Yabuki Breeze Blog

Happy New Year everyone! We had a great holiday. We got much needed rest and family time. We appreciate your prayers and many of you helped out with our year end shortfall. Thank you so much! It really helped.

Big week coming up. We have a big meeting with our Texas staff – planning our Tejas spring break retreat. This is an important meeting because many of us will be very busy right before the retreat and so much of the planning has to be done early. This is the retreat where God often leads many to start the journey with Himself and many discover God through the Bible and learn how to help other discovery God through the Bible. We are anticipating a very busy semester coming up. We will need your prayers as Roy will be traveling a lot to train people in ministry stuff and doing other things. We have busy regular schedules too with Friday night groups, PTO discipleship groups, lots of sports, scouts, etc. Here are some recent pictures including some from the holidays, etc. http://www.flickr.com/photos/yabukibreeze/.

Some Quick hits form the last few weeks:

• Roy and Charis got sick during the holiday. This is a blessings because it forced Roy to rest a lot which he needed. We got really close.
• Roy just finished yesterday the next major version of the PTO discipleship curriculum for our offering the ISI M28 initiative that he has been working on the last month. It is curriculum designed to help disciple groups to disciple other groups.
• The kids are excited about all the special gifts they received for Christmas. So are their parents.
• We met with our UTA ISI Team at the Phillips for a fun get together. Wow! I can’t believe how big and tight our team has become. Good job Ron as our UTA team leader.
• A fair number of students were exposed for the first time to the story of Christmas at churches during the holiday. Two student were even involved in Christmas plays at churches.

Pray for

Tags: Bible, ELI, Friday Night, Pictures, PTO, scouts, Spring break, Spring Break Retreat, Staff, Tejas, UTA

“We want to go to the zoo,” said several of the UTA international students toward the end of the last Friday Night meeting of the summer at the Yabukis’ house. Ron said, “Lets go” and so began a wonderfully fun journey with six international students from Taiwan, Korea, Ivory Coast, etc. We gathered during the break between their summer and spring semester. This is a time when many of the students are stuck on campus and looking for stuff to do. We piled into our two mini-vans and we all drove to the Fort Worth Zoo. We saw all sorts of animals… Monkeys, lions, tigers up close. C-4 liked the tigers the most. It was a great time of fellowship and relationship building. We then had dinner afterwards and were joined by another student from Vietnam.

Tags: 2007, ELI, Summer, UTA, zoo

Roy & Lisa had the priviledge of welcoming three new NCN students to UTA’s language program. These Japanese students are entrusted by their parents to the NCN corportation to navigate through the university experience and NCN working with Ron asked us to make sure the students get off on the right foot. We picked them up from the airport, took them shopping for many different types of things, and during the memorial day holiday, we had them over for a special barbeque with some of our friends who love Japan. We really got close to them as they depended on us for many new things. We will be sponsoring other trips and gatherings for this special group of students in the future.

Tags: ELI, Japanese, new students, UTA

“In my first day in America, I have a warm feeling…” one Taiwanese student commented. Unlike domestic students, international students typically stay during the summer. Many also arrive for the first time during this quiet time on campus. It is a perfect opportunity to really shower Christ’s love on them and give them our full attention. This week, Roy, Ron, and the team were able to welcome many new international students to campus.

In addition, Roy & Ron and others on the team picked up others from the airport and helped the students get settled. One student commented, “In my first day in America, I have a warm feeling…”  because of the love he felt.

Ron also shared to all 50 new English Language Institute students at UTA about American culture. He was then able to visit all of them to our welcome picnic, on June 1 which ended up a wonderful success with over 40 students who came to enjoy the time in the park We played many different games and had a lot of fun.

Tags: 2007, ELI, new students, Summer, UTA