Mondays, January 13th & 20th, 2014

Hello wonderful family! 

I had no idea that Arianna Grande was Cat from Victorious.  Now that I know that, I'M WAY HAPPY!!  Her family was cool.  Good people.  

Anyway, today was the Ward Mochitsuki!  It is this Japanese festival where everyone gets together and pounds rice with a mortar and giant stick.  Google it, I can't really explain it, haha.  It was way fun and we had about 12-15 PI's and Investigators come.  It was a great chance for the ward members to fellowship and get to know the people that we are working with.  I was working closely with the people in our Bible class, they are way closing to getting baptized, and introducing them to all the ward members.  Our Bible class right now has 4 solid investigators in it, although they don't really know that they are investigating.  They aren't official investigators yet.  But they all have been given Book of Mormons, I've given some triple combos to 2 of them, they ask a ton of gospel related questions, and we have basically taught them all 3 main lessons a few times.  They still have some personal biases against the church, but they love the Bible and want us to teach them.  This last week, we had a Chinese recent convert lady named Kyou Bien come and join in on our Bible class.  After a while, we had her share her conversion story with everyone and she basically just bore her testimony of baptism for like half an hour.  Everyone in the room was feeling the spirit very strongly and one of the class members, a guy named Yuichi, said that he has heard hundreds of missionary discussions over the past 30 years, but it wasn't until today that his eyes have been opened and he understood baptism.  Her words were very powerful.  We have high hopes for our Bible class. 

In response to Kyle's question, cremation (when you die) is totally fine.  Most members in Japan respect their Buddhist traditions and are cremated and buried in their family plot.  It's not so much as what happens to your body after you die as it is what you do while you are in it, haha.  That is the important part.  

This past week, Elder Medeiros and I had a some more finding time than usual and we went hard in the paint.  We had over 113 quality contacts on the street and found a bunch of new PI's.  We set a record throughout the mission as far as quality contacts go.  As a mission, we had quality contacts with over 4,100 people in our mission boundary.  Statistically, 1/1000 people we contact gets baptized.  So just from this weeks effort, 4 people will be baptized.  In Japan, that is really good.  

I love you all and hope you have a wonderful week!!!!

Love, 

Elder Crandall 

We (Christopher's family) got a nice surprise in the mail this week!  A cute note sent from the Takanesawa Family from the ward Christopher is serving in!  It's so sweet! 

(Short email sent on January 20th)

I am writing this email on my new iPad mini, courteously provided by

the tithe payers of the church!  Yaaaaay!  It is white and light and
designed specific for a missionary's everyday life.  We of course
don't get most of the regular apps or things like that, but we have
all of the Church applications and things like that.  If we try really
hard we probably could get on a lot of the prohibited sites and use a lot of
prohibitive apps and things like that.  But we don't!  This new iPad is a big
symbol of the missions trust in us the missionaries.  It also shows how
much the Lord is hastening His work.  We are now able to update our
area books and send emails and Mormon messages and things like that in
an instant to whomever we want.  Although it can be a distraction 
sometimes, I feel that the benefits of the iPad outweigh the
consequences.

Well, I wrote a really long email on the iPad, but when I tried to send it, it didn't work and ended up deleting my message.  I will fill you in in detail later cause now I am out of P-day time.  Basically we have two new golden investigators who are member referrals who said that they want to get baptized and we have started teaching them.  It's a cool story.  I will share it next week.  

I love you and am excited to be an Uncle!!!  Wahoooo!!! 

Love, 

Elder Crandall