HEY! is that COCA-COLA?!?!?

Yes the Japanese members believe (for the most part) believe that caffeine is strictly against the word of wisdom and we found that out at eikaiwa this week when we walked in with a bottle of Coca Cola each Duren Choro and I, and Tetsuya Kayama (the mentally handicapped kid in the ward who isn`t really a kid he`s 26 and I can tell you about him in a later email I suppose) shouts at us, HEY, IS THAT COCACOLA?! SORE WA DAME DA YO!!! and could not focus for the rest of eikaiwa. Basically I am not a big advocate for caffeine either, but it does bring back a sense of American-ness so that is nice sometimes.So I always get to p-day and realize that I have forgotten everything that happened in the last week even though it seems like P-day was just yesterday. I don`t get how that works.We finally met with Yoshinaga again this week who hasn`t kept ANY commitments shame on him. And always talks to us about how he wants the spirit to guide him and yet he does NOTHING to invite the spirit into his life whatsoever! I have taught him 4 lessons about the spririt and nothing ever sticks! GRRR. Also he tells us he is going to move in May...

So I realized this week that if I don`t take time NOW to be well, I will surely take time LATER to be ill. I found that out as I was staying up way too late to study Japanese and getting up early to get extra revelatory study without the distraction of Dragonball Z Duren Choro and it finally caught up to me and I was then confined to the apartment for 2 days with illness most likely caused by fatigue. I even wore a little asian sick mask because I wanted to feel Japanese. I realized that they are quite comforting, but it doesn`t work with glasses because my face isn`t as flat as the Nihonjin`s are.

We were out and about the next day going housing and lately I have found more and more that you are guided more by the spirit when you are DOING THINGS, rather than just SITTING, WAITING for guidance. We were out housing and I figured we would go visit a potential investigator from 2006. I don`t really know why but we were close so we figured why not. Turns out that the Mother was the potential investigator from the past and the daughter is very open and it was the same situation as with Suzuki san a few weeks ago and basically the moral of the story is kind of `The Lord doesn`t steer a parked car`YAY LIVERPOOL IS DOING WELL! I knew my serving the Lord would bring Blessings! 笑Well I want to have more to say, I did `get mad at` Elder Duren for being lazy and making me do everything and he didn`t like that very much.

I feel like I should have more to say... sorry. Love you all!ペース長老

けっこですわ！‏

So I am starting to feel like my emails and letters are all really repetitive and just not fun for anyone to read and stuff. And it probably doesn`t help that my english is slowly deteriorating and yeah. anyway let me know more of what you want to know and I will try and be more interesting.

So Duren choro left the garbage outside the window one day because it smelled bad, and Japan has crazy strict rules with what days you can and can`t take out certain garbage and it`s very complex. Long story short we now have a friend ferret who scavanges our garbage for anything worthwhile and Duren choro won`t take care of the mess he made, and won`t go with me to kill the ferret. (lame lame lame!) We have since named the Ferret Nusumuto and even though I want to kill it, Duren Choro won`t let me because `it has a fluffy tail` You`ve got to be kidding me.

On Tuesday I went on an exchange with the district leader and I forgot the map of this neighborhood and so I was really frustrated because this was taking way too long to find this person and blah blah I was really mad and our lesson fell through on top of that so it was a rough day until EIKAIWA!

I finally brought pictures of our family to eikaiwa and showed the students and everyone was like all bug-eyed and could not believe SEVEN KIDS?! That is completely unheard of to them! They just couldn`t get over it. Then right as that thought was settling in their mind our district leader pulls out his family pictures. He is one of ELEVEN children. I thought their little Japanese heads would explode haha I don`t think I have seen anyone so surprised in a long time haha.

We finally met with Yazaki and he is doing well, he loves the scriptures and believes very strongly in God and Jesus Christ and he now understands AND accepts the principles of the gospel but he struggles to understand the priesthood and what authority has to do with anything.

Miyawaki (mr. kitchen god) finally accepted our free english program and so we will help him out. When we went to visit him this week it was snowing like crazy, and so we got there and he was awed by our diligence in coming all the way in the snow (barefoot, uphill both ways...) We also ran into another lady named Suzuki San who let us in (miracle in itself) and she expressed to us how she doesn`t really get what we`re saying, not like the words, she gets what we are saying, but struggles to internalize it, but she wants to learn and understand more and feels it is good. She also wants her family to learn too, but right now if she asked them she thought they`d probably say no so she wants to learn a bit on her own first and then introduce it to them. I think so often that Christianity just has this kind of label here and it leads people to regard it as weird without really knowing anything about it. Most people I talk to LOVE the idea of the gospel and the doctrine, but don`t want to join a church or be labeled as Christian, because that is odd in Japan a country where religion isn`t something that is practiced, or necessarily even organized.

