Third to last

Hey family! Third to last letter, how crazy is that! Still really hasn't occurred to me that it really is almost over. Again another week of nothing too eventful. You would think I would have gotten better at all this writing jazz by now but not really. Hope your guys` trip went well. Mandy definitely has a fun mission area. Ha. To be perfectly honest I don't know what we would do if we all came to Japan together. I would be fun for me just being here but don't know about you guys. Oh well. So lets see. Monday was P-day so that was pretty chillaxed. Also Monday night when we were housing we met this super mean guy that didn't say no but just was way rude about everything. He used a lot of hard Japanese so I ended up passing it to Elder K. Little by little Elder K got irritated and then the guy said the Book of Mormon was just good for firewood(which totally reminded me I think its Moroni that talks about how the actual gold plates are worth nothing, its the record that is off worth) and that may be the closest I have ever seen my companion to punching someone. He was so angry at that point. We ended up stopping there and just biking to the coast and drank "orange juice"(They are like the tiny oranges, I cant remember what they are called in English)(which is the thing Elder K's home "state" is known for). Strange night. Then the next day was splits in Sanjo. Spent most of the day at district meeting, service for the branch president, and seminary. Oh well. We had a BBQ with the branch which was fun. Japanese BBQs and American BBQs are quite different but still good and fun. You probably got some pictures from O-kyodai of that. (How many pictures has that man sent at this point anyway?) And that was basically it. This week the Zone leaders investigator is getting baptized so that will be fun. He's a way good guy, already like a member. Then next Sunday Elder K and I are talking in church, the next week probably bear my testimony in testimony meeting, and the next week report in Sacrament meeting. Wow! Lets see. I got your *You put up the good fight, you have finished the course* letter. It was funny because I read it and then Elder K looked at me and said, *Its a don:t get trunky letter isn:t it?* *No, its a good job, you did it letter* *Did it!? You aren:t done* Then he banned me from reading it and just started mumbling about you after that. It was way funny but it was a very nice letter thank you parents. So I couldn:t get the go ahead with going to Sado weekly so that was too bad. We have gotten things lined up so we can Skype lesson him on Sundays but its getting kinda hard to find time to do it. Also President B has all but told me that missionaries are going to Sado but doesn:t look like it will happen this next transfer. Therefore another like 8 weeks. Sigh. Nothing you can do I guess. So I guess thats it. Until next week.

Translation

Hello family, there are only a few of these reports left aren't there. This week had it slow and boring parts and its fun and exciting parts. No one wants to hear about the slow parts so yay for sharing the exciting parts. So the first one was Monday night. I was finally able to eat dinner with a member I have always wanted to. Brother Yoshida! Why do you ask? One sentence. The man translated the Book of Mormon into Japanese! No he is not Alma O Taylor but he did the big rehaul of the Book of Mormon back in the day. He is awesome! Way funny too. We spent the night eating delicious food and talking about his adventures in translating and other crazy things he did. Its just not a normal conversation when you hear people say, “When I was translating as Pres. Hinckley dedicated the Fukuoka Temple...” But also just plain funny things like, “So you know the whole, ‘I Nephi being born of goodly parents...’scripture？” “Of course”“Its actually ‘I COMMA Nephi’” “Ok？” “We spent a day trying to figure out how to translate that comma. Turns out it doesn't mean anything” And for the record, “This is my beloved son, hear him”　Also apparently took a day to translate. So that was fun. Then on our way home got a call from an unknown number which is always kinda fun as a missionary. It turned out to be a member of the Sado branch's branch presidency. After expressing pleasantries “So.....I want you to come to Sado this week” turns out one of the Old investigators we visited last time has started coming to church and he wanted him to hear the lessons again. So that led us to yesterday when we met the man. I-san. He came to church and it was wonderful. He is a very private, quiet man but I like him. We did a lesson with him just to figure out how much interest he has and he actually has quiet a bit. Already believes in God and Jesus Christ and apparently he had a baptism date until his older sister and mom were against it. We’re still not sure how we will teach him but we will find the way. Especially after his prayer. He gave one of the most sincere prayers I have heard an investigator give let alone a first lesson investigator. Asking for the power to change himself for the better and that his sister and mom and recognize that change and accept it. Way cool. So yay for new investigator. Other than that not a whole lot to report. Rest of the week was fairly boring. Got my going home packet from Tokyo which included flight plans, still haven't checked it with the others but probably the same, way crazy that its so close. Cant believe it. Other than that not a whole lot to report. I:m sure you already realized this but as of.....well yesterday for you. I have been a missionary for 2 years! Crazy right! This little while will just fly by I think. I will probably email you later today when I can look at both of the flight plans to tell you if they are the same. Probably are. Get home at like 5 or something. Sounds like you all have a fun week. Keep having fun. Well thats all for this week.

