My blog is really a surrogate short-term memory. If I don’t blog, I can’t remember what I’ve been doing recently. And it has been a fairly hectic few weeks.

My mother was here for three weeks, which was great, and I have a much tidier house and garden as a result. We then spent three days thinking about what sort of orientation programme our new missionaries should undergo - on the condition that the new missionaries coming up with the plan should also go through it themselves! We’ve come up with a programme which should hopefully be as challenging as it is informative, and will also be a stimulus to the rest of the field as well as the new missionaries.

It feels like since then the past two weeks have been a blur, because from there, my schedule went: pastor’s meeting; media team meeting; meet up with an old friend from Oxford who was passing through the area; weekly meeting with pastor; day off; preaching and church vision meeting; preparation for missionary conference plus time with Henrietta; climbing a mountain; (it was the Midori no Hi - Green Day - holiday so the church did something involving being out in the greenery) two more days of conference preparation and another weekly meeting with my pastor, and that takes us up to today. This is why I haven’t been blogging much.

Today I played football. No, really, don’t laugh. We had an Argentinean professional coach over, who’s in Japan to set up soccer schools and share his testimony with the kids he teaches. Our numbers today were swelled by the soccer team from Omi Kyodaisha School which (ObVories) is the school set up by Vories.

I’m presenting about Vories at the missionary conference, and I need to take some more time to look over that. I’m also preaching tomorrow, and I suppose I need to take some more time to decide what I’m going to say…