Week 60 in Nagano (4/13)

Hey everyone!  I'm sorry for the horrible email last week, haha.

Like I promised, this week will be better!  Well, nothing too interesting happened this week....but, I figure anything will beat last week's email, right?

So, this week we've been focusing on visiting less actives that we don't know.  This can either go really well or really horribly....  It can be a great way to branch out and visit new people and new neighborhoods, but the risks are that they may have moved, may not know that they are members of the church (I hear this happens more often the closer you get to Tokyo), their family members may not know that the person we want to meet is a member and are therefore sketched out by two random people visiting out of the blue, or the house/apartment may not even exist at all!  Despite all of these down-sides to visiting unknown less actives, though, we decided to go anyways!

Most of the LA's we visited didn't live at the address that we have anymore, but we found two people who weren't home but still live at the address in the ward directory, and we were able to meet another LA and talk to her for a while :)  We also found a really nice neighborhood to go housing at (lots of new apartments and houses), while we were looking for a different LA (sadly, she had moved away....).  One of the other problems with visiting less actives is that I just want to get to visiting people and I forget to go finding on the way.....oops....that defeats the whole purpose of us leaving in the first place, so I really need to be better at that.

As for investigators, we only have two right now (did I mention that finding is hard here? haha), but we were at least able to meet with both of them this week.

We had a lesson with Ko-san (Chinese investigator), but our small talk at the beginning turned into us listening to her problems and worries and thoughts about the future.  She really talks a lot when it comes to certain things, haha....  I thought we had a really good lesson planned so I was a little bummed that we couldn't share it with her.....but maybe we weren't supposed to talk about that.  Ko-san is hard.....she reads and prays but doesn't completely believe in God, and doesn't believe in an afterlife, because she thinks it's just a way to have hope and it can't be proved.  I feel like she is one of the best investigators I've had, in terms of keeping commitments and wanting to know, and yet she doesn't seem to really want to accept what we say.  Hmmm.... I at least hope that we'll be able to have a real lesson next time we meet, haha (:

After meeting Ko-san, we visited a member, and then visited our other investigator, Wada-san (Tokyo South Mission President's mother)!  We had to run to kid's Eikaiwa so we didn't get to talk to her for very long, but the coolest thing was that when she opened her door, she greeted us with a big smile and said "I just had a feeling that you two would come over today!"  So cool!  She was so sure of her feeling that she even made a small dinner for us!  It just made me really glad that we had decided to visit her that day, and that we had carried out our plans to visit her (I almost gave up visiting her because it was raining cats and dogs, and the member we visited talked forever).

Speaking of rain, it has been raining more these past two weeks than it ever has my whole mission.  It hardly rained last year during rainy season (maybe once or twice a week), but it's been raining almost every single day lately!!!  It's so crazy.

I hated dendoing in the rain, but I think I've gotten over it now--I've decided that wearing a kappa (a hideous set of a blue raincoat and rainpants) doesn't work for me, because I can't get myself to OYM in a kappa, and I hate taking it on and off.  So, I just wear my black coat and get wet!  It works a whole lot better, especially since we don't have any appointments anyways so I don't have to worry about getting someone's genkan wet.

Ok, I'm running out of time (we have an appointment with a member who wants to take us to go see some cherry blossoms), so I'm just going to send some pictures now....

Love you all!

いつもありがとうね♪