#torchbear

I met @arithetonberry at a local art booth festival here in Chicago and I'm really glad I did. It was a real pleasure working together with him, hope I get the chance to again

Just look at this glow up! 😍🐻🔥

Anyways! Since nothing particularly interesting happened before class this morning, I’ll just skip right to the beginning of our new class today ^^

This morning we began our new class on the book of Mark with our teacher Scott Countryman. Although we should have technically covered the basics of Mark in our New Testament Survey class with Anton, everything about this book has been saved for this class specifically. Although I’ve read through Mark before, I feel like I’ve already learned so much in just one day. Like Song of Songs, we’ll be studying this book by reading through everything in order and interpreting the meaning behind every passage. I’m finding that by studying this way I’m learning new things that I’ve often overlooked in the past. Reading Mark has often seemed like a disjointed story to me. I don’t mean to say that it doesn’t make sense, but I never connected the themes and ideas of the stories and parables before today. This morning we mostly studied introductory information to the book of Mark, such as who wrote it, why was it written and what sets it apart from the other Gospels. Afterwards we began our chronological study of Mark. My favorite topic that we studied this morning was learning about His Kingdom Provision in chapters two and three. His three Kingdom provisions talk about forgiveness, fulfillment and freedom. Although Jesus healed people physically and performed many great miracles, one of His greatest miracles was His salvation and offering us what we need the most: forgiveness. Fulfillment touched upon Jesus as personal fulfillment in all of us, but focused largely on being the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament and a fulfillment of the law in our place. Both of these provisions lead to freedom. When Jesus came to earth, He rebuked the laws of the Pharisees and offered freedom to those who were held back from it (like the man with the withered man whom the Pharisees didn’t want healed on the Sabbath). While we studied more than this in our three hours, this was one of the points that stuck out to me the most.

Currently the only working oven here is just down the hallway from our classroom, so by the time lunch had arrived we were excited ^^ After we had finished lunch Iliana and I decided to take a quick walk down to the 7-11 to pick up a few things and squeeze in a little bit of exercise. As usual, I left with my stash of bananas but also with a bag of dried mangoes and some Japanese candy for my younger sister ^^ Again, we are supposed to be in the middle of the rainy season, but it was once again beautiful and warm out (definitely not complaining though!).

Technically this afternoon was supposed to be reserved for working on my journal due tomorrow, but that failed miserably (it was so worth it though!) I’ve been having a difficult time getting in contact with my family back home, mostly because of the time-zone difference, but also because we are both leading incredibly busy lives at the moment (it also doesn’t help that the internet at my home is terrible…). I hadn’t heard from them in a while, so I decided to try my luck and see if they were available, and much to my surprise and delight, I got a hold of my younger sister! Holly left for three- week mission’s trip in Brazil about a week and a half before I came to Japan, and since she had no way of contacting us while she was down there, it felt like an eternity before I last talked with her (in reality, it was only about a month, but still!) It was really great having an opportunity to hear all about her trip and talk about all the new things that we’ve experienced. About forty minutes into the conversation my mother arrived home and I had an opportunity to talk with her as well, so it was great! I’m so happy to have heard from them after being out of contact for so long, so it was a perfect way to spend my afternoon :) I hope to have more opportunities like today with my family soon (specifically with my older sister too! :))

By the time we had finished our conversation and said our temporary good-byes, I had a brief window of time in which I could work on my journal. To put it plainly, not much was accomplished… D: I headed over for my last week of dinner preparation, in which I ironically spent most of my time preparing our breakfast for tomorrow xD Because of the difficulty we’ve been having with our oven, we ran behind schedule and ended up eating dinner quite a bit later than we had hoped. The highlight was definitely these small Japanese cookies that tasted like heaven :) There are so many recipes I want to bring home with me and recreate (I have a feeling I’ll be on a baking rampage for the first week or so of my return).

In class tonight we continued our work on the book of Mark. Even though I despised the evening classes in the beginning, I’m finding that I prefer the evening classes now since they seem to go by much quicker. Tonight we continued our study on the third chapter in Mark, and undoubtedly my favorite passage of what we studied was in Mark 3:13 when Jesus appoints the twelve disciples. Although it is only six verses long and mostly lists off the names of the twelve, I realized that I have overlooked the importance of the very first verse, which says, “Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted, and they came to Him.” The importance in this is that it is an image of how our relationship with the Lord should be. Jesus calls to those that He wanted, and the disciples respond to His call. The call is first and foremost a calling to God, so how important is it for us to respond to Him! Not only was this an example of how we should respond, but it also demonstrates to us that if we are willing to come before the Lord and do His work, then He can use us for anything. Despite their sinful pasts and failures that were to come, all of the disciples qualified for Jesus work simply because they responded to His calling. Knowing that God uses us despite our imperfections really spoke to me. I want to make it a goal of mine to always come to the Lord whenever He summons me for His work and to rest in the knowledge that He wants me for His work despite my imperfections. If we’ll be learning powerful lessons such as these from just one verse in Mark, then I’m really looking forward to what we have in store this week! :)

My night essentially ends here, as the rest of it was spent finishing my journal due for tomorrow. So to spare the boring details of sitting and studying for two hours…