What God has done

Recently I have been attending a Christian fellowship group on campus. Some times we do a Bible study and sometimes we have worship. Afterwards we can go to a Indian restaurant close to campus. They have curry and naan which is wonderful, if a little more than I can afford regularly. I have been enjoying the Bible study and singing. What is best is that I get to talk about God. I love talking about Him and His character. For the first half of the semester I had little to no interaction with Christians, so it is good to talk about Him.
Two weeks ago I got to encourage a Chinese girl to love the Lord and trust Him to work His will in her life. It is such a blessing for me to encourage others to the Lord. It is amazing to me how many Christians seem to think that the Christian walk is about striving to be God wants them to be. It is one of my greatest joys that I don't have to change myself. Firstly because I have found that I can't change myself, secondly because I don't really know how I need to change, but mostly because I get to rest in His sovereignty and loving care that He will work His will in my life if I will but trust Him. Of course, trusting Him is one of the hardest lessons to learn, along with learning to wait for His timing, which is really just an extension of learning to trust Him. 
We are planning a Thanksgiving party for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. One of the leaders who is a  teacher (who is not Japanese) at KG is going to do most of the cooking. I am going to be helping her. She feels that she has been called by God to Japan, but she hates it here. She has been here, in Japan, for around ten years. So we were planning the grocery list, and we got on the topic of a conflict that she had had, and it was impressed on me that she was exhausted and frustrated.  I exhorted her that God loves her and that He is working in her life. I went of about it for a while(sometimes I feel like He takes over). She is struggling with Him about trusting Him to change her. Please Pray that He will draw her to him and teach her to trust Him. Also that He will give her the desire to love the Japanese people, and that He will manifest this love in her heart, and so glorify himself.
I think that I really love to be used by Him to encourage His people, it is such a blessing to me, and I hope that it is also a blessing to those He sends me. I can only trust Him that I am, I fear that I am merely an annoying busybody.
Something about Japan. The Japanese people are very ethnocentric, I suppose it comes of a homogeneous population that was cut off from the world for 200 to 300 years. This ethnocentric ism becomes discrimination against foreigners.  I'm sure that it had vastly improved since the end of the Tokugawa era,when there was a greater portion of the population that wanted to eject all foreigners off  of Japanese soil, by force if necessary.   It continues to shows up in Japanese policy making. Foreigners are generally considered second class citizens(if you can even get citizenship, which is pretty much impossible). We are requited, if we are staying longer than 3 months, to register as an alien, and we get a card that we have to carry around at all times. We call it the Gaijin card. The police can ask you to show it to him. When a foreigner first comes he/she is something of a novelty, but once the novelty wears off they are merely difficult to deal with. Which I can understand, because if you can't speak the language you are almost a child. If you have a white face they assume that you cannot understand Japanese, and thus will say anything they feel like to your face with impunity. It usually isn't complementary. Mostly you get "Gaijin!" which being translated is "Look, mom, it's a foreigner! Sometimes it's nice not being able to speak Japanese. I have been informed by more than one longtime resident gaijin about how frustrating it is to always be the foreigner. Many Japanese people won't rent to foreigners, some places will even refuse service to foreigners. If you look at things objectively, you can usually understand why it is that way, but it doesn't make it very much easier to deal with on a daily basis. I think that I am somewhat insulated from most of this, but there is a sense of being used to practice English with. I wonder how I would feel if that was all it ever was, being used. I think I had a taste of that in Junior High. God uses me, but He loves me, so I suppose that's what makes the difference.
I think that if I were to live in Japan I would probably be rather lonely. The thing about being lonely is that I have often felt lonely, and this has, to some extent, developed in me a dependence  on God for my identity. Not to say that I want to be lonely, it would be incredibly hard, but I think that, with His grace, I could handle it. I think that I wouldn't want to do it all by myself, though. What I want to do is to be an encouragement to His church. If that is in Japan then I am willing. Equipping the saints. I do not know what He has for me, but I am willing, and I believe that He will guide me.