Shintaro!

Hey guys! Thanks for all the emails this last week, I was thoroughly entertained :)

The time has come, the new mission president gets here tomorrow. I'm so sad President Wada is leaving :( He has done so much for me and my friends here in Japan. I will never forget some of the lessons he taught me. I will never forget getting chewed out on the phone by him as a younger missionary and feeling angry but feeling his love for me so strongly through the phone. He just has so much unconditional love for others. I hope I can be more like that.

I wanna say this week was tiring and hectic but... that's becoming the norm. We saw a lot of miracles and taught a lot of lessons this week!

We met with our African friend, Ernest. As I said last week he is really stubborn. We asked him why he is wanting to meet with us and he has no intentions of ever following the church's teachings. It's funny because he believes the teachings and feels like God has told him The Book of Mormon is true. Here is the catch though, he believes in every church's teachings. He believes in any book, any prophet, anything. He wants to teach us the "divine principle." We declined his offer. We told him we love him and would like to study together but our time is short and we aren't looking for anymore truth. Looks like we won't be meeting with him anymore. He "believes" the church teachings but refuses to apply them. At the end of the lesson we finally figured out why this is. He is a part of the Unification Church. I don't know a lot about that church and I am sure it has good aspects, but it makes zero sense. You can always respect others but you simply can't believe in every church because we teach different things! That's why we've got to ask God about the truth. If we find it we don't need to look anywhere else. I feel so blessed to have gotten that answer from God for myself.

The highlight of the lesson was when he was asking us questions about what we believe. He went from asking who we think God is and then said, "what about Porn?" We were like what? "PORN, you know?" I said, "yeah pornography? What about it?" He then started talking about a story in The Bible and it took us a sec but we finally understood that whole time he was trying to say Paul, his accent is just super thick. Hahaha

I did my first baptismal interview this last week with an awesome lady in Kofu almost 2 hours away from Hachioji. We go out there once a week for district meetings. Anyways, this lady's name is Michiko she is probably in her 50's and basically told me her whole life story. I was actually pretty nervous before the interview, I just would never want to have disappoint everyone and tell someone they aren't ready. Thankfully she is super ready and just one of the sweetest ladies. It's amazing to see the happiness she has already found through the gospel. Since she talks a lot we had to run back to the station to catch the train. We actually got permission to use the rapid train, soo much faster. Lots of drunk business men on there too :)

Ok last thing! Remember Shintaro? Elder Cook recognized him walking by as we were having a long conversation about Trump with and old guy who wants us to go to America and convert all the politicians... :/ Anyways we ditched that convo and just started talking to Shintaro. He was a previous investigator who had a baptismal date and disappeared, that's why Elder Cook recognized him. Well fast forward to now. We have since had two lessons with him. He is 20 years old and soo smart, he understands and remembers anything we say and read. Straight genius. It's super easy to teach him. He showed up to church this last Sunday looking fly in his suite and we had a lesson afterword with our ward mission leader (who's such a boss) Bro. Nakamura. Shintaro ended up agreeing to prepare to be baptized on July 30th! So happy to be meeting with another young guy!

Love you guys so much, you are in my prayers and I miss you.

1. Speaking of Shintaro here he is at church after our lesson :)

2. Best looking zone in the mission!

3. Commented on a kid's pants across the street and struck up a convo. Turned out to be his girlfriend's pants lol. He is Chinese and his name is Deisen. He was so thankful he could meet us and learn more about "Father". We taught him how to pray and he prayed and said he felt soo good "talking to father." He lives in Tokyo so we may never meet him again but what a great experience. The real miracle is that we couldn't communicate very well but I wanted to teach him how to pray. I started looking through my iPad and found the restoration pamphlet (which teaches prayer) downloaded in Chinese. I don't ever remember downloading that and had no idea it was there but so thankful it was!

4. There is a ramen shop next to our apartment with a big line every day, so we assumed it must be good. Soo bomb, we went back again today.