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.

A Naked Man

**must see pics**

Today we went to the temple with two other zones, one of which was Yokohama South (Yamate). As I was noticing how many of my previous companions were there I realized 9/12 of my companions were there! 4 of which are now companions with each other (2 pairs). I got a pic with all of them, I'll explain more at the pic caption.

I'll start with the funny stuff. I have been making taco rice a pretty good amount lately, it's so bomb. We got some lettuce from a member recently and used it for the taco rice. Cook cleaned it and chopped it up to have with the meal. As we were eating though he said, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?" I look in his bowl and see all of his food pushed to one side. On the other side there sitting in the bowl was... A slug! I originally though it was a worm that got in the meat but we decided it must have been from the lettuce. If he hadn't have noticed it he definitely would have eaten it and assumed it was a tomato. I lost my appetite but managed to finish my meal, so did Cook, what a champ. I love Elder Cook, we are way different but we are working hard and just feeling joy, even though we haven't seen a lot of success lately. It's funny though because the whole mission thought we wouldn't get along. People always ask me, "so... How is it?" Implying that it must be terrible. I was worried too but it's great!! Haha

Alright next thing is another one of those stories that I can't ever forget. Elder Kubera and his companion came to Hachioji all the way from Kofu. I went on splits with him this same time about a year ago, at that time he was my zone leader, this time I'm his haha. Our previous split we had all kinds of funny experiences but this last one trumped them all. We went to go visit this Vietnamese family pretty far put. Of course when we got there it was raining and we had no umbrellas. We finally got there after getting lost and decently wet. Of course the parents weren't home but their 6 year old daughter was. We gave her a note to give her mom. It was raining pretty hard so we ran over to a bike shelter to check the map. Some guy rides up to park his bike with a shoe on one foot, slipper on the other. He knocked over like the whole row of bikes when he parked and I started to pick them up. I said hi to him probably 4 times and he just stood there staring in space ignoring me. So awkward, we started leaving and then he called out to us, "Christian? Go home! Go home!" Took us a while to understand he was actually telling us to follow and go to HIS home. We skeptically followed him into his place. He sat us down and not too long after just dropped his pants real close to me. Just the first layer but still. Then he went for his shirt. I just started thinking, "please stop there, please stop." Then he said, "shower." I though he was asking us if we wanted to shower, so I said no. Then he walked over into his kitchen (still in view) and just exposed it all to get ready for his shower. I turned away but not before I saw EVERYTHING. After that I wanted to ditch so we started to try and sneak out but his shower was less than a minute! He was already out... He came in and put on the tiniest boxers and sat down with his legs spread to hear a message about Christ... Haha we could not stop laughing though. We eventually got out of there haha. Here is the awesome part though. If we didn't go to that guys house we would have gone home. Since we spent about an hour there we went back to the Vietnamese ladies house and she had just gotten home and read our letter. She was so happy we came by and such an amazing lady. She asked us all the great questions we love to hear (What's the purpose of life? Why do we have hard times? What's the difference between you and other churches?). We managed to answer all of them using the Book of Mormon. Hopefully you will hear more about that family soon.

Last thing is we started meeting with a kid named Kenji! He is actually only a quarter Japanese and the rest Hispanic. Which is awesome, I love Hispanics. One hard thing is he can't read or write any language, so teaching him is really hard. He can't read the BoM. You will hear about him more later.

I'm actually out of time and that was the bulk of what I wanted to say this week. I love you guys so much. Oh and also I hit my six months left mark this last week! See y'all in December.

Pics
1. Alright! Here it is. All of my companions so far except for three of them! From left to right with whichever transfer I was when I was with them. Johnson 8, Molen 11, Hawkins 9, Harrison 6, Schreiber 10, me, Cook 12, Gailey 7. Then in the front: Nagano 1 & Inumaki 2 my dad and step dad (trainer and follow up trainer). Everyone I was ever with in Yamate was there and to top it off Nagano replaced me to be with Molen in Yamate. Also Johnson and Schreiber are companions now. I hope you understand a bit of how wild this was. Nagano, Inumaki, Harrison &
Cook are all going home in about 3 weeks.

