Sunday

Today as we were pulling out of the cabin driveway we punctured a tire. The spare had been as cleverly concealed as possible, to make the hunt invigorating and thorough for us. In impish delight, it then revealed itself to be flat. Disgusted, we piled half of our group in the remaining van to go to a church in Sendai while the rest of us (Anna, Raun, Steve, Matt, and I) walked about ten minutes down the road to meet up with some Samaritan’s Purse people who run their own little service in a chapel that’s built in the woods on another hill.

 It turned out to be the most perfect thing that morning. The Japanese are big on buildings that remind one of nature and seamlessly mesh into whatever natural surrounding they’re set in. This chapel was all wooden, with large, screen-less rectangular windows through which we could see the trees and dappled sunlight, and which admitted the most glorious little breeze.

The meeting wasn’t so much an official church service as it was one guy leading a meditative lesson and Bible study about pride. The essence of it was that we often focus on some sins (sexual sins, usually) and assign them a status of being “worse” than others. Dante’s legacy lives on! Anyhow, Greg—the guy leading the study—was focusing on the sin of pride today. He brought up the point that the Bible says the prideful are the enemies of God. And really, how can you have a real sense of your need for Christ if you’re proud? The whole point of the gospel is that we’re screwed up and need Jesus. If we don’t believe that we’re screwed up, then we can’t appreciate what Christ did for us because deep down we don’t think that we needed him to do anything for us.

After the study we sang some songs. Then we sang some more songs. And just because we could, we sang a few more songs.

It turned out the mayor of our little hill-cabin community, Wendy, was at this service, and she graciously allowed us to borrow her wifi hotspot for the day, which is why you guys got an update last Sunday (though not about Sunday--that's what this is for).

We checked our mail, chatted, and made lunch. Then we sat down to eat and realized we didn’t know where Brian was. This has been a common theme throughout this trip: “where is Brian?” The answer is usually that Brian is off buying us tea, water, pocari sweat, cleaning bathrooms, and doing other quiet, awesome things that make life a bit easier for us. This time it was that he was down changing the tire on the car all by himself. He gets awkward and uncomfortable if we try to tell him seriously how grateful we are, so instead when he made his way back up to the cabin we made fun of his Canadian accent so he’d know how much we all love him.

We have been keeping a “Book of Brian” that is a collection of things he’s said throughout this trip, and it has reached pretty epic proportions. One of my favourite things he talks about, though, is “female ninjitsu.” I was unaware that this is a thing, but apparently it’s this instinctual ability women have to make men do things. The skill is natural, but some women can hone it and become deadly. The last resort, and the most powerful, is the ability to cry. According to Brian, the last thing a man ever wants to realize is that he made a woman, particularly his woman, cry.

“That’s why I don’t approve of women in the army,” he said a couple nights ago. “The enemy just has to snag one of them and pinch her until she cries and all our armies will be helpless—unable to respond rationally to any following attack.”

We had been invited to go to the Cummings’ for lunch again, but due to our car disaster those plans were cancelled. The Cummings, who are very flexible and laid-back people figured the obvious thing to do would be to bring lunch to us. Consequently they showed up with the rest of our group and we had a lovely and delicious curry lunch together.

Everyone spent the afternoon writing blogs, emails, and creating clever Facebook statuses with our super handy and rare wifi access. Brian, Anna, Hannah, and a few other people went hiking and found a small lighthouse on our hill.

Anyhow, Sunday was restful and wonderful—just what we all needed.