Transfer 4 Week 5: January 27, 2013

皆様！久しぶりだよ！

Hello everybody!!

This week was kind of slow. :-)  That's okay.  Wednesday was a day of amazing miracles that I have to share.  So this weeks email is just going to be about Wednesday since the rest of the week was pretty boring. :P

Wednesday morning we had study which really set the mood for an awesome day.  We left the apartment and headed to visit one of our Potential Investigators named Chizuko.  Chizuko works at a Flower Shop close to the bishops house.  Her husband recently died and all her kids live pretty far away now so she's kind of lonely.  We try to visit her at least once a week, but usually she's not home.  Sure enough, she wasn't home again, but we left her a gift (a grapefruit from America. xD) and a note.

Then we headed down to visit Nishizawa.  When we got to her apartment, my companion had a major anxiety attack. She grabbed my backpack and her face was completely pale. She just said "Hold on a minute." and went to a corner.  She ended up not being able to leave that corner for about 10 minutes. I was actually pretty worried about her... Finally though she stood up looking much better and said "Okay. Let's do this."  So I went and rang the doorbell and...

Nobody answered. :P

It turned out she wasn't home. We wrote a quick note saying we missed her and hoped she was okay and then realized that the plan was for meeting Nishizawa to take about 2 hours of the day......  So we had a quick planning session and decided to head back to the apartment.  I was pretty disappointed... I really wanted to meet with Nishizawa...

As we were walking back to the bikes we heard a man yelling behind us and then footsteps.  I looked back to see what was going on and found Nishizawa's husband running toward us! Talk about a miracle!  If things hadn't timed exactly the way they did we would have missed them entirely!

We talked with Nishizawa for about an hour and a half and then said we needed to go.  We talked with her about the Plan of Salvation a little bit while we were there so before we left we gave her a copy of the pamphlet.  She promised to read it and actually started skimming it before we even had left!

After we left, we got on our bikes and started to ride off. Just as we were leaving, I saw this woman with a really cute dog.  I'll be honest, I have no idea why I stopped.  I just did and I started playing with the dog! I asked the woman how old it was and it's name and stuff. The woman got SO excited.  She said she LOVES gaijin!  We ended up talking to her for like 15 minutes and she told us she wants to meet with us again!  Right now, she's not particualarly interested in the church or anything like that... but it's a start.  :-)

As we were heading back to the church to prep for Eikaiwa, I felt like we should stop at the Bishops house and say hello to his wife.  When we got there though, she wasn't home, BUT we did get to see the kids we teach in Kodomo Eikaiwa which was SO fun.

Then we had  Eikaiwa which was intense...

There was a guy who came this week for the first time who was in our class. What we do for the last 30 minutes or so of Eikaiwa is split into groups of 2 and answer a bunch of questions about that weeks topic.  This week, I was partnered up with this new student to evaluate how he was doing!  When I sat down, our conversation went something like this...

"Before we get started, I want to get to know your background. Is that okay?

"Sure!"

"Okay... How and why did you become a missionary?"

Needless to say, I was a bit taken aback. :P  That wasn't what I expected.  I explained about the whole process of becoming a missionary and why I chose to.  He said "Hmm.  So what do you think of Japan? Is it different from what you expected?" So I made a joke about how everyone said I was going to eat Fish and Rice every day and he smiled. Then he asked his next question.

"This next question may be a bit difficult to answer. You consider yourself a woman of faith right? Well, if God exists... You know about the earthquake that happened here 2 years ago.  In that Earthquake many innocent people were killed including innocent children.  Haven't you ever questioned your faith? Haven't you ever wondered, if God really exists and cares about us, why does He let that happen?"

It was so nervewrackingly awesome. I explained that I had questioned my faith which made me even more sure that it was true. I bore my testimony and explained that this life is meant to be a test and it's meant to be difficult.  If it wasn't we couldn't reach our full potential.  He smiled and nodded the whole time and at the end said "You really believe that, don't you."

I nodded and said "Yes I do."

Then Eikaiwa was over.

Right before he left he came up to me and said "I'm glad I got to talk to you. See you next week."

