Another successful Praise Night went into the books tonight.
Intermittent (and sometimes extremely heavy) rain kept our numbers down at the beginning of tonight’s third service, but as the night went on we picked up several people, two of which were Praise Night newcomers. Tonight Matt gave the message (his second) while Yukiko interpreted for a couple of people in the audience. Unlike the last time Matt spoke we didn’t have the interpreter up front with a microphone, so Matt was able to speak continuously. As always I worked the slides, and tonight we had a Praise Night first: a clip from a DVD in the middle of Matt’s message from Matthew 20:1-16. The video worked pretty well—VLC performed like a champ, as expected.
After Praise Night a lot of people stayed and chatted, partly in English but mostly in Japanese. I feel like I get most of my real-world language practice in times like this. After most everyone filtered out Yukiko and Chie (a Monday night English student—tonight was her first Praise Night) and I went to El Greco for dinner and spoke almost entirely in Japanese for the whole time. I think I’ve finally reached the point where I can express most of what I want to say without having to think too much, and switching between polite and plain forms isn’t the mind bender it used to be. Of course there are still times when I can’t pick up everything in a conversation, but it’s amazingly refreshing to be able to communicate in another language without being mentally exhausted from thinking about conjugations and the like.
As a human being I’d like to think that my increased comfort level with Japanese is due entirely to my own efforts (I have been studying almost every day, after all), but I think that at least some (probably a large portion) is God’s working. It seems like my language ability tonight an entire level higher than it was as little as two weeks ago, and I can’t find any particular explanation for that outside of God’s assistance.
I prayed tonight that I would continue to improve in my ability to speak Japanese, especially for the purpose of talking with others about the church and my relationship with Jesus Christ. I also prayed for Chie, who is very new to the church, and I hope that she will develop a real desire to know more about Jesus and more about how the things we talk about in church can apply to her life. These are two of the things that have been on my mind a lot recently, so if you can, please pray with me about them.