Hey Mina San(Everyone),
Another week gone, and almost another transfer. It's insane really. It's going by way too fast already and I don't like it, haha. It makes me feel a sense of urgency and sometimes a little stress. All good though, if you're not stressed you're dead, or so I've been told, ha.
I was very sorry to hear about the Gooch family. I will definitely pray for them each day. What a hard thing to go through. Make sure they know I am thinking about and praying for them please.
Let's see where to begin for this week...? I never know how to do this, so sorry but here I go again. So obviously it is Tuesday here, we had temple P-day today which is always fun. It's like a big reunion each time and the temple workers always have to patiently tell us to leave and congregate somewhere else, hahaha. I saw elder Frazier, my MTC companion, and we ate lunch with him and one of our kohai (younger missionaries), which was really fun. He's such a great guy. The temple was wonderful of course, even if we had to wake up at four to get there and don't really get a P day because we contact on the trains, it's so wonderful to go. Not a lot of missionaries get to enjoy the same thing.
So we visited several more members this week. I swear it is getting harder and harder to do that. Everyone is always sooooo busy and it is nigh impossible to get them at home for longer than fifteen minutes. The first man we visited was Suzuki Kyodai. He is a nice thirty year old single man who lives in a tiny single apartment. We taught him the first lesson. It was pretty shaky, because we never teach really so I'm not so good at teaching the actual lessons. All I do is super condensed messages and get to know people, so teaching is a weak point for me. Anyway, I stumbled through, and forgot how to say some of the first vision. Pretty embarrassing considering you want to gain the members' trust so they refer people to you, but nothing can be done. What I said came from my heart, even if it was incomplete, ha. Tai hen (terrible!). Later this week we visited the Yamamoto family. That was so nice. We essentially taught the same thing and it went much better this time. They were very supportive and friendly and gave us ice cream and donuts which is always great, ha. Their daughter is a piano genius. She is going to some big school as a music performance major, and her father had to basically scrape her off the piano bench to listen to us for fifteen minutes, haha. Really talented though--she could do it for a living easily RIGHT NOW. We have been visiting all these members because we simply are not finding people to teach. As a mission we are trying to get the members more excited about missionary work because we definitely can't do it alone. Elder Tsuchida and I made a small paper with family missionary work goals and bring it out at every visit for the members. We made a bunch of copies and are slowly handing them out, so hopefully that helps a little. Other than that we visited two people in Shiroi, about a fortyfive minute bike ride away, and found out they really have no interest. They both sat there and admitted to how wonderful it felt to be with missionaries and learn, but they have decided to use their agency to reject those feelings. Absolutely heartbreaking for us. Nothing can be done though, as sad as that sounds it becomes more true for me each day.
Apart from those visits we have been finding on our bikes, housing, streeting, and going to ekis (train stations). Busy busy busy which is always good. Sometimes it gets pretty monotonous without lessons or people to teach, but that's just part of the work here. Gotta stay focused despite what is happening around you. We had one pretty cool experience the ore night. We have been struggling to accomplish any of our goals lately which has been a bit of a downer, but we never let it get to us. The other night we had twenty minutes to find before we had to get back to the apartment for planning and decided to street contact at an Eki. We met one really nice high school student who wasn't too interested but took a Book of Mormon, and right after that we were walking by a convenience store when another high school kid zipped by on his bike. I looked at him and decided to keep walking. Then, for whatever reason I turned and threw my hand up calling out to him. He slammed on his brakes and walked his bike back over to us. As we introduced ourselves he looked at us and just asked, "So are you catholic or Protestant?" Those who served in Japan know this is a very rare question for a high schooler. We talked about how we were neither. His next question was, "So how is your church different from the others?" Golden question. That's when we brought out the Book of Mormon and told him about it. He then began talking about all this Bible doctrine and church related stuff I didn't even know. At that point he said something like, "I get that there are different sacred texts..but what REALLY makes your church different, what is so special about this church?" That's when we basically gave him the first lesson in the parking lot in five minutes. All in Japanese of course. It turned out that he had attended a church school and was forced to be baptized, so he was a little wary, but still very open and inviting. At the end of our chat I had him read the last two paragraphs of the Book of Mormon intro which he thought was awesome. You could tell it really provoked thought. He asked where we meet and what time and we tried to get his number, but that's when he got a little nervous, so we backed off and told him to call anytime. He was an example of those 'prepared people' you always hear about. A really great experience totally led and guided by the spirit. Unfortunately we never heard from him since, but he may call in the future I suppose. I was grateful for the experience though, just to know those people really do exist, haha.