It was crazy.  I loved every second of it!  And that was by far the most exciting day of this week!  The Elders in our District had an amazing miracle this week, but I don't have time to go into that. Short version, there was a guy with cancer who went to the hospital where the doctors discovered his cancer had completley disappeared. :-D  SOOO cool. :-)

I love this gospel.  I know that it's true.  I'm so excited to be out here as a missionary!  I miss you all so much.  Please write me!  I have nobody to write to this week!  xD

I love you guys!  Have a fantastic week!

-

Christine

Transfer 4 Week 4: January 20, 2013

おはいようございます皆様！元気ですか？

This week nothing really exciting happened to me. So this week is an investigator update email! Woo!

Kaori: I love this girl so much. I love all our investigators!  Kaori is amazing.  I don't know remember what I've said in my emails about her before (and I doubt many people who read this actually remember anyway.  ;D) so I'll give a quick background.  Kaori is awesome.  We met her at Eikaiwa!  She has a friend who lives in the US who's husband only speaks English.  Kaori wanted to be able to speak to her friends husband and to her friend more so she decided to take Eikaiwa!  We made friends with her and invited her to come to dinner at a members house with us!  She said yes and we introduced her to the Book of Mormon while we were there. She talked a lot about her family and mentioned how much we wanted to meet them!  We decided one day we wanted to make a banana cake for Kaori since she gave us her address.  We took it to her house and got to meet all her family!  Her little sister lives in the house next door with her kids and their parents live in the apartment below Kaori's.  So we really got to meet her whole family!  It was so fun! 

Well, on Saturday the ward had something called a mochi tsuki.  I've attached 2 pictures to this email that my family should post on the blog too!  ;) (よろしく！） I think the english word for Mochi is "rice cake"?  but I"m not really sure... Basically at a mochi tsuki you take a TON of rice, a giant hammer, and mash the rice until it turns into mochi! Then you put the mochi into different things to make it taste better because it's pretty flavorless by itself.  My favorite is covering it with anko or shoyu. :-)  SOO good.  Anyway!  It's a New Years Tradition that they have in Japan and we decided to invite Kaori and her family!  She told us that she wasn't going to be able to make it because her friend was getting married that day... but then right before it was time to start, she showed up with her kids and her little sister with her kids! It was SO fun!  The two pictures are of Kaori with her son Shintaro and Yoshimi(Kaori's sister) with her daughter Mei! We got to spend the day with them and they built some good relationships with a few of the members of the ward!  It was so good.

Helen: Helen has been really busy since December with her job.  She works as a Yoga instructor teaching her own yoga program to the other yoga instrutors... Since it's the beginning of the year everyone is starting new programs and she's been ridiculously busy. :/  We miss her so much!  Please pray that we'll be able to meet with her soon!

Judy: I mentioned last week about the self-referral!  The girl who wandered around Urayasu for a few hours looking for a good church to go to.  Well, I have a sad update on this one... We weren't able to get her contact info last week, and she didn't come this week... We have no way of getting hold of her so she's just... disappeared. :/  Hopefully she'll come next week though.

Marcy: This week Marcy brought her son Alex to church!  It was a lot of fun. She's kind of got a... unique personality. xD  Things go her way.  That's for sure.

Nishizawa: We met her this week! We found her while we were denwa dendoing (Calling random people from the area book).  She's in her 60's and she's super lonely... She loves to sing though and it just so happens that Lundy shimai and I do too!  So we're going to start visiting her every week! We're pretty excited about it.

And those are the big investigators right now!  :-)  We have A TON of Potential Investigators, but these are the ones that actually count as investigators.  :-)   Other than that, my week was pretty boring. xD We spent most of the week outside in the freezing cold visiting members, investigators, Potential Investigators, and a 3 hour long kubari kai (handing out flyers session).

Thank you all for your prayers both for me and my investigators!  I love all of you and I can't wait to hear from you! Have a fantastic week and write you all again next week!

