夷険一節＊一期一会: Happy New Year! (Week 48)

Happy New Year to everyone reading this email!

We had a great week this week (although pretty miserable stats....haha), and a lot of members helped us fill our time, because disturbing people's only real holiday and preaching about Christ during New Years in Japan.....is usually not the best idea. Especially not on the 31st and 1st....haha.

Instead of going through what we did, I want to talk about some members that we met with this week.

Hisaka family: Hisaka kyoudai is a third generation member--his grandparents were one of the first members in Japan and apparently they are way famous in the church! That makes their kids fourth generation! I've never met a fourth generation member in Japan!!

Hisaka Saori shimai, the Relief Society president, has a really cool conversion story--really cool to hear as a missionary, at least. She first met the missionaries on the street running right outside our apartment, really close to the church! The sisters invited her to Eikaiwa, she came, and the invited her to hear the lessons. After hearing the first three lessons or so she decided to stop meeting the missionaries, partly because she started a new job and got busy, and partly because she didn't want to listen anymore. Several years later, the AP's housed into her, and despite her rejecting them, they kept on visiting her! Hisaka shimai told us that she usually pretended to not be home when they came over! After a while, a member invited her over to dinner at their house--this member invited all of the YSA members in the ward regularly--and Hisaka shimai started to become friends with the young people in the ward. As she got to know them, she started to feel like she really wanted to become a part of the church and started seriously considering baptism. She also had a lot of questions about family--why family is even important in the first place--which were answered in her association with the church.

Ahh, I don't remember exactly how she decided to get baptized (I've heard so many conversion stories this past week), but I remember she told us that the night before her baptism, she started getting really bad, scared feelings about getting baptized, and she just knew that she really needed to read the Book of Mormon. So, she read the Book of Mormon for the whole night long, and when she got baptized she said that she truly felt through the Spirit that she had made the right decision.

But even cooler--her preparation to join the church had started way before she met the sister missionaries on the street by the church. One of her high school teachers was actually a member of the church!! Her last year of high school, that teacher gave her a "letter" that was actually draft of a talk that he was going to be giving in church, telling her that he was going to write her a letter but felt like he should give this to her instead. When she read it she didn't understand it at all, but she felt like it was something really important so she kept it safe and brought it with her when she moved to Nagoya. Then, many years later, as she was sitting in church, she heard the quote "no other success can compensate for failure in the home," and she felt like she had heard it before. She went back home and searched for the letter and found that the quote was written in that letter, along with many other quotes relating to family, including the family proclamation. The reason that this is so significant is that, she really didn't want a family, didn't think that family was important, and really wanted to know more about families.

Anyways, after she got baptized, she really wanted to tell this teacher that she had been baptized, so she went back to her home in Kyushu, only to find out that her teacher had just passed away days ago from cancer! Such a shock, right?! Super disappointed that she couldn't tell her teacher about the influence that he had had on her, she attended his funeral, and at the viewing she touched his face and whispered to him, "先生、バプテスマ受けましたよ (I got baptized!)." At that moment, she said, she saw the plan of salvation. She said that she can't describe it any other way--she saw the plan of salvation. Hisaka shimai told us that after that, there was simply no way that she could deny the Spirit or the existence of God.

And now, after many years, she is married to a member that she met when she went to Eikaiwa for the first time (he also came to all of her investigator lessons), is the Relief Society president, and has a beautiful family with 4 children!

Ruby shimai: Ruby is Filipino and was baptized 16 years ago in Gokiso. She's actually the mom of one of our investigators, Risa-chan, and she introduced another one our investigators, Cecille, to the church. She's awesome! Ruby shimai stopped coming to church shortly after being baptized, partly because she lost contact with her friends from church, and partly because she got married to a very anti-religion Japanese husband. Several years after their marriage, Ruby really wanted to go to a church so she started looking for churches, and after moving around to several churches she ended up at a Filipino church in Fukiage (close to Gokiso, in Nagoya). After going there for many years, she met Jerry kyodai, who is LDS, and they started talking about churches and religion. He asked her to come to our church and she agreed, if he would come to hers. So, Jerry kyodai went to the Filipino church, and the Ruby came to our ward in Meito. She said that when she came to church, she felt so happy, and she felt a special Spirit that she hadn't felt as strongly at her other churches.

Ruby shimai is now working towards finishing the Book of Mormon, going to the temple, and converting all of her friends.....(; Just kidding, but she is really an awesome missionary. Hopefully the next miracle will be Risa and Cecille's baptisms in the near future........(:

Ayuzawa family: Ayuzawa shimai graduated from a music conservatory in Tokyo in piano performance! (: She first found the church through Eikaiwa, and had a really good first impression of the missionaries. When she first started attending Eikaiwa, she decided that she would stop going as soon as they asked her to listen to the lessons.....but for some reason they never asked. Through the months and years, she became good friends with the missionaries and would have them over for dinner or parties at her house, and through various experiences, she felt like they were really people that lived their religion. After being friends with many pairs of missionaries, she met a missionary that she calls her "little brother" in the pre-mortal life, and when she heard that he was going home, she asked to be baptized by him! They started teaching her the lessons and they didn't finish the lessons in time for his departure, but she ended up getting baptized anyways.