Laptops and Google Maps

So this was quite the week. I feel like there is a lot to say but also not sure what to say but I will do my best. So Monday was the day of doom, we became Tokyo mission. There could be heard wailing and gnashing of teeth as the Niigata zone missionaries woke up. Then we just went about our day normally which included a nap which was WAY nice! Anyway we headed to the church that night. I had my interview with President B which was fine, he is VERY different than president R, much more business man. And then from there I tried to leave to go out and work but the assistants had already learned too much so they told me to set up all the laptops before I left. After 5 minutes I had it all over. So time for me to nerd out here. So we have these pretty old laptops that are falling apart which is basically what I expected and of course they gave our zone the garbage. Then they have 4G Mobile HotSpots (I said nerd out right?) So put simply they pump through money like no ones business. Anyway. That made it for Monday. Oh and President B basically told me Elder K is training next transfer, there are so many missionaries coming and only a few Japanese missionaries to begin with. Poor K-choro.But anyway. So the next day was zone conference which turned out to be different than I expected. It was basically the same 6 hour talk that they give new missionaries coming in. Which I think is kinda brutal to make them go through but is fine because they have minds for molding. When you take in another mission you cant treat them like new missionaries because, well they aren't. I realize normally the senior comp teaches a lot of the practical stuff but that's not the luxury we have here. Up until now there has been no districts in Tokyo mission, this is their first one and I don't think they quite understand. When Elder M went to Tokyo for meetings this week he said President B was in awe of the stats. No babies, basically no Aaronic priesthood, 4 member branches, etc. Sigh. Anyway life goes on. The joke that I always tell Elder K when he is complaining about something is, "well I go home in a month so..." he never finds it funny. :-) The rest of the week was super humid and rainy, I miss my arid Utah. Feels like we have spent the whole week wet. I also ended up teaching Eikaiwa alone because all the other missionaries were in Tokyo for meetings. Oh yeah and then the new sister that came with me to Niigata got suddenly transferred to a spanish branch(yep, Tokyo has those) because she can speak spanish. Met again with H-san. Again he came to the lesson whiskey in hand and as we were kinda chatting before the lesson he told us he had looked up the church online and he asked us if we really didn't drink alcohol. So the lesson changed to Word of Wisdom. By the end up the lesson he said he would rather go to the Terrestrial kingdom than give up his whiskey. How depressing is that! His real problem is he has no faith so to be honest he has no reason to follow. He thinks that drinking alcohol is perfectly healthy. We will give him a little more time considering he is the only thing we got right now as far as investigators go. The laptops are cool. There is only one in our apartment so its kinda a pain to try have 4 people use. K-choro doesn:t even touch it. Yesterday I was showing him how to work on the online area book (I seriously wanted to shout halleluah when I heard that existed) and he told me that it was the first time he had touched that computer. It isn:t as stripped down as I thought it would be but still....yeah. Although I was able to put all the LAs and Active members on a Google map within like 15 minutes of work which we had been planning to put pins in a map we have on the wall for awhile but it would have been like a 72 hour project and this map you click the marker and it shows you all the details about that member. I:m kinda super prideful of it. Just saying. Yesterday we went home teaching with the district president who may have become my favorite member. He is way funny. He was talking about these mission meetings that he will need to go to from now on and he was talking about how the mission president, stake presidents, temple president, etc will all be there. All old men with there big old man glasses on and then the way he explained it it sounded like he would be in the corner kicked back in his chair as the 35 year old punk kid and as he put it *Keyless* *everyone has keys but me!* Ha. probably his favorite phrase. *I don:t have keys* We were praise him for being such a great leader and he would respond with *Its easy. Branch president is hard, they have keys!* Ha. I feel like I will use him in a talk someday when I need to talk about priesthood keys. Just not quite sure what I:m suppose to learn from his talk. Well talk to you next week

