Family

    I miss my family. I expected to miss my biological family, we're related by blood after all, and we live together. But what I did not expect was the wave of homesickness that washed over me when I entered Osu church for Sunday morning service. 

    Osu church is tiny, with barely any elbow room. Every time I stood up to sing, I put one foot into the aisle and stepped a little to the side so I didn't squash my fellow intern who had accompanied me to church.

    But even though the experience of attending a tiny church in a country all the way across the world was new, the experience of worshiping with fellow believers was not. The Sermon was in Japanese, of which I could only understand a handful of words, but we took communion together on Pentecost Sunday. The words in the hymns were unfamiliar, but many of the tunes were the same. The experience with my new, Japanese church family was very different, and yet so much the same that it made me deeply and profoundly homesick for my church family back in the states. 

    To my American family, whether related by blood in an earthly context, or related to one another by Jesus' blood, I love you. Your prayers and support helped get me here, and I cannot thank you enough.