-

Christine

Transfer 4 Week 3: January 13, 2013

皆様おはいよございます！

This week was... definitely a week.  x)  Actually I feel like it was just barely P-day... It's kind of weirding me out how fast yet freakishly slow this week went. xD

Wednesday:

Nothing super exciting happened on Tuesday this week. :P  On Wednesday though, we spent the day with a girl in the ward named Ribekah.  She's been preparing to go on a mission since the age change!  She's one of my best friends out here. She's awesome. x)  On Wednesday Ribekah invited a few of her friends to come out to Urayasu (one of them all the way from Nagoya!) to read Preach My Gospel together and do some pretend lessons.  She invited us to come and give them some advice and stuff.  What ended up happening though was that after they gave us their mini-lessons they'd prepared, we invited them to go dendo with us!  We took them to the eki closeby and chirashi kubari'd. (In English: We went prostelyting at the train station and handed out english class flyers. :P)  It was a lot of fun!  :-)  They are all going to be FANTASTIC missionaries.  Much better than me.  Everyone says that's a good thing though because that means that the work is definitely progressing.  I completely agree. :-)

Thursday:

Merry Christmas!!!! xD  So... when I woke up on Thursday I looked in the mailbox and discovered a slip of paper saying that someone had tried to deliver a package, but we weren't home..... YAAAY!  Well, needless to say... I couldn't focus after that... at all... on anything... So Sister Lundy and I decided we'd walk about 2 miles (OH! Sister Lundy's bike is broken... I forgot to mention that... It kind of died a few weeks ago. She can still ride it if absolutely necessary, but it's pretty much like riding with no handlebars so we've been avoiding the bikes...) down to the post office to get the package! x)  It turned out to be my Christmas Package from my family so Thursday turned into CHRISTMAS!!  x)  YAY!

The other exciting thing of Thursday happened right before we left to get the package... The doorbell rang and there were these 2 ladies standing there.  They were speaking SUPER polite Japanese which is practically a different language (Ha, get it?).  I didn't understand a word of what they were saying, but luckily Sister Lundy kind of did. x)  Eventually they handed us a little book that had English written in it.  Get this... They were Jehovas Witnesses. x) They asked us what we were doing here and you should have seen the look on their faces when we told them we were LDS Missionaries. ;)  They said "Well, we wanted to try to schedule another a point to meet with you and talk about this, but that looks impossible doesn't it." We smiled and said "Yeah, probably."  and then we gave them a HUGE bag of candy and sent them on their way. xD Everyone keeps saying "What!? You didn't baptize them?!"  To which I respond, we considered throwing a bucket of water at them, but didn't think it would have the same effect.  ;) Just kidding. :-)

Sunday!!:

Friday and Saturday we went on Exchanges with the Kofu sisters... It was an almost 2 hour train ride just to meet halfway and split with them. So most of Friday and Saturday was just riding the trains. x)

Sunday was super exciting though!  It actually started Saturday night... when Sister Lundy and I remembered that we'd been asked to speak in Sacrament Meeting... and we hadn't even started thinking about our talks... Fail. ;)

Sunday morning we spent in a frenzy writing talks.  Then at our meeting with the Dendo Shunin the Elders told us that they had a referral for us. Her name is Mercy.  She's from the Phillipines.  A year ago she met one of the Elders (who actually taught Tamae) and got a chirashi from him. She said after that she went back to the Phillipines and just recently came back. She said "I'm Catholic and want to go to mass! When do you have church?" 

Sure enough, Sunday morning she showed up and came to church!   The talks went fairly well.... Everyone said they could understand me and said my Japanese has really improved!  I believed them until someone else said that our talks were proof that it doesn't matter what you say as long as you help others to feel the spirit. ;) Oh well.  I tried.

After Sacrament Meeting we were able to talk a bit with Mercy. She's pretty set in her Catholism, but she said that we worship the same God and that's all that matters. However, she said that she was SO excited to meet girl missionaries!  She wasn't sure there were any! :-)  This week she said she'd be bringing her son with her to Eikaiwa so hopefully we'll get to meet with her again on Wednesday!

When church ended we decided to go visit one of our potention investigators named Chizuko.  Since it's Sunday we weren't sure she'd actually be home, but miracle of miracles, she was and we were able to talk to her again!  It's been a long time since we've actually been able to meet with her... While we were leaving her house we got a call from a member.