Sunday night we exchanged with the zone leaders. I worked here in Kamagaya with Prince Choro from Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tsuchida Choro went to their area in Tsukuba to work with Maki Choro. I was jealous because Tsukuba is really inaka(out in the country), rural, and has some mountains, but working with elder Prince was awesome. He is a transfer fifteen and I don't know if any of you will remember, but he is from the same hometown as the first zone leader I worked with my second week here, Higby Choro, who went home last transfer. Both are actually good friends and went to high school together. Anyway he was great. I planned the day for us, and the day essentially went backwards, hahaha. We went to a park to contact about twenty minutes away, and normally we stop and talk to people on the way, but that day NO ONE WAS AROUND, except for obachans and ogichans (Grandmas and grandpas). So that was tai hen, haha. At the park, again it was old people only, hahaha. Some were nice and willing to talk, but not many. From there we biked another twenty minutes away from our area to surprise visit some members. They weren't home. On the way back we met one old man who was quite interesting. He asked us why we stopped to talk to him, because he had no relationship to us. We just told him we wanted to talk. He said as a Japanese man he didn't talk to people. We told him we were just being friendly, to which he said that Japanese people aren't friendly. We then asked him how he made friends if that were the case, and he just said he didn't make friends, and that we should learn Japanese culture before we go around being rude. Unfortunately, that is the attitude with a lot of the older people. We patiently continue to talk to them and eventually find out something like their kids all ditched them and they were divorced and simply lonely. Normally they open up and start being more friendly, but this man didn't. It was really sad. If anyone needs to feel Christ's love it is him. After that we stopped another grandpa who was wandering and stumbling around. When I stopped him to say hi he looked up at me and fell over onto me and my bike. Almost tipped me over. We asked him several times if he was okay, and he assured us he was, but he wasn't making any sense, didn't know where he was, and couldn't speak because his throat was too dry. We sat him down on the street and told him we would go to the store and buy him some water, so he sat down and we took off for a store around the corner. We were waiting at the crosswalk on our bikes, when I glanced over and saw him wandering down the road toward us. He stumbled in a step and fell, got up and kept walking. I was shaking my head at this point. This man couldn't even function. He stopped and looked at us, jumped a little, and said, "Have we met before???" That's when we decided to just walk with him to the convenience store. I kept having to hold him and catch him because he kept walking into my bike pedal. The whole time he was saying he was Buddhist, he didn't reallize that at this point we were just trying to save his life, haha. He knew he needed help though, so he walked with us to the store. We bought a half gallon of water, sat him down, and he drank all of it...he was suffering from severe heatstroke. As an eighty year old man that's pretty serious I would think. He seemed a tiny bit more steady after that, but we bought him more water and gave it to him to carry. He wouldn't tell us where he lived, so we just left him to his own devices and prayed for him a little. Hahahaha, it was so weird. That whole day, Monday, I think we met every crazy in Kamagaya. That night we tried visiting a member I had planned to, but couldn't find their house. It was hard not to feel responsible for the poor day. After all I planned the whole day, and led off on everything. Some days just go bad though. Luckily we managed to laugh most of it off, and elder Prince had some really great things to say during our splits review. It was a good day. Tough mentally, but good.
That pretty much sums up our week. There is always so much more, but it's just tiny details and things while trying to find investigators normally.
Danielle I'm sorry Mazer pooped in the bathtub again, haha.
Nattles thanks for your letter sweetie! Love you.
I love everyone back in American and miss you very much. Oh I almost forgot! Don't send anything to me, just send it to the mission home, they send it out and handle things during transfers, so if I move they will get it to me.
President Nagano
4-25-12 Nishi-ochiai
Shinjiku-Ku Tokyo-to 161-0031
Japan
Thank you for all the support!!
Viehweg Choro
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| Elder's lunch after a temple trip |
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| Elder Prince |
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