Straddlin' the fence

I owe y'all a blog. I owe a lot of people emails. I owe one dear friend a phone call or a gigantic email or just a lot of communicative effort. However, I also owe this country and this country and these people my attention.
This morning in church I was thinking about how I am leading a double life. I have my "here and now" life here in Japan. I also have my "home" life consisting of people and places scattered throughout the planet, but mostly a hemisphere away. It's hard to live with one foot planted in each, which I think I've been trying to do since I got here, through mostly lots of emailing and also through the blog.
I'm not going to say that's completely bad. I don't regret keeping in touch with people through emailing. I am, however, now starting to believe that I have depended too much on it to keep me afloat, rather than working on deeping relationships with people here. That is unhealthy, I think.
So here is my abstract new year's resolution (everyone needs one of those, right): I will make an effort to be more of the world God has put me in. That means that I will not invest myself only in those people with whom I already have established relationships, but I will also work to build relationships with people I encounter day to day or week to week. That also involves not just focusing on gaijin or English speakers here, but also making a concentrated effort to learn and use Japanese.
This is not to say that I am turning my back on anyone. Hopefully you know I couldn't (and moreover wouldn't) do that. As says the immortal Girl Scout song, "Make new friends and keep the old; one is silver and the other's gold." :) So many of you are more precious than gold to me.
So if I owe you an email, I'm am truly sorry. I will do my best. Tomorrow's a holiday, so hopefully I will catch up some then. Thanks to all of you who are still actually reading the blog. I am getting back into the blogging groove after my weeks of travel. I'm storing up little blogging topics in my mind already.
Love you all so dearly. I thank God for the blessing each of you is to me. Thank you for sticking by me.