Hey Everyone!
How have you all been this week? Is it still blistering hot over there, or is it looking like it'll cool off soon? It's still pretty hot over here. It's actually been raining quite a bit recently too. Which is funny, because I feel like it's been raining more in the last couple of weeks than it ever did during the official "rainy season". Anyways, it was actually a much better week out here in Fuchu for us this week. The week before we were miraculously able to get a hold of nearly all our investigators an potential investigators, and set several appointments for this last week. Even better though, is that a majority of them actually held too. It's a nice change from having over half of your appointments fall through for one reason or another.
I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure a few weeks ago I mentioned how we ran into a man named Cooper at the Fuchu station. He's from Australia, and he's here in Japan to play pro rugby. We had met him just a few days after he moved here when he called out to us. Turns out he's a member. We thought it was a perfect opportunity, because there's a less active woman we're trying to work with whose non-member husband also plays pro rugby. Well, the story continues now. This woman, Edna, was pretty nervous about us coming over and meeting her husband. He's a pretty direct guy, and she was worried he wouldn't like us. Well, we finally got a time set to go over and meet her husband, and it went really well! Her husband, Hendrix, is a way cool guy. He even invited us to one of their pre-season practice games against Toshiba, which is the team Cooper plays for. We ended up going to that, and it was great. We were able to talk with Hendrix and Edna, and we even introduced them to Cooper after the game. Cooper had seen us on the sidelines during the game, so he came over after the game had finished. While we were talking with Edna during the game, she told us how relieved she was that Hendrix likes us. She told us that after we had left their home the day before, she asked him what he thought about us. He said he thought we were pretty cool. She asked if he was going to invite us back over sometime. He said yeah, they can come over and play PS3 or whatever whenever they want. Haha! Edna then had to try explaining to him that we don't play video games on our missions.
Later in the week, there was a disaster that ended up being a huge blessing. We have a Chinese investigator named Kosui. He goes to sports night at Kichijoji every week and plays basketball with us. He LOVES basketball. No joke. His interest in the church is pretty weak right now, but he comes to every sports night just because he loves basketball so much. The Fuchu Ward Elders Quorum decided to help us out and plan a ward basket ball activity specifically for Kosui. The reason being is we wanted to help him have friends in the Fuchu ward, and nobody in Fuchu Ward is able to go to sports night. So, we figured if we had a basketball activity with just the Fuchu ward members, it would be a perfect opportunity to introduce him to everybody and help him have some friends. Well, we invited him and he said he would come. Saturday morning, the day of the activity, he called us and said he actually couldn't make it after all. We were kinda bummed. But we went anyway, because he has several friends he brings to sports night, and we invited all of them too, so we were hoping at least one of them would come. The plan was to meet at the church at 8:30 in the morning, and then carpool over to the sports center with the gym and start playing at 9. At 8:50 there was only Elder Fernelius and I with 3 other people, and nobody had a car. We made a call, and they told us that they were already there, and to just go on ahead and walk there. We did. We didn't make it to the sports center until about 9:30 though, When we arrived, it turned out there was actually nobody there yet. And, we found out that that day wasn't basketball day. They were set up for indoor tennis and badminton. Elder Fernelius and I both agreed that Kosui was much better off not coming. Definitely a hidden blessing.
One last story for this week! We were invited to go to the Chofu City Hanabi Taikai (fireworks show) by an investigator Saturday night. It's an annual event, and it's apparently really popular. Their big selling point for this year was that they were going to launch 9,000 fireworks in 60 minutes. You can do the math. That's alot of fireworks. They were launching them down by the Tamagawa river, and they had partitioned off sections of the river bank for a couple of kilometers for people to watch the show. We got there only 10 minutes before the show started. Rookie mistake. There were literally thousands of people that had come to watch the show. there were only 5 of us, but we still had trouble to find room to sit on the ground. We did eventually end up finding a place to sit. I'll tell you what though, that was the best fireworks show I have seen in my life. It was incredible. Makes all the shows I've seen in America look like weak sauce.
Well, that's about it for this week. This week starts the new transfer. I won't be able to let you know where I'm at or who my companion is until next week though, because transfer calls have been switched to Tuesday. I'll find out tomorrow what's happening. Talk to you all next week!
Elder Blake
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