The member told us that someone had come to the church and wanted us to give her a tour of the church!  We were about 30 minutes away from the church, but we ended up getting back to the church in roughly 15-20 minutes.  :P We went fast.  The woman's name was Judy and she is also from the Phillipines.  She said she's been wanting to come to a church for a while and decided to go searching for one!  She spent all day Sundy riding her bike around Urayasu searching for a random church to go to. She found ours and saw there were people inside (hanging around talking. :P).

We were able to give her a short lesson and a copy of the Book of Mormon which she promised to read. :-)

Overall, it was a fantastic week.  We saw quite a few miracles and definitely had a lot of memorable experiences.  :-D  I love being here!  I still can't believe I'm in Japan!!  I love it so much!  I hope that anyone who is reading these emails and considering serving a mission, DOES IT! It seriously changes your life.  I'm SO glad I chose to do this.  It's worth every hard day.

I love you guys!  Have a fantastic week!

-

Christine

Transfer 4- Week 2: January 06, 2013

皆様おはいおございます！

This week was rather eventful... I'm just going to go through day by day!  There wasn't a single day this week that something big didn't happen.  First thing you all have to know though is that I've been really sick this week. It's just a cold, but it zapped all my energy and made this week really hard on me.  I'm just greatful for my amazingly awesome companion. :-)

 

Tuesday:

Tuesday was techincally P-day... but we only got a couple of hours of P-day time in.  xD  We were invited by a ward member to have Lunch with them at their house!  When we got there we discovered that they wanted to introduce all of us American missionaries to the way that the Japanese celebrate New Years!  Basically they have a REALLY big meal together, but they eat certain foods for New Years that they don't eat at any other time in the year... Probably for good reason. ;) One of the things they serve is Mochi! I really like mochi!  But they way they serve it for New Years is they mix it with different kinds of Miso soup.  It was really interesting. They also have these bento (You'll have to look up pictures of Bento's on google or something. xP) boxes with stuff to eat on New Years that will bring you good luck for the year!  Most people go to their parents houses and celebrate with their families and play.  Here's the best part of Japanese New Years... They all take a WEEK off work!  :-)  School finally started again today (1/7/2013).  They've been out of school since right after Christmas.  Ta-dam!  That's New Years in Japan.

 

Wednesday:

We spent the day with one of our investigators who I don't think I've written about in an email before... Her name is Kaori and she is FANTASTIC!  I love her so much!  She invited us to come over to her house to meet her family since they'd all be over for New Years!  Before we went, Sister Lundy and I set a goal to give Kaori a copy of The Family: A Proclamation to the World".  When we got there we were able to meet Kaori's 3 kids (ages 14, 10, and 8), her husband, her little sister, and her two nieces (ages 7 and 5).  It was so fun!  The littlest ones and I played most of the time. xD  At the end when we were about to leave, Sister Lundy turned to me and said "We can't just give a proclamation to Kaori and not give one to her sister now..."  I said  "You're right... What do we do?"  It took us all of last week to find just one proclamation and that was totally by chance that we discovered it.  Then Sister Lundy said "Wait a second..." and went over to her backpack.  Next thing I knew, she pulled out two copies of the proclamation and gave one to Yoshimi and one to Kaori.  :-)  Both of them were so excited to get it!

I asked Sister Lundy where the other one came from later and she said that she'd accidently bought 2 of them while she was in the MTC.  When we left the apartment she didn't remember that. She just grabbed the proclamation.  Then she remembered having two in the MTC.  When she went to look in her backpack, sure enough there were two!  Bread and fish anyone? ;) This really was a testimony builder for me.  Heavenly Father knew that we would be meeting Kaori and her sister.  He has been preparing us for them and them for us!  He really does know everything from beginning to end.  There is no other possible way to explain how we had two right when we needed them.  :-)

 

Thursday:

This is when the cold started to really hit.  I decided to ask the Elders serving here in Urayasu to give me a blessing.  It also turned out that Elder Petersen (he was my first Zone Leader and came to Urayasu at the same time as me.  He finished up his mission this last transfer) came to visit Urayasu!  I asked him to join too.  So Thursday night I got a blessing to help me recover quickly from this illness.  :-) It helped me a lot.  I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it through Friday, but I know that the blessing was the only reason I was able to.

