February 2nd 2015

Mom and Dad,

Well, I'll just get right on to the good stuff. We met with our kinjin this last Tuesday. Morin Choro and I both had probably the best, most enjoyable lesson of our mission! We biked out over the ocean road, as usual. Thanks goodness I'm no longer on the Mamachari bike! We get to the house and go in intending to just teach our investigaor about pre-Earth life and creation. I don't know if Mr. Kinjin had something else in mind or not, but he was going too fast for us to keep up! Basically we taught the Pre-Earth Life, then started talking about the Creation, and he started putting all the pieces together on his own and ended up figuring more than half the Plan of Salvation! He seriously understood it all perfectly and loved it! He was literally bouncing up and down as he rephrased basically everything he and we had said! This man is going to be an awesome member. We both came out of that house blown away.

I kind of don't even want to bother saying more because that was such an awesome experience! but, I know you want to hear more. Sooo...

...the other big thing that happened this week was on Saturday. Have I ever mentioned the couple in their 60's, who are super great at English and LOVE the missionaries? to the point that they feel they have to feed us instant ramen when we drop by just to give them a li'l Christmas card? Well, that morning we left study a little bit early to help at the English class that the man teaches. In Japan, you don't have any formal English class until you're in middle school, but these kids were only at the end of grade school and are really good. Anywho, following the class we got invited downstairs to have lunch with the entire family. Not even joking, the grandparents, whom we're teaching, their two daughters, and their daughters' children plus one of their son-in-laws. I'm not sure exactly how we got to the next point in the conversation--it may have been because they were looking at Google Earth and I mentioned if you go into street view, of our house, you and Jayden are visible in the street--so they wanted to see. The grandfather suggested we look at the church honbu in Salt Lake. I got them to a point where you can see the temple and they all were pretty amazed. I then showed them the Portland temple. All-in-all they ended up on lds.org looking up several of the temples around the world, as well as going to the main page and looking through tons of stuff. One of the daughters and her husband were looking pretty intently though the whole website for a good chunk of time! I think we found ourselves a handful of new potential investigators. We're not certain if they'll want to know more because they're all very strongly Buddhist--at the very least, it was a great family experience!

Other than that, we had another dendo fireside following the end of church yesterday. We focused a lot on LA's and how we can friendship them better. We don't think everyone took in the message we were trying to get across since they kept going off on random tangents. The four of us know that this branch needs a lot of help strengthening it. We had good, long talks on the phone with our zone leaders about how we can help, so hopefully we can accomplish that.

This one's pretty short! I didn't write it in the beginning, but I definitely thought it would be! I just didn't write it because you know how it usually goes when I say it's going to be short. :) Give my best to everyone!

愛、

～ウィルソン長老