Week 17: HE SAID YES!!

Something super exciting happened this week, so I'm going to share it first and upfront!!

Last week we were housing really late, and we were almost going to go home, but we decided to house one more apartment. We met someone who actually let us talk. He had even read the bible, which is so rare in Japan! We were able to give him a Book of Mormon, and we were SO STOKED after! We were shouting "WE FOUND A KINJIN! WE FOUND A KINJIN!" all the way home!

Kinjin - kin - gold + -jin - person = golden person aka Golden Investigator in missionary terms!

We visited him the again a few days later, and this is how the conversation went:

"So we gave you that Book of Mormon last week, have you had a chance to read it?"

"Oh yeah, I'm half way though, I really like it."

WHAT?!

HALF WAY???? In a matter of DAYS????

This is one of those stories you hear about where it's like "My cousin's uncle's brother's son's friend heard this story about a missionary who..." But it really happened! In my life!

And what's even better, is after we taught him the second lesson, he agreed to be baptized!

Here's how that went:

"If you come to know this message is true, will you receive baptism?"

"Yeah."

HUH, REALLY????

"Great!"

"I'm just going to have to get rid of all of this Buddhist stuff my friend gave me first."

OKAY!!

He came to church this week, and seemed to really love it! He seems so happy. He said to us that he has been depressed recently, so bad that he can't hold a job. He has a terrible relationship with his family, and he's divorced. He really needs this message.

I'm glad we housed that last apartment, and didn't go home early.  We really made a difference in his life.  If all goes well, he will be baptized the end of October! One of us will transfer by then, so I might not get to be there, but that's alright!

So this week has been pretty great!

Not to mention we also were treated to lunch by a missionary's parents!! He was taking his parents on a tour of his mission, so they stopped by and took us to the NUMBER ONE LEGENDARY RESTAURANT among the Japan Sapporo Mission: BISTARAI BISTARAI!

Every day is Car-Free Day for missionaries. As our noble Zone Leader says, "Get Excited!"

He is also commonly quoted as saying "Yaaaaaaayyyy." (You can find Noble Zone Leader in the picture at Bistarai Bistarai in the bottom right. It's like where's Waldo, but you're not finding Waldo, so I guess it's actually nothing like where's Waldo.)

Haha and he just said from the other room of the church: "AUGH, what happened to the wiffy?? (He means wifi)" And now he's whining no. "Nooooooooooooo."

Ah, missionary life.

A picture from some meeting with my Zone and The Mission President! I don't know what the meeting is actually called, because they said it in Japanese. Yaaaaay! Look how precious Sister Doesn't Like Pictures looks hiding behind me. We're buddies.

Also I love how I'm front and center.

Not.

Look at the discomfort in my face.

You can practically hear me screaming on the inside.

This week after church (and the extra hour of meetings for the Halloween Party, which I will probably be transferred before happens) someone gave us food to eat! We were so hungry! We were so happy. We bite into our rice balls only to find....

THIS. This is a sac of fish eggs.

Not just the fish eggs, no. They were nice enough to put in the whole SAC! Delightful!

I didn't eat it.

I made potato soup from a powdered mix instead.

This is a picture of me eating my soup, uncomfortably close to fish organs.

There's a drink called C.C. Lemon which apparently has 55 lemons worth of Vitamin C in it.

Anyway, the packaging was just waiting to be used for a photo opp. This is what we call シャッターチャンス / shataachansu in Japanese, taken transliterally from the apparently English phrase "shutter chance."

This week we had splits with the new Sister Training Leader, Sister Not Australian, But Eats Vegemite! She's super cute and nice! This is the joke she said this week:

(Backstory) So I had a dream about this clementine cake that looked really yummy so I woke up one morning and made it, and upon hearing this, she replied...

"What, are you Lehi????"

You know, because Lehi had a prophetic dream and.... Yeah, it's a Sister Missionary joke, I know! But it's still funny!

Anyway, back to the story about splits!

My companion had already left the apartment before we were ready to head out, but they left.... With the keys! So we couldn't leave!

BUT WE WEREN'T JUST GOING TO SIT THERE, OH NO!

WE WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR THE WORK!!

I attached a stick to the door with a rope so we could lock the door from the outside, without the key. If watching Cyberchase and Zoom after school every day as a kid did anything for me, it's this.

And then we walked around by the train station to talk to people and met some people from Switzerland speaking German! I was like "SUMIMASEN (Japanese) ICH HABE DEUTSCH-GO (Japanese/German) MANAB...(Japanese) Ge.... GESTUDIERT!!! UMMM UMMM"

4 years of German classes and in a matter of months all that work has been smothered by Japanese.

Good thing they spoke English…

BYE, BYE!!