 

Friday:

Was miserable... We went to a Zone Meeting first thing that morning and I felt SO sick.  I wanted nothing more than to curl up on the floor and just lay there.  After Zone Meeting the Dendo Shunin (Ward Mission Leader) wanted to take all of us out for sushi!  After Zone Meeting I said a little prayer and asked for the energy to make it through lunch with him.  Heavenly Father definitely answered my prayer.  In the Sushi store I actually met a family and started talking with them.  It turned out they lived really closeby and they had an interest in Eikaiwa!  I was able to give them a chirashi (flyer) for Eikaiwa and they really seemed like they wanted to come!  Yay!!

After that we went back to the apartment and Sister Lundy forced me to go lay down for 3 hours.

Then it was time for us to go meet with Rosalin who I wrote about last time...

Her birthday party turned out to be outside our area so we had to get permission to go over there. It was in this REALLY fancy hotel.  Like seriously.  It was like something out of a movie... Sister Lundy and I felt SO lucky that as missionaries we're always dressed up... But even with what we were wearing we felt extremely out of place... Then we met everyone else that Roslalin invited to her party.  4 of them were missionaries from other churches.  After a little while of being there, they started ignoring us and wouldn't talk to us. Then Rosalin came. She was wearing this incrediably fancy gown that was rather immodest...  She went to entertain all of her guests and we ended up keeping her two kids (5 and 3) entertained.  My life is so hard.  ;)  Then towards the end, they pulled out the champane.  The spirit was just... gone.  However, we were able to build a good relationship with her kids and she really wants us to come over again!  So although it was really rough on both Sister Lundy and I we were able to get a lot of good things out of it.

 

Saturday:

We were able to meet with another Less Active member named Maria.  We had a really nice lesson with her and the spirit was there really strong.  Other than that we took the day really slowly.

 

Sunday:

Maria came to church!!!!!!!!!  She bore her testimony and cried a lot saying that she wants to come to church more often and she's so greatful to everyone who has been helping her the last year through all her trials.  Then she said "The sisters shared a scripture with me yesterday that really helped me." She shared that scripture and bore her testimony on it.  It was SO good. :-)

 

Although most of our stats for the last month have been nothing but zeros, I feel like we're still getting a lot of work done.  I just have to keep reminding myself that although the work I'm doing isn't being recorded here on Earth, it's definitely being recorded in Heaven and in the end that's all that matters. :-)

 

 

And that was my week!  Thank you guys all for your prayers and everything!  I love hearing from you so please keep writing me!  Also, any members of the ward that may be reading this: THANK YOU!  The letters I got for Christmas from all the primary kids really brightened my day. You all are amazing and I'm SO blessed to come from such an amazing ward. :-)

Write you all again next week!  Have a great week!  :-D

-

Christine

Transfer 4-Week 1: December 31, 2012

HAPPY NEW YEARS EVERYONE!!!

あけましておめでとうございます！！！

 

I have a whole bunch of New Years cards from out here I want to send to a bunch of you... but I haven't had a chance to write them yet. xD  HOWEVER.  They exist and they will be sent to you all! :P  ..even if it is kind of bad luck to get one of those after New Years.... Look forward to it! :-D

So not a ton happened this week...  But there were a couple of things that happened I can share. :-)

 

First though...

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE BESTEST LITTLE BROTHER EVER!!!! :-D I LOOOOVE YOU!!!!!! (And Sister Lundy and I may or may not have recorded something for you on the Voice Recorder. >:D)

 

Transfers:

This is probably the biggest one this week. :P Transfer calls came last Friday (the 28th).  At the time, Sister Lundy and I were on exchanges so I was in an area called Kichijoji.  How transfers work is that if your transfering area's you'll receive a call from the Honbu(...Uhmm... I don't know the English word for that. xD Where the Assistants to the Mission President work! :D).  If you're not transferring you'll get a call from your Zone Leaders.  Well, neither I nor Sister Facer (the girl who I was on Exchanges with) wanted to transfer so we were praying that it would be Zone Leaders that would call us... Then another set of sisters who are in the same Zone as Sister Facer got their call from the Zone Leaders. The Zone Leaders told them that they were the only companionship in the whole Zone who would be staying together in the same area.

Here's why that affected me.

