Food From Babylon

Hello All!

So if you haven't realized by now (and I may have said this already) but I kind of just write a list of things to say each week so thats why its random and weird. First off, every friday night we get food from the outside world like Pizza or something but that doesn't really matter I just really like what people call it, "Food from Babylon"! Also this week we remembered that in Japan people do things called seizaing which is basically just sitting on your feet in the most uncomfortable positions ever! So we started doing duing each of our "Language Study" times trying to seiza the whole time. This led into people not being able to walk for long periods of time and then we asked one of our teachers about it who informed us that no one really seizas for long anymore so that practice ended. Also I think of something that is pretty neat is that we are always talking about getting investigators through missionaries giving English classes (I believe that is the reason we have all the progressing investigators we do have). It shall be super interesting to find out what that is like and if I will be doing English classes for Japanese people. Quite a good possibility in fact. Speaking of investigators our life is SUPER focused on them. Every study time whether it be Personal, companion, language or whatever is focused on what the next lesson will hold which is good but grows tiring when you don't even know the language and are trying to get yourself prepared but nevertheless. To answer your question father only language-oriented classes (kinda) are SYL and that is only teacher SYL not us constantly speaking the language but it is encouraged. We have started even during our teaching practices amongst each other in class to speak Japanese. So basically I have a feeling I led you astray with thinking that it was SYL all the time although my district is going to try to SYL all day today. Clayton Choro and I haven't really started yet though. We have also come up with a new way to judge time, they are called MTUs (Missionary Time Units). Nothing makes sense here with time, you never really know what time it is or what day it is cause it all blurs together so MTUs expand and contract based on how slow the day seems to be going. Some day I will figure out what this means. Basically its our way of avoiding saying the same thing everyone says that "The days feel like weeks and the weeks like days."


So apparently i'm taking from the forwarded Mandy email that she is your favorite missionary......excuse me!!!! Youngest=Favorite thank you very much! ;-) Let's see if you get more emails from your second favorite missionary (If I'm even that) ;-)

So to answer your question a little better pa. We basically have our days separated in a few things.
Personal Study - We do spiritual study of some sort of our choosing (in English)
Companionship Study - We study as a companionship, basically lesson planning goes here
Language Study - Basically we study the language how we wish alone
Group Language Study - Teacher teaches us the language
TALL (Technology Assisted Language Learning) - Computer program that lets you practice the language (Probably written by a BYU CS major, SO MANY bugs!)
Anyway that is the bulk of it.

Also something crazy, I'm still getting used to saying "Watashi wa Matsujitsu seito iesu kirisuto kyokai no senkyoshi desu" (I am a missionary from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). Crazy!!!

So more updates. Last Thursday Whetto Shimai left to go and get married (soon to be Smith Shimai) so we haven't taught Kudosan since then which was when we committed her which is FREAKY!!! Morimotosan has been just coasting along, we got him to commit to come to church with us on Sunday so that is cool, I hope he does it and his date is set for a seek from next Wednesday! So close, fake investigator but I'm still excited. Next lesson we have is on Word of Wisdom and Chastity, can you notice we put those off? :-) Hopefully it goes well. I'm kinda terrified of what will happen but he has been faithful. Tomorrow we get our profiles of becoming investigators ourselves so we will become progressing investigators for each other so that should be interesting. Other than that the investigators have been fairly quiet. We have had a few subs that we have taught and those lessons went well but they were one lesson and then no more progress.

Yesterday we had this talk thing with my whole zone so all Japanese Elders and Sisters which was THE COOLEST!!!! So we go in there and its different than a lot of meetings because most aren't just our zone so they introduce everything in Japanese and then we have this speaker who says he wants to give us his conversion story, he was Japanese. So he first goes over some vocabulary with us which was Buddhist Oriented and family oriented. So basically he gets contacted in high school by the missionaries. Takes the discussions decides to pray but first had to pray to Buddha to say he was going to praying to Christ for a few weeks to try it out (I thought that was funny) and then he decides to get baptized (interesting not adulthood starts at 20 in Japan not 18). So he has to get his parents permission and his dad freaks out, runs into the kitchen grabs a knife holds it against his stomach and says he will kill himself if this speaker goes through with it. Basically he prays about it. Has basically a vision which was legit and a half! Then through a course of items he is baptized, serves a mission, works for the MTC then had his brother come to allow the district he taught to "practice" on this nonmember brother and at the end of the lesson these MTC missionaries committed his brother to baptism and the brother accepted. Awesome!!! One of the coolest experiences I have had here (oh and the whole thing was in japanese and I understood).

Anyway no time. Love you all.


Random request, as we have been working with the Book of Mormon this week during some of my discretionary study time (they actually don't really give us this but sometimes I need a break) I looked up Elder Holland's talk from a few conferences back about the Book of Mormon called "Safety for the Soul" super awesome, everyone should go read it again.