It's a dark rainy day in NoNAMi. (Hope you get the joke). We've been here for a week and life pretty crazy here. We haven't had a whole lot of time to work quite yet. Pulled into a lot of meetings and didn't
have much time to dendo. I spent a lot of my first day learning about our zone and current investigators and learning how to dendo here. I've also been able to meet quite a few members here as well and they
seem pretty nice. We are in what can be best described as the suburbs
of Nagoya. We are still technically part of Nagoya City, but during the height of the day no one is on the streets because they all commute into the more central part of the city. At night things liven up a bit, so from here we are just going to have to work hard.
On Thursday night coming back home from an investigator lesson I blew my bike tire pretty bad and I couldn't get it fixed in the dark so we had to walk halfway across the area to get home, which only took about an hour. The tire was so messed up it caused me some grief for about two days because I kept finding holes and decided to just buy a new tube.
On Friday we had MLC and the primary focus was how to work better with members. The member missionary relationship in Japan feels really strained a lot of the time and we really want to improve it. The most
difficult thing is having members want to be involved with the missionaries. They often don't want us visiting, or don't want our help for service, or won't make the time to just sit in on a lesson and bear a simple testimony. The members are the most important part of the work of salvation so we really need their help. At our stake
conference on Sunday Elder Choi of the Quorum of the Seventy spoke on this very same principle. Every time a General Authority visit they always tell the members the same thing because there hasn't been much of a change. However, we are still trying.
On Saturday we had one of the strangest experiences ever. We were going to visit a former investigator who seemed to have a lot of potential. When we got there however the place was rather creepy. It seemed to be an old abandoned workshop that nobody had used for very long time. Just as we were leaving a man walked up and beckoned us over and we starting walking down the street and started telling us about how he had received some sort spiritual baptism. He took us to a coffee shop and proceeded to tell us that he heard the voice of God.
He then proceeded to tell us some crazy stuff telling us that we are wrong and that we can't be missionaries since we've never heard the voice of God. He was also making up and twisting scripture trying to prove his points. It was way weird and we will definitely not be going back anytime soon.
Right after that we got a phone call from the Mission President to go to the mission home because wanted us to be to a Stake Conference meeting that we weren't originally invited to. We rushed to get on the
subway and hurried pretty quickly to get to the mission home. When we got there there was about an hour left in the meeting and afterwards we were very confused because nobody needed us there. So we
essentially lost about three hours of our time that evening. The joys of being a zone leader in Meito Zone! Yeah we are still adjusting to it.
Finally last night I the pouring rain we met with a nice bloke from Blymouth, England who was a former investigator. It was nice to get to talk to someone from Blighty for a little bit. He didn't have much
interest in listening to our message, but he did tell us, "I like you Mormon missionaries. I believe that if the whole world was Mormon then it would be a better place."
Well I hope you have a great week and we'll being hearing from y'all later. Best of luck!
スピードと天使
堅城長老
写真
野並 (Nonami)
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