There's so few sisters right now that if any of them change there's a HUGE change to everything... So Kichijoji sisters were definitely changing...  Sure enough, the phone rang and we got a call from Honbu.  They told Sister Facer that she'd be transferring to the middle of nowhere (Also known as Kiriyu) and she started crying... Then she handed the phone to me and said "They want to talk to you." GAH! My heart was pounding out of my chest.

"Sister Grosland. We're here to give you your transfer call.  We want to thank you for all of your hard work the last 6 weeks in Urayasu.  You and Sister Lundy worked really well together and saw a lot of miracles and we're very proud of your work out there.  Are you ready for your transfer call? (Me: YESS!  JUST GIVE IT TO ME ALREADY! :P) Well, Sister Grosland.  We believe that it is the Lords will for you to serve... in Urayasu with Sister Lundy for 6 more weeks."

 

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!

 

Kimura Linda:

Kimura Linda is a Less Active member that we've been working with for as long as I've been in Japan.  Missionaries have been trying to reactivate her for much longer than that though.  I know that it goes back at least 2 "generations" of missionaries.  Kimura Linda got into this really large argument with another member in the ward. -_- Because of their argument both Kimura and the member she fought with went inactive because they didn't want to see each other.  Since then missionaries have tried to get them back to church.  The other member has come quite a few times since then, and honestly has a desire to come back! She just has a really busy work schedule that makes it difficult for her.  Kimura Linda on the other hand only didn't come because she was afraid she'd meet this other member.

Well, during these 18 weeks of being in Urayasu, Kimura Linda really started to like me.  She said she felt like I really listened to her. (Mostly it was just that I was to polite to interrupt her 1.5 hours of ranting about the other member. xD)  She also liked the way that I treated her son Masato (who is Autistic).  So we invited her to church just like we do every time we visit her, but this time she said "I'll try".  :-)

Sure enough, last Sunday she came to church with Masato!! She had a really good experience and said she was looking forward to coming again!  :-D YAAAY!  It seriously was a miracle.

 

Rosalin:

Rosalin is another Less Active member.  Missionaries and Ward Members alike have been trying to get hold of her and NOBODY has been able to.  She works at a konbini which makes her work schedule unpredictable and busy.  She has two little girls who spend more time at her mother-in-law's house than with her because she has to work so hard.  She LOVES missionaries and the church, but she just has no time.  She's seriously working herself to the bone... Well, on Sunday night while we were thinking of people to call and try to make appointments with I said "Why don't we call Rosalin? She probably won't answer, but we can try.  If by some super amazing miracle she does answer, try to set up an appointment for Friday sometime."  So Sister Lundy starts calling.  Next thing I know she's saying "AH! Moshimoshi! Rosaline shimai desu ka?! Eeeehhhh!  Sugoi!!" I sat straight up and said out loud "SHE ANSWERED?!" So Sister Lundy sits there and talks to her for a second... Then she gets this look of just "No way" and says "Yeah!  Friday should be perfect! What time?!"  It turns out we called Rosalin during her 2 hours she would be home that day and this Friday is her birthday!  Her whole family will be there and she invited us to come too! :-D  YEES!!   It was amazing. Seriously.  I can't even tell you how much of a miracle it was. :-) SO cool.

 

New Years:

Happy New Years Everyone!!!  :-D So I'm sure you're all dying to know what 2013 is like... You'll find out in a couple of hours! ;)

New Years is THE biggest holiday out here in Japan. It's Japan's Christmas.  People have been asking us about what our plans for shogatsu (New Years) were for about a month now!  It's been crazy!

So what did I do for New Years?

Went to bed at 10:30 and laid there talking with Sister Lundy until midnight (partly on purpose, but mostly on accident. xD) and then we sat up and yelled "HAPPY NEW YEARS!!"  All of the sudden there were these loud BANG's from outside. We looked outside and DISNEYLAND EXPLODED!!!!  With fireworks... ;)   Seriously it was the most amazing Firework show I've ever seen.  I wanted to get a video of it, but I couldn't get to my camera fast enough.  It was SO cool!  Sister Lundy and I stood there watching it going "Oooo!  Ahhhh!" for like 15 minutes. It was SO cool.

