火曜日。

Sometimes you can meet a person and they immediately mean something to you.　They stand out, and you long to keep them close.  Somehow.

This is how things started with Gramma Kay.

In my first few weeks back in Tokyo last October, I was all over Tokyo with the Hilo Hawaii team.  On a particular night of outreach in Sagamihara, we met this sweet little lady in front of the train station who told us to call her Kay.  She rode with us in the pastor's car to the church for that evening's service.  As I sat chatting with her before the service began, I learned that she had lived in the US for several years with her family while her husband had been working.  She actually attended a charismatic Catholic church in the area, but had always wanted to stop by this church - so our hula event gave her a good reason.  She also has weekly English lessons, which she was on her way to when we lured her in with ukulele music, and was genuinely pleased to be with us for the evening.

When the service was winding down and we were all beginning to say goodbye to the guests and pack up, I was suddenly struck by the idea that I might never see Kay again.  Sagamihara is a bit far from my general whereabouts, but I had so enjoyed talking with her that I caught her before she headed out to ask if I could write her a letter from time to time.  It felt kind of silly, we'd just met a few hours before - but, sweet little lady she is, she just smiled and wrote down her address and said it would be a pleasure.

We've been writing each other ever since, moving from [Last Name]-san to just Kay to Gramma Kay - "your Japanese gramma." Her postcards and cards are always made from some personal picture she took, or a friend took, from some obscure or famous place in Japan.  She writes notes about the names of the flowers in her pictures, their names in Japanese and why she chose it for that letter.  She asks me to correct her English, which I do reluctantly because I don't want her to stress about how she writes, and she's good at it anyway.  We write about family and prayer requests and what God has done from one mailing to the next.

I hope she knows how much of an encouragement she has been to me, and in some way, I hope I am able to encourage her as well.

Until.
Amanda