電車ドラマ - やった！ Train Drama - Alright!

I wrote an article about our skit day for the Lutheran Journal here in Japan and thought I would share it with you all as well. And if you can't guess by the pictures, I played the role of one of the Harajuku teens. I had dialogue about loving Japanese pop music, going to a concert, eating at McDonalds and asking if my lipstick looked ok before taking a picture on a new cell phone. Also, "yatta" means "alright"!

What do Texan Cowboys, Harajuku teens, old and drunk men, and sumo wrestlers all have in common? Well, to start, they all found themselves together on a train in the skit our Japanese class wrote and performed as the culmination of our Japanese study.

The plot of this skit began with a young man and woman who meet on the train platform and start a conversation. They develop a crush for each other, but on the busy Tokyo train are pushed apart by the many people getting on and off. Each train stop had a different humorous event take place. Some of the scenes are commonly seen such as teens talking about shopping and using their cell phones, while other scenes such as sumo wrestlers fighting and throwing salt in the middle of the train are maybe not so common. In the end of the skit the young woman needs to get off the train and is trying to shout her telephone number to the young man so they can stay in touch but the doors close before she can finish. However, what she didn't know what that he was trying to get off at that same stop and as she is sitting in an English class at LLI he bursts in the door late. They look at each other in recognition and excitement and exclaim, "yatta"!

We encounter many people every day all around us that may seem very different from us. It may be hard to imagine what you could possibly have in common with a Harajuku teenager or sumo wrestler, but we are all loved by God in the same way that he died on the cross to save us. Just like the couple in our skit were compelled by feelings of love, I challenge you to be compelled by Christ's love for us to seek others to share it with. We can find joy in knowing that nothing can separate or keep us from His love. We are lost without God, but he finds us. That is truly something to say "Yatta!" about.

- Romans 8:38-39 "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."