From the Sendai Mission into the Tokyo Mission

Hello family! How was all of your peoples week!? So this week marked the last week as part of the Sendai Mission so as of today we are officially Tokyo mission. As always it feels like I didn't get that much accomplished this week. We tried to visit a billion LAs but a lot of them were not home and some had moved. Its been a while since I have met an actual LA when visiting them randomly without an appointment. Not sure what to do if I actually met one. So transfers got a little more interesting with one of the third transfer sisters here suppose to become trainer as of President R's transfer call, but then all these things happened without hearing any details and that sister got transferred out and the other set of sisters in Niigata got another bean. Crazy. In the Sendai mission every sister but two is in a three-some with two of those three as new missionaries. This last transfer also opened up like three areas with new types of missionaries (elders going to sister only areas and vice-versa). The work moves on. From there there is not too much to report. Tonight we have interviews with President B and then tomorrow is the zone conference with Tokyo. We have gotten a call from the Tokyo assistants and that was weird. The broadcast, well last week for you but yesterday for us, yesterday was awesome. If you didn't watch it, you should. Church is moving forward with this missionary work thing. Way cool. I'm already an old style missionary with moving forward with internet missionary work and the such. Should be a busy week so well see how it goes. That's crazy with the iPads with the new missionaries. I really feel since yesterday when we watched that broadcast that I am already an obsolete missionary. Already too old, throw him out, bring in the new type. I should be excited and I kinda am but kinda don't like it a lot too. Church comes out and says that the way we are doing missionary work right now won't work but that's all I've got and all I have done. I know it hasn't been a waste but still. I hope you get what I'm trying to say.

Final time with President and Sister R

Hey family! How are all of you this day! So this week has been a busy one. Started off Monday getting ready for zone conference and the FHE that night. Before FHE I had a temple recommend interview with president which was interesting. He used the phrase, "This isnt your final interview but if it were I would say...." and then say something to me. It was nice to have that time with president. He gave me my "white book" which has all my returning stuff. So yeah. That was sad to know it was the last one but yeah. From there we ate together and just had a jolly old time. We had various musical numbers. It was interesting to sing our, Ill go where you want me to go with the version that Sister Stubbs made because it was kinda sad but the last verse was sweet. Then we had ice cream which went to like 9:40. Then the next day was zone conference. That went well I think. I was put in the translation position which was basically all Japanese to English. I have secretly always wanted to do the translation but yeah. Man is that harder than it looks. Its not that I dont understand them it just that its hard to listen and speak at the same time, let alone put it in naturally sounding English. Oh well, we had the area doctors there and they were very nice about my translation. Its kinda funny because I knew who was wearing the headsets so I could play with them. Mostly Sister Rasmussen. President always set me up good when he would talk about his wife. She knows he is talking about her but not what he is saying so her reactions are very delayed. I also had my "Last Testimony" which was kindof an erry experience. Especially since I still remember my first zone conference in that same building over a year and a half ago with my zone leader giving his last testimony. We gave President and Sister and R a book we put together of pictures of us and little notes to them. Then it was over. Then president and sister R stood up in the front and said they wanted to shake hands with and hug us. Kinda a strange feeling. Thankfully I have mothers emotions so no crying from me. Strangely the biggest tomboy sister I have ever met, Sister S, just lost it. She just hugged Sister R for like 3 minutes straight crying into her shoulder. A touching sight. Then we cleaned up and everyone left, as I walked out of the church and I looked back and waved goodbye to President and Sister R for the last time and that was it, I dont know the next time I will see them. The rest of the week was more uneventful than the rest. We got passed an investigator for the sisters. He is a man so they try not to teach men and they gave him to us. Hes an interesting guy. His name is Hさん. Now the whole lesson I thought his name was H. Very unfortunate name I thought but oh well. Still find his name very dangerous to say. We still arent sure why he is meeting with us. He absolutely LOVES beer. As he walked into the lesson he was finishing a beer and we had hardly said "amen" in the closing prayer before he opened a new one. And this lesson was at 11:30. The Word of Wisdom will be fun. Yesterday at church Brother S from Aizu came to Niigatas church. He is the first counselor in the mission presidency and so he is making the rounds but it was nice to meet him one last time. He even mentioned Elder K and I in his talk as the miracles of missionary work because we could actually speak Japanese now. Ha. This week doesnt have anything too crazy. Next week will be the interesting one. Monday night we have interviews with President B, the next day is another zone conference where we are to put up to speed on what Tokyo is all about. Then Friday is zone training meeting. Oh and this Sunday is a satelite broadcast from somewhere at the Niigata church so that means Joetsu the farthest area in our zone will come three times to Niigata. Probably going to cost them over 200 dollars. Yay for effciency! Oh and today was transfer calls. Of course no changes to me but some of the people of the zone escaped the switch to Tokyo and a few more new missionaries are being thrown into TOkyo three days after coming to the Sendai mission.

