Konichiwa!
Rachel congratulations on the birth of your little angel! I'm happy to hear it was another water birth just like mine. I hope you both are resting and recovering well together and all continues as it should for your family.
This week has been interesting with the transfers. We had a few days to work before I said goodbye to Elder Burch on Wednesday. I'll sure miss him, he's a good elder and Abiko area is lucky to be getting him.
We had a really cool day on Tuesday. We started off the day with a visit to our friend with mental health issues. It was an opportunity for elder Burch to say goodbye to him. We had a good lesson and were able to feel the spirit fairly well together. He has been coming to Chirac regularly for the last month so hopefully that continues. We are pretty sure he has a pretty good shot into the kingdom of the Lord due to his schizophrenia, but we love loving him anyway so we keep inviting him. After that we went and bought flowers and oranges, made origami, and wrote letters in kanji to our investigator Mae's wife. She has taken a turn for the worse with her cancer and Tuesday was her birthday so we dropped by with gifts. We couldn't go inside so we just left them on the porch where Mae found them and promptly called us. She was able to talk on the phone with us just a little and expressed her gratitude. We were sure to include scriptures to read as well, so hopefully they get the chance to read those. After that we went to the church where we had a lesson with a young college student named Fujieda. His family is super hantai (anti) so he won't be baptized yet, but we still work with him anyway. Luckily the first counselor in the mission presidency lives in our ward, president Kodama, so he attended the lesson with us. It was awesome. After that we went to visit a less active member from Sri Lanka who we work with now, also with president Kodama. It was such a good afternoon. I love working with church leaders like Pres. Kodama and Nagano Kaicho. They bring so much power with them.
Wednesday was nuts. The zone leaders all make plans for everyone, but often the plans contradict with other missionaries in the area and make for a nightmare for district leaders (me) trying to ensure everyone has companions during the transfer. We had three people transfer out so it got pretty dicey for us. My companion transferred at eleven am, the sister's companion transferred out at eight thirty am, and elder Harrison's companion transferred at ten am, elder Harrison's new companion came here at eleven, Sister Crandall's new companion came here at eleven thirty, and my new companion came here at four. Sister Crandall had to split with me and elder Burch in order to wait for her companion, Elder Harrison and Elder Lloyd had to go to the bike shop to fix a bike for the transfer and ended up having to blow their transfer time to accomplish that, which also meant they would not be there to meet Elder Harrison's NEW companion who would have to be met by me and sister Crandall right before she went to meet her new companion. Got all that?? Nightmare!! We ended up calling a member named Mikatsura Kyodai to split with us and help. Me, Elder Burch, and sister Crandall all met with Mikatsura Kyodai at eight thirty at an Eki and waited together until my companion left. Then it was Mikatsura Kyodai and Sister Crandall and I for two hours until Elder Harrison's new companion came. Then Mikatsura Kyodai left, and soon after that Sister Crandall left. We then went to the apartment and waited until Harrison Choro and Lloyd Choro came back. Then we walked together to the Eki and saw off elder Lloyd. Then we worked together until four when we went back to the Eki and met my new companion. THEN we were finished. It was a crazy day!! It all worked out in the end and everyone made it to their new areas safe and sound. Right after we all met up at the station I was walking with my new companion when a huge six foot four inch white man with a Santa beard called out to us, "why it's the Mormons!! Come here, lets talk!" We talked for about fifteen minutes and found out this guy was pretty crazy. He was wearing a safety helmet with all kinds of funny things painted on it, orange safety glasses, and toted around a camp chair to sit on because he was in very bad health. He simply wanted to know if the church was still growing or shrinking because all other religions were shrinking in the world. I guess he was baptized a long time ago and runs a homeless shelter now, but he was clearly not mentally sound, haha. Nice guy though, Anthony. We tried to get him to come to church, but he said he couldn't because he didn't pay tithing. Interesting guy. Missionaries just attract crazy people.
My companion is great. He is a transfer three now so I am not training, but we call it "follow up training." The trainer is the dad, the follow up the mom. So I'm a mom now. Anyway he studied four years of Japanese in high school so he is way advanced. His desires and faith are super strong and we get along very well. Elder Harrison's new companion is from Meridian! He lives about five minutes up Linder road from our house. Nice guy.
I think that's about all for now. We had one really cool lesson with an older guy named Shouda San. He is retired and has no family, but is the sweetest man I have ever met. He came to church one day just to see what it was like after hearing about it at eikaiwa (English class) and liked it a lot, so now we teach him. We talked about how life is like everyone climbing up Mount Fuji and many people climb from different directions, but we all have the same goal. He liked that and when we said that while it all is the same goal, there is one path to the top that avoids pits, cliffs, dangers, and stuff like that, he was very interested and said he thought so too, but was searching for it. Bingo. Golden. We left him with the vision of tree tree of life to study for next time. We will probably invite him to be baptized soon.
All is well here! I'm super jealous of the snow you all are spoiled with!
Viehweg Choro
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