Missionary Moments

The week has come along alright. I am searching my mind for interesting things to say, and I am somewhat lacking... except for a couple of things.

I cannot remember if I have said or not, but recently the Elders have picked up on the Less Active reactivation activities. As this has been a solid desire of mine since the beginning of my mission (my first interview with Kaicho was about this), I was overjoyed. It is a lot harder than it looks though. .....Having visited many addresses that are over 20 years old and no longer exist, enlisting the help of the community in finding the lost people, and creating quite a ruckus in the city of Kusatsu and Ritto we have only managed to find maybe 2 or 3 people with any potential. Most are lost, moved, dead or outright hostile. We stopped at this one guys house who was baptised only two years ago. It was behind this little shop that had the nicest old lady in it, who gave us directions. The LA wasn't home, but we visited another night and began talking to a younger guy, who was a bit cautious with us, but really nice, then this other guy came out and started yelling at me. He is kinda small cause he is Japanese so I stared him down and calmly asked him if he was this particular guy, and that if he could just tell us we will leave and not bother him again because he is obviously upset. I thought he was going to fight me but yelled that religion is not and will never be welcome in the house and slammed the door. All my angry Japanese wanted to come out, but I apologized for interrupting and left. It took a lot of control to walk away, when I wanted to break the door down. My companion was kind of shocked about it all. The joys of missionary work....

That was just one experience though, some people are really friendly. We ask one old lady for directions and she said she will walk with us there and then got every single person around to help out as well, so we arrived at the location with a party of like 10 older people whose only intent is to give us correct directions. I felt like we would break out into a musical number and they would all join in like in the muppet movie.

One of our investigators agreed on a Baptism date this week, so that was exciting! Numbers were a lot better than other weeks, but we are still struggling to find new solid people to teach.

It has rained a little this week, particularly today, which is taihen (a hassle). It might stop sometime... the weather is set to cool down from now too, which is funny because this summer wasn't even that hot (due to rain and stuff)......

My Japanese class was fun this last week. I got put into a group while my companion got one on one training. I was with two filipinos, a chinese lady and two cool brazilians. We all spoke English, though we spoke in Japanese, but it was really nice to be in relaxed atmosphere like that and just make friends who do not run away from the Christians.

.....The ward is awesome.