Five Years Later

May 8, 2004 at Oarai Beach, Ibaraki, Japan

July 31, 2004 was our last day in Japan as alien residents, assistant english teachers, and vocational missionaries. It's hard to believe that it's already been 5 years, and that it's been 8 years since we first packed our bags and headed overseas just 6 weeks after we had tied the knot. Shawn always says that he just took the "leave" part of the leave and cleave verse in Matthew literally. We definitely started our marriage off in a very memorable way and we feel that we truly benefited from our shared experiences in the beautiful culture and land of Japan. And we are still blessed today by many friends that we made during our time in Japan. (And I'm really thankful for blogs to keep up with many of you. I know, I know. I need to join facebook too.)

For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking a lot about our upcoming Japan anniversary and reminiscing about the things we did and the people we met. One person I thought about was Christian Hancock. We haven't heard much from his family since we left Japan, but we were pretty close with them when we lived there. (We spent lots of evenings/nights at their house watching basketball, football, and baseball games of American teams. His father, Mark is American and was an athlete at OC.) Anyway, Christian was in junior high school when left and I just realized that he's alredy in college now. Wow, time sure flies.
This is a picture of Christian helping Shawn tell the Bible story at the Mito church of Christ during children's Bible hour a few months before we moved back to America. It was our turn to teach the class and Christian was our translator--yep, that's right a 13 year old was translating for grown adults. Occaisionally, his 10 year old brother, Charlie, would translate too.
Another person I've thought of lately is Seiya Sasaki. He's the boy on the left. His brother, Tomoya, is next to him and getting his fingers stuck in glue. This was another picture from the same Sunday in children's Bible hour. When we moved from Japan, Seiya was a little older than Carly is now. (I think he had just started kindergarten, but maybe it was preK.) I remember thinking before we moved back how much Seiya had changed from when we had first met him. So it seems even more strange to think how much older he is now. Memories are wonderful and I'm so glad we have such rich ones from our time in Japan.