Well hello! It's now officially transfer 2 for me here in Japan, and the work is going well as always. To start with, At district meeting last week, our district leader Elder Burningham gave us an assignment to study the Christlike attributes section of Preach My Gospel again, and to choose one that we would like to develop, then make a daily plan of how we can develop that attribute. I ended up selecting humility, because let's face it, I'm the most humble person you know, right? haha! So yeah. Something interesting that caught my attention this time around when I was studying the Christlike attributes is when it says that a characteristic of a humble person is they recognize the hand of God in their life. So I asked myself, "do I recognize the hand of God in my life as much as I ought to?". I decided then that my daily plan would be to write down at least 5 things in my planner at the end of every day the the Lord had done for us that day. The first couple days were a little tough, because all of our appointements had fallen through for those days. But over the course of just a few short days, it became much easier to think of things to write down, even on days we weren't able to meet with anybody. That's been a great experience, and I'm glad that Elder Burningham gave us the assignment.
Last Tuesday I had an opportunity to go to the Tokyo Temple. That was way aweome. It was good to be able to go to the temple after over 6 weeks of not being able to. Later that afternoon Elder Christensen and I went to Akihabara with one of the missionaries he served with that's actually going home tomorrow. Akihabara was quite the interesting place. I think I saw more references to anime and video games in the first 30 seconds walking around that district then the entire 6 weeks of living in Yamato. And people. Lots of people. More people than I've seen anywhere else in Japan so far. It was fun.
So, it's been a good week, but the weekend especially was great. There are some less active brothers in our ward, and one of them goes to sports night on friday night almost every week. Saturday morning there was a stake softball activity, so we invited him to that. We met up at the station saturday morning, and lo and behold he brought his brother with him! Great! So we have a great time at softball, and had a lesson with them afterwards. They both said they would come back to church, so we're lookig forward to seeing them next week. Later that day we had an appointment with another less active member. Before our appointment, we did some housing at the apartment complex he lives at, and found someone that we were able so set up a return appointment with. Not bad. Our lesson with the less active member that afternoon went fairly well. He can't come to church because of work, but he still reads his book of mormon and prays every day. Good for him. He wants us to start teaching his duaghter who is 24-ish and still living at home. We're hoping that will work out, because they could both really strengthen each other if she accepts.
Sunday was probably my favorite day this week. Saturday evening we had gone by our phillipino investigator John's house to try to visit him. We haven't been able to see him for almost 4 weeks because of his work schedule. He wasn't home, but his wife was, and she told us to come back sunday afternoon. So we did. John was home, and we were able to have a lesson with him. We found out that he got his work schedule changed up a bit so he's not working overnight anymore, so hopefully he'll be a little easier to get ahold of now. That was really exciting to be able to finally have a lesson with him after almost a month of not even being able to have a conversation on the phone with him. After our lesson with John, we went and had dinner with the ward mission leader from the Zama Military Branch, Brother Smith. It was a good time, and ended up turning into a mission business sort of dinner. We found out about one of his son's friends who went to youth conference just a few weeks ago, has been to church a few times, and has expressed interest in learning more. Right now the plan is to take him to sports night friday night, and if he can get permission from his dad we can start teaching him. So yeah, Sunday was a great day.
Those are the highlights for this week! It's been good to hear from those of you who have written letters the last few weeks! I appreciate the love and support! More to come next week!
Elder Blake
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