foreign vs. familiar

Today we had our first Japanese lesson. The main thing I learned... Japanese is hard!! We have been working on learning the 2 basic alphabets (called Hiragana and Katakana), so that we can read our textbooks. Knowing those will also help in reading street signs, maps, and food labels. There is a third set of characters called Kanji (which comes from Chinese) that we would need to know in order to read anything complex, but there are literally thousands of those.. so we're not exactly there yet. Right now we're trying to learn both the basic writing system and common conversational words/phrases/questions/etc. Please pray for us as we are doing lots of memorizing.. pray that God will help us to grasp this new language.. pray that we will be brave in using what we learn.. and pray for patience! Studying is mentally draining, and it can be frustrating to feel like we are moving slowly! Check out Trent's awesome reading material:

In our new home where most everything is foreign, it's amazing how good it is to find something familiar! For instance, the other night I made Mexican food! I have to say, it was some of the best Mexican food I have ever tasted!! It's true what they say, that you don't really appreciate things until they are gone.

This weekend we went to a fall festival at Trent's focus university, ICU, with some friends that we made there a couple weeks ago. It was fun getting to know them a little more, and they also introduced us to more people on campus. Please pray for our new friendships with these girls and others that we meet at ICU! Here's a picture of all of us:

To see more pictures from the festival and other random things, go see our picture page: http://picasaweb.google.com/trentandlindsey. And for more ways to pray, read the right margin of the page! Thank you for reading and for praying! We love you!