My beloved Family and Friends,
This week was a long one but it was good.
Saturday
Elder Bates and I have worked hard on our morning runs by telling everyone we meet hello or good morning. This morning we told one man who was what you might call a "usual". Only this morning he told us that there had been an earthquake and they were expecting a tsunami...well that made us giddy on up home. Thankfully we weren't affected at all, not to mention it was pretty small comparatively. For lunch we went to a tsukemen shop it was pretty good, it is one of our favorites. Then we did some shopping we went to Loft to look at pens, and the Star Wars exhibit. Then to this hidden mall above the train station that sister Wada helped us find, it is a pretty classy store. You can buy a suit made to you (I actually forgot what the word is in English). It was pretty cool. When we got back to the apartment the assistants were in a buzz which is weird for a p-day. Then I was called over, it turns out at the mission presidents seminar, president learned a lot and now wants to make so,e big changes to our mission standards, which means changing a lot of information, such as; an app, the portal, how we gather statistics, and where we report....it is a lot of work. Not to mention he also has asked that either I or Elder Yamada go to each zone conference and give two presentations! Oh, and this all needs to be finished by Thursday because that is the first one. Talk about stressful. Thankfully after all that news I distressed by writing home, so sorry last week was so short. Then we began getting all the work done for the change. I finished a new baptismal date reporting system which I had been working on all week. Around 10 president and sister Wada came back from one of the stake conferences they were asked to go to. Last week we all gave them money and they purchased ties for us in Korea because you can get them really cheap there. Like handmade silk ties for 10 dollars! So we all got to pick one out of their selection!
Sunday
The night before I got a message from an investigator in one of the other companion ships in the area telling me that he was coming to church! So my companionship sat with him and Josey at church! It was a great time. Sadly Josey had to leave halfway through for another yotte. After church we sang in choir "Angels we have heard on high" it is way weird singing it because last time I was singing the hymn I was in Japan and had no earthly idea what I was saying, now most of it makes sense. Interesting how that works out. After church we are lunch and weekly planned which took forever but we were able to set up appointments for most the rest of the week. Boo yah! After dinner we worked on another musical number for zone meeting on Tuesday. I don't know what it is and having missionaries sing. Then we went out to dendo. With this new swagy dendo style being released we decided to give it a shot, and boy oh boy does it work miracles...literally. We stopped two men and talk to each for 45 minutes it was just perfect. We showed one man the Easter video from two years ago, we are so fortunate to be able to use iPads to hasten the work, sometimes a simple 3 minute video can touch people in ways we simply cannot. After we got back president told me I could be leaving the Honbu as soon as the 3 of December! Hallelujah! With some extra time at night I decided to relax by doing some of that good'ole family history work. Or basically detective work.
Monday
We woke up to a big problem with our statistical report for the mission. The date for tracking ended...today. So elder Leach and Yamada worked on that all morning and since I am not a ton of help when it comes to excel I studied. Then worked on a statistical app for the mission. It was a slow day. We also worked on getting the new way of counting contacts working for president. It is a lot of work, but it is pretty neat.
Tuesday
In the morning we had a zone meeting which was in the church it was way boss. Lots of mogis. We got into a good motion where it felt good. We had a normal office day, it was pretty chill for the most part. We just worked on various projects. They are still doing construction so that is kind of annoying. Then we had dinner with Tarokuni! He is awesome. He was a pianist in New York City but came back because of an expired visa. He has a real tender heart. After dinner we played the piano and sang because that is basically the only way to teach him.
Wednesday
Staff meeting was held in the Wada's living room because of the construction, comfy chairs yoshu! We found out afterwards that You can't take your bike through the trains anymore and there was an elder emergency transferring because another elder who was sick was coming back! So I went with the assistants to go and pick up them which took about an hour via car. So we put the bike in the car and then I went on the trains with them to make sure things were sorted out. It took us about an hour to get there by car but only 12 minutes to get home by train... Now we see why missionaries don't have cars in Japan. I took the companion of the elder who was emergency transferring to Gioza, then we dendoed in the park where we met a man who is from South Carolina. He was pretty nice and had never met us too! Then we went back to the office to drop him off so he could go to the airport to pick up his new companion. Then we had some work to do through the the mission. Then eikaiwa! It was fun, we just talked about color idioms which was confusing and fun for everyone.
Thursday
I have a really sore through the so sister Wada dropped off ginger, lemons and honey and told me to use it to make tea for my throat. It worked so well, cleared me right up! So president decided instead of having us go to all of the conferences we should just skype in so we waited and waited but it turned out that we weren't needed. After the work we went to sports night but I had the feeling we should go dendo in the park. So I grabbed elder Mukai and we changed and went. There we found a man who was playing the harp! In the park, I had talked to him before but he had showed little interest, but this time he was all ears. It was great we handed him a Book of Mormon and set up a follow up appointment. Then at night it was just Elder Yamada, and Elder Leach in the apartment which was pretty strange because I haven't been in an apartment with less then 5 people in it for a while.
Friday
Walking up with a sore throat always kinds of sets the tone for the day, but you know what. A study of Christ-like attributes is really helping out with that. Positive thinking...buzzz.. Then worked on creating a mircle collection page for the website. It is a lot more complex then I was anticipating which basically means it took forever. We had dinner early, McDonalds, home of the mega mac. Then District meeting, this weeks was especially funny because Elder Mukai basically gave interpretive dance to the whole thing. It was hilarious!!! I really like this district we all seem to work well together.
Saturday
Well it would normally have been out p-day except we had stake conference and we might have had to help out with a blood drive so it made things a bit complicated. So we just moved it to Monday. We worked on the excel file for the key indicators. Turns out excel really isn't that bad. It is just a lot of formulas but coding is more difficult. Stake conference was really good president wada really pushed for more missionary work in the stake. The evening session he talked about the miracles seen throughout the mission using Facebook. He used a powerpoint I helped him make it was kind of neat to see what happens to all the crazy project we have around the office.
Sunday
We had stake conference in the morning, it was great. I stayed awake! That was a miracle in and of itself. When Japanese people speak in church they use a lot more kaigo (formal language). Which isn't normally used a whole lot. Afterwards we had weekly planning, it was kind of long but we got it finished. Then we had to "emergency clean" the office. Turns out someone really big was coming and we needed to clean up....no idea who though. We then made bread for the bishop and headed over, sadly he wasn't home but we were able to leave a note. We then housed around and met a really sweet 92 year old woman! She was so kind! However she was a little crazy and asked if I wanted to eat some of a plant with her, i did but i think it was mint but it dried my throat out pretty bad. We came home early and then housed around the church. We found an awesome lady who came outside and wanted to learn more! It was such a neat miracle #thankful.
Well that was my busy week. Sorry it is kind of long, but there is a lot of neat things going on in the mission!
愛しています！
ダン長老
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