Monday, September 10, 2012

Hi Mommy :) and Dad and Kyle and Connor, and everyone!

It's weird to hear all about school and stuff and not starting school myself.  My body tells me that it is time to start school again, like, it's telling me that it is time to start doing home work and studying and stressing out, haha. But it's totally awesome that everyone is adjusting fine and that school is looking to be very fun this year :)

I get more and more exited for Kelsie each week! Let me know when the dates are, like when she goes through the temple, receptions, the wedding, and so forth :) Have fun planning, Mom :) Don't go too crazy over this. When it gets hard and stressful remember that I won't be a part of any of it, but I would gladly do any of the hard and stressful things if I could :)

Kyle and Connor are being great otsukaresama's and working hard in school.  Connor, I was smaller than you when I started Junior High, haha.  I remember how crazy it was and feeling super small.  Just don't be afraid to talk to people and never judge anyone until you get to know them.  I was friends with a lot of people that I wasn't sure if they were cool or not until I actually got to know them, haha.

Kyle, Good luck with choir man.  It's not easy memorizing things, but at least you don't have to memorize Japanese songs.  Japanese songs are so crazy.  They are really hard to understand because they have really long sentences for really short phrases, so they cut out a lot of their grammar.  It's like a string of words without any order to them really.  The hymns are a mess.  "Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam" is in the hymn book and literally translated from Japanese it says, "Light, Light, Like Jeeesus, Light, Light, Like Jeeesus", instead of "a Sunbeam, a sunbeam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, a sunbeam, a sunbeam, I'll be a sunbeam for him". Sooo work hard, you will do fine :)

This week was very good for us.  We were able to find 3 new investigators and we taught many lessons.  If they start progressing I will tell you more about them, but they are different college students and we ran into them streeting over by our church building.  For the past few weeks I have basically been training my trainer, haha.  I won't go into too much detail, but Elder Gallacher felt as though he has been in a bit of a mission slump so I have taken over a large part of the leadership position and increasing his faith in our missionary work.  So that has been a huge blessing to me but I still have a lot I need to learn before I am 100% trained.  We have been focusing on a lot of streeting(stopping people walking down the street) lately so we have been hanging out by a lot of different train stations and busy china town, I guess you could call them, haha. We are getting really good at teaching mini lessons and figuring out if people have interest in the church right now.  We went on splits with our District Leader and I spent the day streeting with his companion.  He is a very shy kid, but I made him say hi to 300 people and by the end of it, he stopped and talked to 3 people on his own which is a huge improvement.  We have been trying to give out a BOM a day and it is actually pretty hard because Japanese people don't like receiving things for no reason.  They are very humble and receiving gifts just means that they have to do something nice back, haha.

My Japanese is getting better little by little.  I always know what's going on and I have been using the phone and emailing a lot more recently. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time today to detail everything that I have done this week, but I'll give a brief overview...

We have a weekly takyu (ping pong) night every Saturday and I get my butt whooped hard, haha! We found a way cool curry restaurant with a guy we can share the Gospel with a little bit every time we go; weekly eikaiwa is going great; this guy in my ward was baptized in Puyallup in the 70's and I was able to get to know him really well; we visited over 10 ward members and shared little messages with them; had a Zone conference and President Budge taught us about faith; turns out our less active member that we were trying to bring back has a mental disorder so we shouldn't visit him often anymore, haha; one of our Sister Missionaries had a Birthday, but other than that, we hit the streets every day this week for like 4-5 hours a day. We've talked to over 100 people this past week, but 3 of them I think have genuine interest.  The work is slow and can be hard, but it is progressing nonetheless and we see miracles daily :)

I love you guys and I always pray for you and our loved ones back home. Please keep praying for me and please pray for the members in Japan to have more courage to share the Gospel with their loved ones. 

Love,

Elder Crandall