Then we went to sleep! xD

Today is P-day obviously, and we also have a Lunch appointment at a members house! YES!  So that is how I plan on celebrating my shogatsu! Writing all of you, eating, taking a bath, and then SLEEPING. ;)

 

I love you guys so much!  Thank you all for everything!  All of your prayers seriously mean everything to me! I can't tell you how many times I've been sure I couldn't do something and then been able to do it.  I know that it has to do with all the prayers for me from home!  I love you all!  I can't wait to talk to you again soon! You're amazing!

 

PS: Emrix, Miranda, Peach, Josh, Deanne, and Mason! All of your letters are sitting on my desk right now... a reply is coming I promise! :P You'll probably get a new years card first though. :-)

 

LOVE YOU!

-

Christine

グラスランド姉妹

Transfer 3-Week 5: December 24, 2012

皆さん！メリークリスマス！！！！

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

I hope you all are having a fantastically amazing Christmas! I know I have!

As with all other holidays out in Japan, Christmas is pretty boring... No body really celebrates it. Really little kids do, but that's seriously about it. Kind of sad. :/ Everyone is getting ready for shogatsu! (New Years!) That's the super huge holiday out here. They've been prepping for it all month. :P I'm kind of excited to see what happens!

This week was amazing. We saw so many miracles!

Kaori:

Kaori is an Eikaiwa student we've got a really strong friendship with. Recently she's taken an interest in the gospel. Mostly out of curiosity than anything, but that's okay. We've had a couple of lessons with her, but she's told us that she's not interested in entering a church. She just wants to learn about it. But she's agreed to keep meeting with us and hearing about it! :-D

This week we had a lesson with her where we watched the Restoration Video. Honestly, Sister Lundy and I hadn't prepped much of a lesson for that...  I can only say that the Spirit guided that lesson. Neither Sister Lundy or I had to question what we would talk about. We just knew what the other one was going to say and we were ready to keep the lesson going. Everything went amazingly perfectly. :-) She even said her first prayer by herself and she did SO good. It was amazing. :-) I loved it!

Tamae's Baptism:

The day of Tamae's baptism was ridiculously stressful. xD We wanted everything to be perfect for her baptism. We stressed and planned and practiced. The service ended up going really really smoothly. All of the missionaries who came ended up singing this BEAUTIFUL song. I don't have a video of the final performance sadly, but I attached to this email a video of Sister Lundy and I practicing on our own... It's not the greatest, sorry... but hey!

Yamamoto:

Oh dear. I think I talked about this last week, right? Yamamoto came to Eikaiwa, freaked out and left... Well, we had an amazing miracle this week with him. After Tamae's baptism we headed over to Kaori's house with a birthday cake for her! It was so fun! We got to meet her family and it was awesome! After, we were walking back to the eki to go back to the apartment when I saw a man that I recognized and immediately a name came to mind. "Yamamoto-san!" Amazingly, when he saw us he actually stopped and started talking to us! Short version, we were able to start over with him! He said he still wanted to meet and talk about the church. We said "When?!" He said (Keep in mind it's currently 7:15pm) "8:00?" So for the next 45 mintues we stressed beyond all reason about what to teach, getting the Elders there, and trying to find another woman to joint with us so that we actually could meet with him. Again, Heavenly Father seriously helped us out... The Elders and one of the members just dropped everything they were doing and came to the church as fast as they could so we could have a lesson. :-) The lesson went fairly well. I mean... He mostly just talked at us, but that's okay. He agreed to meet again! Heavenly Father seriously put us exactly where we needed to be to meet him. It was incredible.

I love you all! I hope you have an incredible Christmas! I know Heavenly Father is aware of every one of you and loves each of you! Don't ever forget it! :-) Thank you all for your prayers! Keep praying for us! We love you!

