Male Bonding?!?!

This past week, the guys in BEST club had a male bonding session to strengthen their relationships with each other...

Kyle and Masashi

Our friend Dan and Shanghai

Kyle and Keigo

...HAHA! Just kidding! BUT, we did play a game at Shaberanito (our weekly BEST club meeting) called "Baby if you love me, won't you please, please smile." The game invovled showing affection (as you can see!) and reciting the above sentence in order to get your partner to smile. Good job, Kyle! You get an A+ in male bonding! :)

In all seriousness, these pictures do represent the sweet friendships that are being strengthened between BEST members, especially the guys lately. It has been such a blessing to see God move as we open our hearts and our home to these guys week after week. How blessed we are!

...at a concert in Tokyo last weekend with our friend Kazu and his sister Sakae! Kazu is an old friend from Iowa but we met his sister for the first time last week; turns out she lives at our train station AND is a freshman at Chuo University, where many of the BEST club students attend school! the four hours of train riding was SO worth the short time we spent with this sweet brother and sister!

won't you be my neighbor?

our house is at the bottom of this hill on the right!

that's us on the left side of the duplex (and our honda minivan!)

thank for stopping by!

want su-mo?

what: BEST club Sumo extravaganza!!!

where: downtown Tokyo

who: all BEST club members willing to rough-it a bit in exchange for 4 hours of soaking in this ancient Japanese sport!

why: because Sumo is AWESOME!

masashi cozy-ing up for a night on the sidewalk!

where our group camped out from midnight to 7:30a to get free front row seats!

the line was growing in the morning!!!

in action!

just couldn't resist adding this close-up!

the arena from above

Not enough sleep, Tomo?

Kyle's new mentor :)