Monday, January 27, 2014

Hey there everyone!

This week has been pretty interesting. Quite a few twists and turns to keep things spiced up. On Wednesday morning we went to the Temple. Because the Tokyo Temple will be closed for 2 weeks, the day we would have gone normally as a zone got moved, but it was moved to the day that we have to go pick up new missionaries from the airport, so we went on Wednesday with just us in the office along with President and Sister Wada. It was really good. In the temple, after we got in I noticed that there was a tv set up in the corner for sign language interpretation. There was a deaf woman who went through in the same session we did. After the session ended I was able to talk with her a bit, and found out that she knows Sister Matsunaga in the Fuchu Ward. It seems like all the deaf members in Japan know each other. Every time I meet a new one they already know the others. So anyways, that was really fun. What a treat. Oh, and as a random side note, the interpretation was actually ASL with Japanese captions. I thought that was interesting.  I guess there isn't one in Japanese sign language.

Our office temple day.

A majority of the rest of the week was opening new apartments and moving missionaries into bigger ones to accomadate the increase in missionaries. Thursday night we did have sports night like always though. The last couple of weeks there has been a group of 5 Jr High kids coming that all play basketball for club at school together. We let them play together, and they just destroyed us. It was pretty funny but emberrasing at the same time being completely outplayed by a bunch of these little Jr High kids. We had reach, strength, and size on our side, but they could play the game alot better than any of us. When they first came they were playing serious, keeping in formations, only taking safe shots, stuff like that. But after coming once or twice, they caught on that we just play for fun and to have a good time. I noticed that they started playing more relaxed, started trying to show off a little, take a couple of crazy or just silly shots for fun. After all, it's not practice, so coach isn't going to yell at them for missing, right? It was good to see them be able to loosen up and just have some fun. 

Aki's Baptism! LtoR (Back): Toru, Elder Fernelius, me,
 Elder Medeiros, Elder Call. LtoR (Front): Elder and Sister Yamashita,
Aki's friend, Sister Wells, Aki, Elder Crandall,
Sister Feist, Elder Fukuchi

Sunday was a really good day this week. The sister's investigator, Aki, who is actually Mongolian, was baptized. We had been working together as a district to plan the baptism, and everything went smoothly. Aki brought a friend with her to church and to the baptism, and now her friend has a Book of Mormon and wants to learn more. There was wonderful participation from the ward, and lots of people came to support Aki. We were even able to have another investigator (Toru) there, and he really felt the spirit very strongly at the service. In an attempt to help a certain member who feels like he doesn't have very many friends, we introduced Toru to him. That's when we found out that apparently when Toru stayed in California for 3 months, he stayed in this member's home town! That was a good conversation starter for them. It was just one of those days were you plan for the worst, hope for the best, and then everything ends up working better than we hoped for. It was really nice. 

Well, that's about all I can think of for this week. I hope you all have a great week! Talk to you all more next week!

Elder Blake