Well, the church was an hour and a half away by train/bus from where the Ayuzawa family lived, so Ayuzawa kyodai (not yet a member) volunteered to drive his wife to church every sunday on his way to church, and after a while would start going to church with her sometimes. He didn't join the church in Tokyo where they were living, but he had really good experiences with Ayuzawa shimai's home teachers coming over and talking to him about his two favorite things--jazz and cars--for hours and hours.

Long story short, he got baptized 10 years after Ayuzawa shimai, because of the kindness and diligence of all those around him. My favorite part of his conversion story is that, he finally agreed to listen to the lesson after a missionary asked him if he wanted to be with his wife forever and he said yes (so cute!), even though he didn't really believe that was possible. After he finished taking all of the lessons, the missionaries asked him to be baptized on a specific date, and as he leaned over to look at the date (it was written on a piece of paper), he literally felt something push his head down, as if he were nodding "yes" to the baptismal date. And so he got baptized (:

Ok, I think that's all the stories I can tell.....that took a lot of time!

Here are some other highlights of the week:

Tuesday: We had "Christmas" zone conference, in which we, as Sister Training Leaders, gave some training on the weekly planning session. I was really worried about it being super boring, and I was stewing over an object lesson until Tuesday morning......until I finally came up with an idea! or, Heavenly Father gave me an idea.....(; It involved making really nasty cookies, and everybody thought it was really funny/a good analogy, so that made me happy (:

Thursday (New Years Day!): President Yamashita had us over to his house for dinner!!!!! Perks of being in Meito, I suppose? (; It was so much fun but really surreal, because I never thought that I would have dinner at the President's home again until the day I would be going home..... They fed us so much food (Nabe, temaki-sushi, curry, 3 desserts.... It was all so good!), and then we performed some music afterwards. Sister Yamashita had initially asked Elder Naylor (one of the Assistants) and I to do a musical number together, but he didn't want to sing a solo, so we ended up singing "Ring out wild bells" in a trio. It wasn't super great because I couldn't hit the high notes and Elder Naylor and Jackson didn't have enough time to learn their parts, but it was fun. But after we were done, Sister Yamashita, looking very distressed, asked Elder Naylor and me if we were doing a musical number with me on the piano and him singing......so, we ended up doing an impromptu arrangement of "Nearer My God to Thee" hahaha. It was just all super ironic because we had practiced "Ring Out Wild Bells" for the whole purpose that he wouldn't have to sing a solo! haha

After the music, we had a movie night with President Yamashita! haha. He showed us "Meet the Mormons"!!! I was worried that it would be kind of slow at first, but I really like it! (: I thought that the stories were really powerful and inspiring, and I wish I could show it to every Japanese person! Also, I had another surreal moment, thinking that 8 of us missionaries were watching a movie in the home of a general authority. Crazy, right? haha (;

Saturday: I kind of had a freak-out moment on Friday, because I found out that I might only get 12 transfers, rather than 13......!!! >< (Mom and Dad, yah, so my release date might be July 1st...................) So, I prayed really hard on Friday night that the time would go more slowly and that each day would feel longer. Well, I learned that you have to be careful of what you pray for, because, boy did we have a slow day on Saturday! Ok, well, the morning was good because we had a great member appointment with the Yuasa family (they're awesome member missionaries!), but after that............basically all of the people (less actives) we visited were not home. And, our investigators--who we had an appointment with--weren't home. Soooo......we ended up doing a lot of housing. We tried going streeting, but well.....it's New Years weekend, and no one was at the nearest station. All I can say that it was a really long day, and now I'm grateful when my days are full and fun and fast! Even if it does mean that it will feel like my mission is coming to a close way before I want it to.

In other news, I've caught a cold, we finally got an appointment with Cecille (our investigator that comes to church every week but we haven't taught in a while), President Yamashita apparently challenged Cecille to baptism while I was out helping the primary, an investigator dropped us out of the blue (we haven't even met her in a while....I wonder what's up), we dropped more investigators (well.......we can't contact them........), and we took some footage for a new lesson teaching video that Presdient Yamashita wants the Meito district to make. Basically, it's going to be like the District 3 (;

Honestly, it's been kind of hard, approaching my year mark as a missionary. If I'm really going back on July 1st, that means I don't even have 6 months left......

I really feel like I've been going in circles in terms of my progression as a missionary and as a person.....I'm having the same issues, same troubles, same worries as I did on Transfer 1, 3, 6.....etc. I feel like I'm still no better at finding, teaching, and dendo in general, which is super annoying, because I feel like I should be better at all this!!

But, what can you do..... I'm having fun everyday, and I love doing what we do! I love Japan!

Have a great week!!!

Sister Michelle Papenfuss