-

Christine

Transfer 3-Week 4: December 17, 2012

皆様おはいようございます！

今日はちょっと。。。仏じゃないけれでも楽しいと思う。

LOL!  Kay, I totally just started writing that without completely thinking about it. Sorry.  I've been writing too many emails in Japanese lately!   Also, last night we had exchanges and I was with Oseki姉妹 who is a Nihonjin.  I'm still switching out of my Japanese brain into English.  Forgive any random grammer/spelling mistakes today... :-)

 

So this week was rather rough... Everyone is right. Every single part of your mission is hard. Everything. The longer you're out in the field the more those difficulties change. They don't necessarily get harder or easier, they just change.  My first two transfers were really hard because of the whole not understanding what was going on and just feeling like I couldn't do anything right... This transfer has been hard because now that I kind of have a hang of what missionary life is like, it hurts more when we get rejected. :/  I've been searching through my journal for something super positive and amazing to share this week, but the fact is all of the big things that happened this week weren't really positive things so let me start off by clarifying: I'm totally fine.  I'm not letting this get to me. :-) 

 

Yamamoto:

Last week I wrote about the revelation that I got from D&C and I think I briefly mentioned that I was able to talk to 9 people about the gospel... I didn't tell you guys about who I talked to though! Right before the huge earthquake last week, we were handing out Eikaiwa flyers an eki.  There was this man there who was kind of looking at me funny... that's normal.  Well, I gave him a flyer and he sorta wandered off a little and read the flyer.  A couple minutes later he walked up to me and started asking a bunch of questions about Eikaiwa, and then he started asking questions about the church.  I got his contact information and we arranged to meet at the Urayasu eki before church so we could go together the next Sunday! Woo! :-)

However, before that Sunday came Wednesday, Eikaiwa.  Since this man (named Yamamoto) had an interest in Eikaiwa as well, I decided to call him and invite him to Eikaiwa.  He agreed and said he'd come!  Not just that, but HE CAME!  He was afraid to enter the chruch though.  He called us from outside the church and said "I can't come in, but I'm here."  We went outside and we were like "It's okay!  It's safe!  Come in!"  So we went in together.  This is when things kind of took a turn for the worst.

It turns out he had misunderstood why we'd invited him to come.  He thought that we were going to be having a lesson with him about the church, not Eikaiwa.  We told him that we could have a lesson after, and he said he liked that idea. So he went to the beginning english class... In the middle, he got up and stormed out of the church saying he couldn't believe it.  We called him after Eikaiwa to find out what happened... He basically chewed me out saying he couldn't believe I tricked him into coming to Eikaiwa and how I lied to him and he could never trust the missionaries, etc. etc. etc.  I apologized over and over again, but we haven't been able to get hold of him since then.  It was rough... Luckily, I have wonderful sweet amazing Lundy shimai who is beautifully amazing!!!! She really helped me not to take it too personally. :-)

 

Helen:

So, Helen is supposed to be baptized this coming Sunday... We haven't been able to contact her since last Wednesday. :/ She's been feeling really sick and she's really struggling with the Word of Wisdom... So it's looking like she's not going to be baptized this week after all... The most depressing part of that is that in 2 weeks, I'll likely be transferring out of Urayasu and I won't be able to teach her anymore... I'm praying that Heavenly Father keeps me here in Urayasu for just one more transfer.  Even if she's not baptized during that transfer, I want to find out what is going on with her. I don't want to leave! :(

 

Tamae:

Sooooo everything else that happened this week was just depressing so I'm going to end this email with the BEST thing that happened this week. Ready for the full story on Tamae!?

Tamae has been in Illya kyodai's fitness class for the last 10 years.  They've known each other for a REALLY long time.  :-)  Well, Illya was baptized. He told Tamae that he'd been baptized into this church and she was like "What?! What church is that!?"  So she went to find out.  She started meeting with the missionaries in April and decided she really liked what we were teaching.  She eventually prayed about it and felt that it was true. She wanted to be baptized, but she is the kind of person that refuses to make a promise if she's not COMPLETLEY sure that she's going to keep her promise.  So she refused to set a baptism date... Until October with Kuwahara shimai and I.  Her baptismal date is this Sunday.  Two days ago she had her interview with the district leader to make sure she was worthy to be baptized.  She passed!  :-D

So, December 23rd, (Joseph Smith's birthday) Tamae is going to be baptized by Illya kyodai! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!

 

 

And that was my week!  Wooo!  I'm so glad I'm out here. As hard as this week was, I know that it's important and there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be.  I love you guys!  Enjoy your snow! >:)

-

Christine