The Bullet Train

Hello family.So we end another busy week. Unfortunately it wasnt so busy in the ways I would like it to be. Tuesday we went to Sanjo for district meeting which was not that exciting until we came home. So in my apartment above my desk is my bucket list pertaining to my life as a missionary. One of the things was to go to Sado. Checked off last week. Another was to ride the shinkansen, or as you would know it as, the bullet train. So we took that back and it was way fast and smooth and 13 minutes ha. But it was a good experience. We tried to focus more on finding a new investigator this week which didn't end up with any results so the end of the week our numbers looked like crap. Also worked a lot on this Excel spreadsheet of all the members in Niigata and organizing them in such a way as we can use it better. Let it be known that I may have not really touched a computer in two years but I still dislike Microsoft. I have wanted to run my head into the wall a thousand times working on that although this week we talked with the Elders Quorum president and he asked me if I could make excel do something and oh how that became a problem. You dont challenge me to something like that. Although I realized how much I miss free use of the internet. In the end I wasnt able to do it but yeah. Other than that really nothing interesting this week. I had a good birthday. K長老 took me out to dinner and I received 3 cakes, and all that jazz. Even some crappy singing of Happy Birthday made it feel like home. Kinda funny presents. Tie and "P-day shirt", you do realize we wear normal missionary clothes on p-day right? But I could feel the love and to be honest, no offense to you mother, but I really was impressed with your tie choice, I really like that tie. So yeah. Tonight is our family home evening with president and sister R. And before that K長老 and I each have 45 minute interviews with president for our temple recommends. Either he thinks we are big sinners or he is going to use it as an opportunity to give us a "pre-final interview" since he wont be there for the real one, half excited, half terrified. So that shall be fun. So we will keep working. This week is zone conference so that shall be fun. The last zone conference. And then it will just e back to the old grind. It will be interesting to see how the switch off of missions is going to be. I thought it might be a little hectic but as things are going now we are just going to become an island at that point. We have heard zero about the switch over. I guess there is not much to say. Im assuming President B will come do a zone conference type thing real quick to introduce us to Tokyo mission and meet the assistants and stuff. Then after that basically going to tokyo to end the mission. Shall be interesting. So I hope all is well with you guys. Talk to you later.

Blind Soccer

Really no time today so no time to fix mistakes. Hello people of the Americas and people living on other other continents. Another week is behind us. It was an interesting week more than I would call it a exciting week but whatever works. We did various things. FHE with members and visiting a ton of LAs. Anyway. Elder K found his first potential investigator which was nice. I think it may have helped his faith some. Had zone training meeting which was nice not to have to stress about and just sit and listen. Also funny how small this zone is. Ok this is where it gets interesting. This gets us to Saturday. So since I got here I have been talking back and forth with this lady and trying to get our two schedules to meet. Well anyway we finally were able to get a time together on Saturday. Well the first thing that was weird was that she wanted to meet at a shrine but she is a female so we would have to meet outside anyway so we agreed to this. Well most shrines are inside but this one wasn't. So we go into this building and they give us visitor passes and we are walked through this place with a ton of incense buring and people meditating in the hall and lots of statues. So she explains her religions basic beliefs and talks about how you can be any religion and also her religion at the same time which makes no sense to me. Anyway, I was about ready to leave when she sat us down in this normal room and asked us what we believe and of course I cant pass up this so we gave her the 10 minute version of the restoration and she already has the Book of Mormon so yeah. And my goodness and then on the way out they gave us little care packages. And their book of doctrine in English. Then we went to the welfare center and played Blind Soccer which is exactly what it sounds like, playing soccer with no sight. First strange thing is that no one at blind soccer was actually blind. So this is how it works. You put a blind fold on and the soccer ball has like rock sounding things inside so it rattles when it rolls and then you have a seeing person who yells from behind the net to tell you where to go. Sounds hard right? Now try doing it with half your hearing gone in one ear! Actually surprisingly I could do it. Do I think the broken ear made it harder, yes but I still have directional abilities. And actually the majority of the time we helped the official Niigata team practice for their tournament next week so we were allowed to see. Way interesting though. Then finally yesterday. It was on my list of things to do before I went home and I did it. We went to Sado. That would be the island off of Niigata's coast. We woke up and 4;30, left the port at 6, arrived at 8;30, Took a bus and got to the church at 9. Adventure, right!? It was way interesting though. There were a total of 6 people there including the two of us and one non-member. They all have to give talks like every other week so they were way excited when we came and made us give talks. Sado is amazing though. Way beautiful, cool members, and goodish dendo. Kinda has always been a joke in this mission but way awesome. They have three or four potential investigators here. Thats more than I have in Niigata. So after church we just went around with the first councilor and we visited LAs and PIs and all that jazz. Way fun. So that kinda does it for this week. I got the birthday package this week so thanks for that. Still haven't opened the wrapped stuff but used some of the other stuff to celebrate Elder K's B-day which was yesterday. We will try to make it a fun day.