Had coffee today with Joyce Kitano, missionary to the University of Tokyo in Japan. Back when we tried to plant a church in Chicago, we wrote our first check to Joyce because we wanted the first check to go to missions. She still has a picture of check 001. Here is the great irony. We also wrote her our last check a few months later when we realized the church wasn’t going to make it. We closed out the account by giving Joyce everything we had.

Needless to say, it was a walk down memory lane. I jokingly said that Joyce was the only good thing to come out of that attempted church plant. But that isn’t entirely true. I wouldn’t trade the invaluable lessons we learned. Alright, I’d trade some of them! But not all of them!