Mr. and Mrs. David Phelps and Mr. and Mrs. Onodera announce the matching of Pablo Rivera and Mika Onodera.

Pablo is in his second year of STF in Chicago.

Mika is living in India with her family.

This is a testimony describing how my relationship with God and my parents changed over the years. How, after building a healthy relationship with my parents, God decided that I was ready for the matching as well as for the blessing.

In Japanese culture, parents do not express their love for their children by words nor do they try to connect with them internally. It was the same in our family. My siblings always hid their feelings and thoughts from my parents, they would not quarrel or try to connect with them deeply. They have started opening up though.

It was the same for me but I started expressing my opinion on different matters, but I also started quarrelling and fighting with them a few years ago. I do not like to shut up and leave things. I always like to make things very clear. I also like to try and reach out to other people, especially people who are very close to me. I started expressing my resentment against them and so, of course, very often our talks would end up in a fight. I could get very aggressive sometimes. But through the whole process, God was just trying to guide me and help me grow up, build a positive relationship with my parents and also to build a very good self esteem. He wanted to prepare me for the future before me.

In the year 2002, when I attended my first workshop in Kerala, S.India, God helped me open up and pour out all my anger, and resentment, as well as my hurt feelings that were bottled up within me over the years, ever since I was small. It was very spiritual in a way and strange. I just started crying and crying very much, too much in fact after a relatively very small quarrel with my mother during lunch that day. At the time I didn't know what made me cry so much, but now when I look back, I realize it was all those negative feelings that were pent up inside me. You see, when I was small, I always had a VERY low self esteem, had no confidence in myself, was always very shy and was even scared of my own mother very often.

That was in a way, the starting point. I started trying to reach out to them after that. I started talking very much with my mother about internal things and also spent more time with my father taking walks in the evening with the dogs or playing table tennis with him at home. But I also started shouting at them at times when I thought they were wrong or spoke to people in the wrong manner. Then we would start arguing and end up fighting. I hated shutting up like the way everyone else did. I also started expressing my resentful feelings towards them, especially my mother, during the fights. But all that, made us come closer to each other.

They started understanding me and I also started understanding them even more. I didn't realize it but I also started trusting them in certain ways.

Studying at KLI, SMU for one year was a VERY good thing for me. God helped me come so much more closer to Him. I started really focusing on following my conscience. I started making confessions to the central figures whenever I felt I needed to do so... As I went on confessing and following God-centered advice from them, I started feeling very happy, free and liberated! As though as I was actually in the true meaning, naked before God.

I started feeling secure, as though I was really God's child, now that He knows everything about me, I'd be safe and secure as long as I confess and report things to Him. I started hating hiding things from God. Through confessing to the central figures and following their advice, I started gaining confidence in confessing to my parents, through written letters. I started confessing to them about minor things also, to protect myself from Satan and also to let them know that I trust them very much. I also started gaining a VERY good self esteem there.

The people are great, very different from the fallen people I always had to hang around with in school. That helped my parents and I build a stronger, positive and very healthy relationship. It made me feel happier, free and rounder in character. It made me understand them more and it also helped me to learn to be more forgiving. It made life so much more colorful!!! Now, I feel as though I truly love my family, I always did, but I never really felt so. But I do now and I am very happy that I was born to my parents and that I have such great siblings, it makes me proud to think that I belong to them!!!

After I came back from Korea, God helped us find, after this foundation was built, my future-to-be-spouse!!! I had full trust in my parents' choice and was ready to accept anyone. I was very confident that God would work through them. And now I'm so happy because I know our future is going to be a very great one!! As long as things are God-centered, everything would turn out beautiful!!! :D Just follow your conscience...!! That helped me most. : )

Love,

Mika

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