Good afternoon sports fans,
It is now the middle of Golden Week here in Japan. It started last Wednesday and goes to this Wednesday. They have a bunch of little holidays like Green Day and Kid`s Day. It`s mostly just a time where the busy Japanese people get a week off from work. It`s getting hot here in flippin` 豊田. We actually had a really productive week and a lot happened. So who wants to hear about it?
The week started off last P-Day before a member appointment at the Ichikawa family`s home. The four of us were going to visit a recent convert on the way there, but plans changed when we saw a bunch of young guys playing basketball. In order to decide what to we played a game of ``jan ken po`` (Japanese version of rock, paper, scissors). In the end playing B-ball one and we crashed a 14 year olds B-Day party and played four missionaries vs 9 kids. It was tons of fun, but we showed up kind of sweaty and dirty to our member appointment. The member appointment was super fun. I love the 市川 family.
We had another fanatastic lesson this week with our Brazilian investigator Fabricio. He started reading The Book of Mormon and told us that since he has work off due to it being Golden Week this week he wants to ``catch up`` on reading it. Awesome! He is such a cool guy and we love having the opportunity to teach him.
We had a super sketchy experience this week. We found a new investigator last week through housing and had an appointment on Wednesday. When we showed up to the appointment a different guy answered the door. We were supposed to teach a young father and his wife. The guy who answered the door was not our man. We started asking the guy about what happened to the people inside the apartment. ``Did they move?`` ``Do you know them?`` ``Are you related?`` To all of these questions he answered, ``No.`` We had one more question up our sleeve. By the door was a name plaque of our investigator so we asked him about it. When we did he tried taking the name plaque off! Weird right? Turns out out our investigator had magic powers because he seems to have disappeared into thin air.
We housed that same danshi later that week and found another investigator and had a great first lesson with her this afternoon. It was probably one of the best first lessons I have ever taught. She had lots of questions and her kids were in and out of the lesson and it was fantastic. I love teaching families! We also had another miracle with a small familiy this week on the street. A young father was walking towards us with a little baby in his papoose on his chest and I thought to myself, ``If I want to teach families I need to talk to this young father.`` I was about to say こんにちは but then he stopped and talked to us about coming to church. He said it is close to his house and always wanted to see what we do in there. We invited him to church since we couldn`t get a next appointment. On Sunday after church he CAME! We ended up teaching him about Christ and the beginning of the Plan of Salvation. Where are the miracles coming from? Heaven... Probably...
Last but not least, it looks like we`ll be having a baptism on Sunday. We taugth our investigator Takahashi about tithing this week which was difficult because it was my first time teaching it. So we did an object lesson I learned from Elder Moretti. We bought 10 candy bars and gave them to him and said it was because he was so awesome and was following commitments. He was shocked at the blessings, but then we asked if we could have one back. He said of course because he just got 10 from us. When he gave it back we dumped three more bags of chocolate as ``blessings from heaven`` on him. It was pretty fun. He said tithing would be hard, but he`ll try to keep it. He has his baptismal interview on Friday so hopefully all goes well.
Sorry this is a long e-mail, but a lot of cool stuff went down this past week. I hope that you are all doing great wherever you are in this world. This e-mail is getting sent to the US, Bahrain, New Zealand, and England. I thank all of you.
スピードと天使
堅城長老
Pictures!!
Pic 1- Everyone flies fish kites for Golden Week and Kids Day. One fish for every member of the family.
Pic 2- Cinco de Mayo in Japan
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