Hello Everyone!
Well, it's been another week. It's been pretty fun, and there's quite a bit that happened. Like I said last week, they've decided to change the transfer schedule in the mission and do transfer calls on Tuesday and then have transfer day on Monday. I guess it's supposed to make it easier for the mission home to coordinate transportation for new missionaries coming in and returning missionaries going home when they do it that way. Anyways, we had transfer calls on Tuesday. I'm no longer in Atsugi! I was really surprised that my stay was so short in Atsugi. I was hoping to stay a little longer, but I guess the Lord has something he needs me to do somewhere else. So now I'm in an area called Fuchu. It seems like a great area so far.
My new companion is Elder Fernelius. Don't ask me where that name is from, he's not sure either. He's only been out in the field for 9 weeks, but he's doing a great job. He's definitely going to leave a big mark on the mission by the time he goes home. He's really cool, and we get along really well. He's from Dallas, and he's actually half Japanese. But, he doesn't speak any Japanese. He never learned it growing up. I'm really excited to work with him.
There have been quite a few cool miracles this week too. One night while we were in our apartment getting ready to plan, I got a call from Brother Kitajima, one of the members from Atsugi. He told me that his parents, who are not members of the church, live in the Fuchu area, and he wants us to go meet them together with him next weekend. That was pretty cool. I couldn't help but wonder if maybe that was one reason I came to Fuchu. Maybe he was waiting for a missionary that he knew and trusted to go to Fuchu before he asked for help with his parents. I'm really excited to meet with them.
Speaking of reasons why I came to Fuchu, here's a funny story for you all. The light in the study room was broken when I got here. The chain pull had completely come out of the light, so you couldn't turn it on. To compensate, they had just been using their desk lamps for light in the study room. I figured it shouldn't be too hard to fix. After all, you just have to figure out what the pull hooks on to and re-attach it, right? So I opened the light up, played around, and couldn't figure out how to re-attach it. Maybe a piece was missing. Maybe I just didn't know what I was doing. Haha! Anyways, I did manage to turn the switch on the inside to the on position, so after we plugged it back in it and flipped the wall switch it turned on. So now there's no chain pull, but we can turn it on and off with the wall switch. As soon as it turned on, Elder Fernelius was just like, “alright, now we know why you got sent to Fuchu. You can call President Wada and ask to be transferred to your next area now!” Ok, so maybe it's not as funny as we thought it was... missionary humor....
One last cool story! Saturday we were going home from a training meeting to eat lunch. While we were walking through this park on the way to our apartment, there was this dad playing soccer with his 3 little kids. He calls out to us, “hey, it's pretty hot today, isn't it?” We answered, “Yeah, it's pretty hot.” That's nice. I was thinking this was a pretty friendly guy. Then he asks, “Are you two Mormons?” Elder Fernelius and I look at each other and we both thought, “ok, we now we HAVE to talk to this guy. How does he know we're Mormons?” Apparently he had met the missionaries nearly 20 years ago in Northern Japan, but was never baptized. He invited us over to his house for a drink and to meet his wife. While we were there, they ended up giving us lunch too. That was a surprise. I've never been invited to somebody's house on the street like that before. We almost always end up teaching people at the church or out in public somewhere. We invited his whole family to an upcoming ward activity, and they said they would come. We briefly introduced the idea of eternal families, and asked if we could teach them more. They accepted. I'm super excited about this family. They're going out of town for vacation this week, so we won't see them until the ward activity, but I've got a good feeling about this family.
I hope you all have a great week! Thanks for your emails! It's always great to hear about how you're all doing! Talk to you all next week!
Elder Blake
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