2. Elder Cook and I

3. Anotha One

4. Takao district meeting!

5. The sister on the far right had to go home this week for medical stuff :/

6. Remember the African guy I talked about last week? This is him! Earnest. We are meeting pretty constantly but he is being really difficult right now haha love him though

7. Our new friend Kenji!

8. Father's Day blitz in Tama (lots of missionaries, one place, mixing companionships & going hard)

9. Mizuo

10. Shintaro, this is a total miracle. Elder Cook taught him like a year ago when he was here. They set a baptismal date and he disappeared. Elder Cook recognized him on the street and we completely ditched a convo with an old man talking about Trump and how we need to go preach to all the people in Wash. DC to go talk to him. We are
meeting again this Wednesday with Shintaro :)

11. Haga... Uhh we went to this shack house to visit him. Most ghetto living circumstance I have ever seen. It's basically like an illegal homeless shelter.

12. Saw a great friend from my previous area Sagamihara, Masaki Yamanashi, at stake conference.

元気？

Ayyye! I'm feeling a lot more awake this week! Just had to adjust to the new busy schedule. We had soo many things going down this week. I will send a picture of our schedule, it's nuts. I'm way sad about it but our mission president changes here pretty soon. We had our last mission leadership conference with him this last week. He is such an amazing man, I wouldn't be surprised if we will see him speak at general conference in the future. Randomly in the meeting President looked at Cook and me and said "I sent two new zone leaders to Machida, I want things to go higher there."...We are working on it haha. He wanted to sing "I'm trying to be like Jesus" with us. He was crying and so was I.

I’m trying to be like Jesus; I’m following in his ways. I’m trying to love as he did, in all that I do and say. At times I am tempted to make a wrong choice, But I try to listen as the still small voice whispers,

(Chorus) Love one another as Jesus loves you. Try to show kindness in all that you do. Be gentle and loving in deed and in thought, For these are the things Jesus taught.

I’m trying to love my neighbor; I’m learning to serve my friends. I watch for the day of gladness when Jesus will come again. I try to remember the lessons he taught. Then the Holy Spirit enters into my thoughts, saying: (Chorus)

So the other day Elder Cook and I met this awesome college kid named Kanta. During the conversation though some middle aged black dude pulls up on his bike and says, where is the church? Are you Mormons? Always awkward when someone interrupts a street contact but we split and I talked to him. His name is Earnest from Nigeria and he is such a strong Christian. We wrapped up things with Kanta and got contact info, then walked Earnest to the church. Once he got in the church he just abruptly stopped talking and gave this super intense prayer in French. We had a lesson and met again later in the week. He has a ton of potential. I love Africans they are so special.

I went on splits with another Elder I live with, Battaglia. We went out finding with a recent convert here Chouyo. He's from China but his Japanese is amazing. We saw some middle aged guy chillin in his car and called out to him. He said hi and we struck up an awesome conversation. His name is Watanabe. Chouyo got baptized just a couple weeks ago but he is amazing at proselyting! Long story short Watanabe came to the church for game night a couple days later and they had a lesson with him and he is interested in joining the church!

Other than that just some way funny experiences at church this last week. One of the members phones went off during church but she couldn't hear it (she is like 85). It was going off for soo long and was soo loud. I was laughing so hard as the whole ward was just turned around staring at her. Then during the sacrament prayer the mic started making this humming sound and it progressively got louder and louder till it was unbearable. The kid giving the prayer turned it off and just started yelling the prayer way louder than necessary so everyone could hear. To top it all of we watched a video in one of the classes about the atonement and no matter how many different times they tried to change the language it would always play the sign language one haha. So we watched in with sigh language and English subtitles. It was really entertaining to watch the members try to understand based off what they understood of the English and sign language then try to give their translation. To top off everything we were riding an elevator at the station and some American said, "hey elders!" Behind us. Turns out it was some member from Preston, ID here on business. We had a good chat. At the end he tried to give us money. We wouldn't take it, he insisted. Elder Cook took it and soon realized it was 10000¥ (about $100). Of course it was too late because the guy ran off and refused to accept it. He told us to get a nice dinner.... I feel like I eat out a good amount and get expensive meals and I still have extra money every month. What kinda meal are we going to get that uses 100 bucks?!! I don't like that it was forced upon us but hopefully God has something in mind for us to use it for.

Sorry, maybe kind of a dry email but, Love you guys :)

1. Our schedule for the last week... Lol I told you it's nuts! The small green sections are us contacting people in our records. We decided to clean up the records because we had 350+ potential investigators...

2. The Nakazawa's (Bishop's family and wife's parents) had us over for an awesome meal with games.

3. Look at me glow

4. Found a nice Vit. C face mask/refresher thing