SIDE NOTE: Elder Duren likes Dragonball Z and has a weird action figure dude of one of the characters and is talking about it all the time and I want to melt his little action figure on the stove.

Let me know if anyone at Olympus gets their mission call to Kobe! (or anywhere in Japan honestly) One of the girls in the Kitarokko ward went to stay with family in New York and sent me an email about how weird it was to run into missionaries who didn`t speak Japanese haha. I really do feel like being here on a mission in Japan is evidence that God knows me better than I know myself. I love Japan and even though I never would have called myself here, I am so glad that Heavenly Father did. I love just being out in Japan and experiencing life here on P-Day and Elder Duren tells me he likes to sleep on P-Day. LAME! I can sleep when I am dead! I love this country and I love these people even though they are super hard to teach the gospel and not as receptive generally as I would hope, I really do love them and I love Japan!

COOL THING! so now that I am better at Japanese I really enjoy reading the scriptures in Japanese. In english, the scriptures are written in a very archaic older english, which sometimes makes them harder to understand. However, the Japanese scriptures are written in more day to day Japanese and sometimes are much easier to understand I feel. 

Someone once told me Japanese is similar to Hebrew but I really have no idea if it is or not.

ANYWAY, I love you all and really hope you have the most fantabulous week ever!

Love,

ペース長老

Mission Tour

This week was the mission tour, or as they told it to us missionaries the mission inspection from Salt Lake. Elder Whiting from the Quorum of the Seventy and the Asia North area presidency came and had a few conferences and what not and it`s so funny because everyone made such a huge deal out of it, and I just hated feeling like we all kind of were told to put on our brightest smiles and wear our nicest clothes and stuff and just pretend like everything is wonderful for the general authority visit, when really I wasn`t feeling to good about things at the time of the conference. Although Elder Whiting did congratulate me on being a `mighty Olympus Titan` so there is that.

 

People on the mission often make bold and sometimes I feel untrue statements about missionary work. like `if you aren`t seeing success it`s because you don`t have enough faith, you`re not focused enough, you`re a bad missionary, etc.` and I just want to be like, no, you can`t know anything about another persons life, mission, effort, etc. `who am I to judge another when I walk imperfectly....` I know people mean well when they say that, but I feel like I`m already bothered enough that I`m not seeing success to have the mission leaders try and tell me it`s because my faith is lacking or that I`m not relying on the Lord enough. give me a break. God`s plan for me is different than his plan for you and even though I didn`t see hardly any success these past couple weeks I am working just as hard as any other missionary who sees 20 baptisms a month in Ghana! grrr! OH, other pet peeve about weird things mission leaders say. `exact` obedience. There is no such thing. I mean waking up at 6:30 isn`t `exact` obedience, it is just obedience. nobody can be `exactly` obedient because that would mean perfection, and we are obviously not perfect.

 

Everything this week just seemed to fall through. Investigators would call us the day of and cancel the lesson, not show up to their appointments, not answer their phones, and even our meal appointment with the members fell through for tonight. I feel like everything that can go wrong, either is going wrong, or will go wrong shortly. Really missionary work is so frustrating because people don`t like to change. Japanese people (particularly the older generation) are very traditional and don`t like the idea of changing anything. Many people have trouble while investigating because being Christian in Japan is odd, or strange to people who know largely nothing about christianity. At the conference Sister Whiting shared an interesting thing. It was the result of a survey done in both America and Japan as to who the most important people in History were. The results for America were Jesus Christ as number one, and also Joseph Smith made it in at 55. The results for Japan were Jesus Christ at number 62, and surprisingly Walt Disney is in the top 20... Basically people here have no idea what Christianity actually is. It is as weird to them as Buddhism or Shinto seem to us.

 

I wish I had more positive things to share, but this week wasn`t all that great. We went out dendo-ing (proselyting) with Asada Kyodai from the ward who really helped, we visited various inactives and I once again was reminded that my Japanese level of speaking and understanding is TERRIBLE! But I also have recognized lately that I have such little confidence in speaking Japanese because most of the time I don`t even know if what I am trying to say makes any sense, and so I speak hesitantly, not because I doubt the things I want to say, but because I don`t trust my Japanese as much as I would like to. I`m working on that as well as a trillion other things.

 

This email sounds really whiney probably and maybe that`s true, but basically I know that I am supposed to be here being as perfect as I can be serving The Lord that I love. Whether that results in me baptizing 5000000 people or not it doesn`t really matter, I`m just here to do what God wants me to do. And yes I have a useless annoying companion, I can`t speak this language like I want, but overall things are just fine and I am well.

 

Love,

ペース長老