used for crossing moats and the like, to sneak up on unsuspecting castle guards.

Being a good Canadian they remind me of snow shoes.

Equations du jour.

tokei = 時計 = watch.
kakkouii = かっこういい = pretty cool.
これはかっこいい時計だと思います。(In Japanese but the pictures are good).
Here are some pretty cool watches. (English interview with creator Haruo Suekichi but watch out for the colourful language.)

Hisashiburi （久しぶり）

My Japanese English dictionary defines hisashiburi as "after a long time [interval, silence, absence, separation]".
Or in the timelessness of the olde First Nations expression with which I am sure you are familiar, long time no blog.

Ninjas!!

Fight or flight?

I ran for it.

Hanami

On my way home. Cherry blossoms are out.

Meeting the good doctor again.

I met up with the good doctor again yesterday at our Alpha course. (Rubric! rubric!) Oddly, he seemed happy to see me. His head is chocked full of knowledge on various topics, especially medicine and religion.
He asks a lot of questions.
I think he was born in Tokyo. Lived there.
He changed jobs and came to work in Osaka. While in Osaka he has learned some of the local dialect, Osaka ben.

After the Alpha, in a Japanese restaurant, during dinner, he was telling us about how when in Tokyo, his Osaka Ben came out, and the Tokyoites were a little disconcerted, thinking he was mafia (so he said). He laughed about this soo hard, I have never seen a Japanese person laugh so hard, it was funny, it was infectious. Yoshihiko, Eiko, Kazuko Hikasa, Koichi and I. We all laughed. It was a hearty laugh. It is overused but I will say it. It is good to laugh.

My Triumphant Return

Almost three years ago I came to Japan on a short term mission trip. When I first got here, my brain could not take in everything, Japanese people's faces all looked the same, places melded into each other, my senses were overstimulated. Against this backdrop of blur, I went to a homeless mission meeting, with Dan the missionary man, and two Korean Pastors from California. They were thinking about bringing a short term team here and were scouting things out. We arrived on the train and then headed to the outside of the loop line (and because of my ineptness here is the picture that goes with it). In Osaka, in spite of what the maps tell you, the inside of the loop is Osaka but the outside of the loop is something else. Amongst the blur, I did happen to notice several things. I vividly recall the long lineup of homeless people waiting at a large building. I also noticed a youngish man in expensive black clothes standing next to his black Mercedes with black tinted windows, waiting for something. I saw him at least once or twice more, though we never went that way again. There was also a very old gentleman dressed in what looked to be towels and rags that in the way they were arranged could have been construed (with the right tweak of your imagination) to look like a dress. He seemed very happy to see me, took hold of me and with a big smile, exuberantly expressed to me in what I assumed to be Japanese, his greetings. After being rescued from his grasp I has informed by the more fluent of our group that he really liked me, and wanted to take me home. Being naive, I still haven't come to grips with the reason, but I'm sure the dress was a clue. So with out much incident we arrived at the place where the meeting was being held. it looked very "inner cityish" to me. The proceedings started with a continuation from the week before of the movie Titanic which was interrupted just as the boat was about to sink, to be continued the week there after. (I recall being amused how the "aww" of disappointed viewers, sounds the same in Japan as it does in Canada). The main part of the meeting consisted of a time of singing, a recital of the apostles creed, a message, prayer and then dinner. The last thing that I remember striking me was how well organized and orderly all these homeless people were, patiently waiting in lines and easily working together to see that everyone got food in an expedient manner.

Fast forwarding through a couple or three years and here I go again, my triumphant return to the scene of the crime. Michael phoned me up and said he wanted to go to the homeless mission and invited me along. We agreed to meet at the closest train station, we were going to walk together to Pastor So's residence to meet with him at about four in the afternoon. The over stimulation blur has gradually become more focused for me and I notice many more and different things nowadays. As I was waiting at the train station, I had a sense that the people seemed different to me, carried themselves differently. I should probably chalk it up to my imagination, as it was on the edges of reality, more of an intangible than noticed facts. After Michael arrived we hustled off toward our destination, neither of us knew where it was but Michael was confident he would recognize how to get there. Although I did not notice any Yakuza or see my old friend, the same long line of homeless people were still there, and looking none-the worse-for-wear (as far as homeless people can look non-the-worse-for-wear) and I hoped that they weren't too tired from standing there for the past few years. We purposely wandered around, conspicuous. The things that stood out for me this time were the perpetual garage sale items displayed all along the streets wherever there was a free spot that didn't involve taking someone else's frontage. The friendly salesman with a big smile who helpfully directed us toward the station (where we had come from) (assuming of course that we were not in the neighbourhood because we wanted to be). We asked him about the meeting in broken Japanese, bending and stressing if not breaking all our Japanese abilities. He helpfully directed us in the right direction. We purposefully wandered some more. We asked more questions. I was struck by the plywood and sawhorse tables, shiny and polished with use, surrounded by serious faced gamblers throwing out thousand yen bills. We were directed to a church building of some kind that many of the neighbourhood folk seemed to agree was where we needed to go, but was not. We continued our purposeful wandering. We came by the friendly salesman yet again. Smiled and nodded. We eventually happened upon Pastor So's house but by this time he had left and there was no one there. I know the area well now, and can take anyone interested on a tour, pointing out the sights and attractions. Eventually we ended up at the building where the meeting was to take place, across the street from the gaming tables. It was ten after six, we were late and Pastor So was waiting for us. The meeting went ahead in a similar fashion as before with the exception of the movie, but then again we were late so it may have finished by the time we got there. Since we were visitors we were expected to say a little something after the message. I had spent time in the morning preparing a little something. I had decided to read Romans 10 vs. 8-13 and I wanted to emphasize the everyone in verse thirteen. When it came to me, I jumped up brimming with confidence. I opened my little Japanese bible and launched into the reading with gusto. Not long into said reading I came to the realization that I had forgotten to pre-read this text. Not a big deal for me in English but another matter entirely in Japanese. I came to this realization as I got bogged down in drifts of Kanji the way my little Volkswagen used to, in drifts of Canadian snow. My knees were quivering, perhaps my vocal chords too. I ploughed through and managed to get to the other side. My confidence battered, bruised and shaken. I hastily made my one little point.

Everybody.