Ohaiyo Gozaimasu Mina-san!
I hope you guys are all doing well! I miss you guys a lot! This week was an emotional roller coaster of a week. It really was.
Testimony Meeting:
So, I actually tend to forget what exactly I’ve been putting in my emails and what I’ve put in letters to people. So if I repeat myself (whether by email or letter) don’t be surprised. xD We have devotionals here at the MTC every Sunday and Tuesday. After the Tuesday devotionals we meet as a District and have a “Devotional Review” where we all share the things we liked about the talk and just review what happened in the Devotional. More often than not, Devotional Review turns out to be more spiritual and awesome than the devotional itself. :P
This last week, we ran out of things to say about the Devotional roughly 30 minutes early, demo we’re not allowed to leave the classroom until a specific time and we didn’t want to lose the spirit. So our District Leader (Lee-choro) decided we should have a mini testimony meeting. It was really really powerful. I found out that there is a choro in my district whose family was really struggling. Apparently he was so worried about them he begged the Branch President to let him go home. The Branch President let him call his family and his family told him they were fine and to get back to work. :P Apparently that was all he needed. Nobody in our district had any idea anything was wrong with this choro. He seemed totally fine. Demo the testimony he bore after about how much serving a mission has blessed his family was really really powerful. J The spirit was really strong. I’m so glad this choro decided to stay and not go home.
Jenny Oaks Baker:
Please tell me at least one of you out there knows this name. :P Jenny Oaks Baker was our Sunday Devotional speaker and oh my gosh was it powerful. I don’t know how many of you know that I play the violin. I know all of you know I love music! What she did was she would share a story about her life and then play a song on her violin that went with that story. (For example, she played I Need Thee Every Hour after a story about how she and her 3 year old son were nearly killed.) Honestly, the most powerful part of the whole thing though was her husband and her children. She asked her husband to get up and bare his testimony. He served his mission in the Kobe, Japan mission. (My Doryo freaked when she heard that. xD) So when he got up to the stand, he talked for a second in English and then said in Nihongo, “This is for all the Japanese Missionaries, demo I haven’t spoken Japanese for a long time so it probably won’t be very good.” Then he bore a really simple testimony in Nihongo and I’m proud to say, I understood almost all of it. J Igen no tamamono! I feel like I’ve learned so much in just 6 weeks!
The other cool part of the devotional was her kids. Jenny Oaks Baker has 4 kids aged 12, 9, 7, and 5 and all of them play musical instruments. They went and played I Am a Child of God. The 12 year old on the violin, 9 year old on the cello, 7 year old on the piano, and 5 year old on the guitar. They were fantastic. I wish I could play any instrument as well as that freaking 5 year old could play the guitar. xD It was so cool.
Kyudosha update:
So, I realized I haven’t been saying anything lately about my Progressing Investigators.. For anyone who doesn’t know, Long-shimai and I currently have 2 progressing investigators (though, we get a third one this week.) Muroi-kyodai and Harukawa-kyodai. Both of them are fantastic. JThis last week and the week before Muroi-kyodai went on vacation to Idaho to go river rafting so not much has been happening there. We met with him for the first time since he left this last week. He’s awesome. He’s going to BYU Hawaii studying Business. That’s really all there is to know about Muroi-kyodai for now. :P I’ll fill you all in more when I know more myself. xD
As for Harukawa-kyodai we’ve made a lot of progress with him. I think I told you all about Harukawa-kyodai setting a baptismal date. J Ahh! Well, since then we’ve been working on preparing him for baptism. It’s been kinda hard to teach him, demo only because Long-shimai and I are still learning. And he’s just kinda hard to read. Luckily he’s started to feel a lot more comfortable around us so he’s been telling us what sort of things he wants us to teach him about. The last couple of times he’s asked us to teach him about the Commandments so that’s what we’ve been doing. We met with him yesterday and talked about Keeping the Sabbath Day Holy and Following the Prophet. We committed him to doing both and he was really excited about it. I think he was mostly excited about the fact that he gets to just relax and not do anything on Sundays. xD He’s freaking awesome. J Next time we’re planning on talking with him about Tithing, demo I have a feeling that’s not going to be what we end up talking about… Harukawa has a habit of asking us questions at the beginning of a lesson which cause us to throw out any prior lesson plan we had. xD That’s totally fine though. I’d rather it be that way.
This week we’re supposed to get a third Kyudosha! I don’t know anything about him yet, besides he’s a guy. The end. :P I’ll fill you in more on that next week!
Sempai:
This is the part of the week that made it the emotional roller coaster. Yesterday morning at 5 am the sempai all left for Japan. It was really REALLY hard seeing them go. Especially the ones from other countries. Long-shimai and I really bonded with our sempai so we decided to go say goodbye to them yesterday morning. We woke up at 4:30 am and helped them to take their luggage down from the Celestial Kingdom to the Telestial world... Then we went back and helped all the Nihonjin. Then there were lots of tears and hugs and “I’ll miss you so much! You’ll do awesome! Get Japan ready for us!”’s. I’m really going to miss them… Although, this week marks our halfway point. J That’s right. I’ve been here for 6 weeks this Thursday. It feels like an eternity. (Random side story, two nights ago there was this girl talking to her friend out in the hallway of our residence. She was like “Oh my gosh. I can’t wait to get out to Texas. I feel like I’ve been stuck in this place for like a year!” Her friend asked “How long have you been here?” and she replied “3 weeks”. It was so hard for me to not laugh. :P) 6 weeks to go! Then we’ll get to go join the Sempai in Japan!! I’m so excited.
Well, that’s my report for this week. Sorry, it’s kinda long. I actually wrote down the things I wanted to talk about beforehand this week! :P Maybe I shouldn’t do that. Oh well. Ai shitte imasu mina-san!
Oh, one last thing. My doryo and I wanted to end our emails this week by bearing our testimonies in Nihongo.
私は証を分かち合いたいと思います。神様は私たちの天の恩父。
Ai shitte imasu!
Love,
Christine
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