August 24, 2007

Newsbrief

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Japan in the name of Jesus! We are busy packing up our worldly goods for our upcoming move to Nishinomiya (between Osaka and Kobe). As our move is scheduled for September 28, this is likely the last newsletter we’ll be sending from this address. We will keep our same email and Web site, but our new mailing address will be 5-29-301 Yasui-cho, Nishinomiya-shi, Hyogo-ken, Japan 662-0045. What our phone number will be, of course, we don’t yet know. This is a nice apartment being rented for missionary housing, and is presently occupied by Wendy Chun and her family. Wendy, a United Methodist missionary, will be moving to Tokyo in mid-September, and so we will move in after she leaves.

Nishinomiya will be very different from our semi-rural, suburban location here in Tsukuba. The Kobe-Osaka area is pretty much one big metropolis, not much different from Tokyo. The apartment is in a nice neighborhood a short distance from a cherry-tree lined river and is close to three train stations. The main rail line is only about 100 meters from our apartment (almost too close!), and the station is only a two- or three-minute walk. A station on another train line is only about a five-minute walk in the opposite direction, with a third station about 12 minutes away. So public transportation will be really convenient.

It is about 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the office of the Buraku Liberation Center on the opposite side of Osaka, and so that will take about an hour to commute to. That will be quite a change, as I’ve only had to commute three or four times a month to meetings in Tokyo or Osaka. How many days a week I’ll be going into the office is still something to be decided, as some of my work can be done from home.

Juji’s counseling work at the Shin’ai Home in Kobe is a good bit closer and should only take about 20 or 30 minutes on the train. Her schedule will be fairly flexible, and of course will be interrupted during her hospital stays. She is, by the way, just finishing up a rather lengthy hospital stay now. Instead of the usual three to four weeks, this time turned into two months, due to some issues that needed to be dealt with prior to the plasma exchange treatments. Those went well, and she is scheduled to be home in a few days. The issue of where she will be treated once we move to the “Kansai” (the name given to that region of Japan) is still be to determined, but we should have several months to work that out once we get there. There are, of course, several options to choose from.

Our “sayonara parties” are beginning, with eight that we know of.  Last Sunday was my final sermon at the Tsuchiura Church. At the farewell gathering after church, I was informed that since Pastor Yoshioka had his stroke last December, I had given 27 sermons there. (He is, by the way, making a slow recovery and is able to walk slowly, but his speech is still quite limited. It’s taking a long time to recover.) I’ll spend the remaining Sundays at different churches in the area, each with its own farewell gathering, and a district-sponsored celebration of our 21 years here is planned for September 9. The international community here is having one for us as well.

We are sad to leave our friends here, but at the same time we look forward to the ministry God has prepared for us in the Osaka area and from there to the world. We ask for your prayers as we move to the next stage of our lives, and also ask that you lift up in prayer both the churches we’ll be leaving and those we’ll be working with this fall.

Blessings in Christ,

Tim and Juji Boyle

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 249