Japan Day 0 - Arrival

And we are off! First off, just want to thank everyone who has supported the team whether it’s your prayers, financial support, encouragement, and everything else, thank you so much for making this trip happen. Before our vision trip even occurred, the team has been meeting up every day since last Sunday. We had dinner and worship at one of our team members, Jooeun’s house on Sunday, had a team meeting on Monday, and had a sendoff dinner with our global mission’s community group at Chantilly Lazy Dog on Tuesday. We even had a daily devotional that the team read together that was prepared by David Lam.

Now we have fast-forwarded to Wednesday 5/24 and the day started early at 5 A.M. Some members were still messaging the team chat hours before our call time and some members only slept for 30 minutes. We saw some tired faces that morning amongst the team, but thankfully, the team was dropped off at the airport and our pastors, friends, and family sent us off in prayer on time. So far, everything has gone smoothly! Initially, upon booking the flights, everyone was going to be separated and we would have been sitting in the middle seats. To the team’s surprise, this wasn’t the case, and our seats were changed for our international flight where we were able to sit together in the same rows! Glad God answered some prayers there! After arriving at the LAX airport to transfer, we found ourselves running across the LAX airport for about a good 40 minutes and had no issues making our connector flight with about 40 minutes left to spare until boarding.

What’s extremely interesting is as soon as we entered our airline with ANA, the atmosphere completely changed. This Japanese airline conducted things very orderly and to my surprise most if not all the passengers were quiet and well-behaved. The team was almost the loudest one on our plane!

A couple of hours and naps passed, and we were served some of the better airline meals on ANA. We had the option to choose between a teriyaki chicken egg meal or a seafood meal.

Both were pretty good! We even got to eat ice cream after this meal as well. We still have about 6 hours left on this 11-hour flight from LAX to NRT. That’s all I have for now!

Thank you for keeping the team in your prayers and thoughts. Some of us are leaving on this trip with some hard situations back at home so please pray for our team member’s life situations at home as we spend this day traveling to Japan.

As far as how we are being picked up, a couple of missionaries will be driving us to drop off all of our luggage as we land at Narita Airport. We will be spending some time picking up JR passes and exchanging money then so hopefully the process will go well. I will upload this blog as soon as I have access to WiFi in Japan! Happy to keep you posted and thank you for your time reading this update.

Brendon