Dan Iverson #4      Mar 12   10:30pm  Jpn Time  (EST + 14)

Dear Family and Friends,  Thanks for your prayers and care.

Just as I wrote this, a fairly large tremor shook the church building again.  # 130th or something since 2:46 pm Fri afternoon. Incredible.

1. Donations for Japan Earthquake via MTW: see www.mtw.org

Send to MTW   “93993 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami”

2. This is incredible devastation.  Please ask your church to take special offerings for this tomorrow.  And pass the word to Christians to give and pray for this.  We have already spent almost $1000 tonight renting a first truck and buying food to take north, Lord willing tomorrow night.  This is a very small start on a huge and expensive project these next months.  Pray that we can really help, and show the love of Christ in this lost land.

3. One news report an hour ago said that in a hard hit northeastern prefecture a village of 17,000 people was missing 10,000 people.  That seems impossible, and they had not confirmed it yet, but what is for certain is that the devastation is incredible. And the confirmed death toll goes up much every hour.

4. Pray for us as people bring money and food and water and diapers etc to worship in our church plants here in Chiba 12 hours from now.  We plan to load the truck and a couple vans, and maybe leave at 2am as daytime traffic bumper to bumper (so gov’t shut down the highways going north, only police and military can use, we have heard) We are tentatively planning on going to a an area south of Sendai and the worst devastation, and south of the nuclear plant problems (hard to get in further north … roads are blocked except for emergency vehicles).  Pray we find a needy town and a church to partner with in a hard hit area on the coast in north Ibarki prefecture, or south Fukushima prefecture.  Someone who knows the area and worst places on the ground will really help.

Your CNN and other news is pretty much same as what we are getting here in Japan.
Keep praying about nuclear reactors, and that we and lots who are mobilizing teams to go in and help the devastated areas can indeed get in, and can get to where they can really help with the right relief materials and people.

Well, I need to get some sleep and get ready to preach in 12 hours.

Thanks for caring and praying for the now doubly needy people of Japan.

Dan

We had a great concert today with the group from Korea who arrived yesterday.  Wonderful for Christians and non-Christians.