All the Adventures!

Ushiku Transfer 11 Week 2

Konnichiwa!

Well this week was just full of adventures! Hehe :)

This week we did a lot of Less Active visiting. We would pick a part of the area and try to visit all the members and Less Actives there. We don't have a list of all the Less Actives, so we were basically just visiting anyone whose name I didn't know...which led to lots of Less Actives. It was quite the adventure though.

The first day that we did this we found the house of a Brazilian PI that I met at a baby shower last transfer (her daughter, who I recognized, was peeking out of the house when we passed by), we also found a Less Active who clearly did not remember that she had been baptized and she rather forcefully told us that she was Buddhist, and we found a Less Active who actually wants to meet with us! It was getting pretty dark when we talked to her and she told us that her house was pretty messy, but we asked her what was her favorite thing about the gospel that she could remember, and she said that it was that Jesus Lives! YES! That is the best thing to remember! We asked if we could come back next week to share a little video about that and she said yes! Then she called us 20 minutes later (not quite sure how she found our phone number) to change the day because she had another appointment!

So lots of fun miracles!

Super yummy lunch

The second day we did it was filled with some more fun! I think my favorite though was when we visited this really old lady and she invited us to come in, let us sit, and then started talking about how she was really sick and couldn't clean her house. She did not remember at all that she had been baptized a long time ago. Well, as missionaries, we love to serve! So we offered to come and help her clean (bringing along a member of course)! She was really skeptical like "Is this your part-time job? Do I have to pay you?" Why no, you do not. We are volunteers. Then came my favorite, "I just don't want you to try and convert me or anything." Well, no problem there, you were already converted! Haha, she doesn't remember it, but we feel very fortunate to have found her. She was clearly in need of help spiritually and physically and we look forward to coming with a member and hopefully helping her bring the light of the Gospel back into her life.

Helping to translate

On Saturday I also had the chance to go to the dentist with a Peruvian Less Active. Wow, the gift of tongues is real. They were using a lot of really technical dentist language in Japanese and I had to translate it into Spanish for her. We made it though! And she fed us a really good lunch and we got to talk to her non-member daughter who lives in Peru over Facebook. Yay!

Those were just a few of our Less Active Adventures. :)

As for some Investigator Adventures:

We tried visiting a new investigator that we found last week and she wasn't home. It was pouring rain and we were not prepared at all, but we had planned to do some finding around that area. We wandered a little aimlessly, but the Spirit led us to a few apartments. The second person we talked to told us that his father had recently passed away and he really wanted to know where he went. He accepted both a return appointment and a Book of Mormon! It was a perfectly timed miracle because we had just been talking about success as a missionary. Sometimes its hard to see if you are doing the right thing as a missionary. Sometimes you wonder "Am I listening to the Spirit and he is just leading me to those neighborhoods that are hard and have no one who wants to listen or am I not listening hard enough to the Spirit and I'm just trying to do this on my own?" We were talking about these things and then all of a sudden we found this really prepared person. Neither of us had felt really strong promptings from the Spirit to go to this apartment, but he led us there anyways.

Success as a missionary isn't measured in anything except for yourself. This ties into a lot of the things that I loved from General Conference that we also watched this week. One thing that really stood out to me from General Conference was the talks about perfection and the Atonement. As a missionary, there are a lot of rules and there is a very clear image of what the perfect missionary is (maybe its someone with endless amounts of energy whose testimony is strong enough that when they talk to someone on the street the person begs to be baptized). If that is the image, then clearly none of us can every reach perfection. God asks us to be perfect, but it's not something that we can do right now. It's something that we slowly build towards. As we do our best every day, and use the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we can slowly grow and come closer to reaching our eternal potential. Through the Atonement we can be made perfect, but it takes time.

Now what does this have to do with success? In my mind, a lot of times success and perfection appear to go hand in hand. To be successful, you have to be perfect. They do go hand in hand, but in a different way. As we strive our best each and every day, to work our hardest, to serve and do good, we will be successful. At the end of our missions we will feel that we did all that we could do. That was true of the night that we found that new investigator. We did all we could do and it wasn't the fact that we found a new investigator that made us feel successful, it was the fact that we went out and used every minute of our day as effectively as we could have and we listened to the almost silent promptings of the Spirit that led us to that particular apartment.

Success isn't measured by the number of apartments you knock on or the number of people who are baptized, it's measured by your commitment to do everything that is asked of you (all the rules and the promptings from Heavenly Father) even when it seems to amount to nothing.

I just want to end with one last experience from this past week.

We met with Nodoka-chan for our first lesson this week. It was the night before her Eiken (a huge English test, like the ACT or SAT) test and it was in a food court. My Japanese was all over the place and we couldn't hear each other too well. Despite all these factors, it was one of the most powerful lessons I have been a part of. She had read the Gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet and as she read about Baptism she though "Hmmm maybe I want to be baptized." We taught her the Restoration and she has the strongest desire to learn more about Jesus Christ! She was overjoyed when we gave her a Book of Mormon and at the end of our lesson, she prayed without hesitation. She has the most sincere desire to learn and to truly know if this church is true and when she does she wants to be baptized.

From the moment that we met her, Nodoka-chan has been in the hands of God. Nothing that we do stops her from having her desire. During this lesson, my Japanese was probably the most scattered, poorly executed that it has ever been, yet through the Spirit it made perfect sense to her. I am so grateful that I am not doing this work alone, that me and Sister Savage aren't doing this alone. We have a powerful force on our side, Heavenly Father. He will never let us down! He will always make up for our weaknesses!

I love this work so much and I love Ushiku!

I hope you all have a great week this week!

Love,

ブラック姉妹
Black Shimai