This week was an adventure. Tuesday was zone conference, and let me tell you, it was the best zone conference I've ever been to. Granted, I've only been to three zone conferences, but that's neither here nor there. Sister Smoot gave a training on effective study and it was way great. We talked about the principles of study in PMG and also those that preceded the revelation in D&C 138. Speaking of D&C 138, did y'all know that one of the first people to read that revelation before it was published by the Church was Susa Young Gates? She's way awesome and was a key influence in keeping family history work alive in the Church in the early 20th century, before it was the priority that it is today. She's a way awesome lady. Y'all should learn about her.
Then President Smoot gave us a training about being bold in teaching, following up with Elder Yamashita's challenges to us from the mission tour. The amount of people accepting the gospel has more than doubled since Elder Yamashita came. It's crazy. As I've said previously, this transfer we've been learning and focusing on the Four Gospels in the New Testament and Christ's ministry to the Nephites in 3 Nephi. We talked about the characteristics of Christ's teaching methods, and it was way interesting. He taught with authority from God, not by the authority of other "experts" like the scribes did, and because of that he was able to really impact people. So as missionaries, if we teach by the Spirit and do our best to teach well, those two things combined equate to what the Savior would do or say if He were here. Way cool deshou?
One of our goals as a mission is to strengthen the Kansai area enough that a temple can be built within the mission boundaries. We talked about that at zone conference, and President Smoot read D&C 110:6-8 with us, which talks about how Christ himself comes to speak to his servants with his own voice. Basically, as a mission right now, in preparing for a temple, we are preparing for Christ himself to come to Kobe, Japan. That's right. We're working to build a house of God right here in the Land of the Rising Sun. What a vision!
Other highlights of the conference include an awesome STL training about loving God (everyone go watch/read The First Great Commandment by Elder Holland in the Oct 2012 General conference immediately) and doing our best to show we love him through our obedience to His commandments. After all, that's all He asks of us. He gives us everything, and all we have to do is love Him, truly love Him, and demonstrate our loyalty to Him. (see Mosiah 2:22) I've also decided that the apostle Peter is my new favorite person and I'm learning everything ever about him. He's awesome. But that's a discourse for another day.
Also, the zone leaders did a training about Elder Yamashita's challenge to focus on blessings rather than explanations when we teach, and they illustrated this principle by using the Parable of Natto. Now, if y'all don't know what natto is, it's a Japanese delicacy. And by delicacy I mean it's fermented soy beans. It's way healthy and all the Nihonjin love it, but it has the smell and consistency of particularly gooey snot. Apparently it's best with egg and rice. (in my opinion, it's not bad...it's not good though) But anyway. There's a first transfer in our zone who hadn't eaten natto yet, and the zone leaders basically just tried to convince this poor guy to eat this honestly really gross-looking substance that most missionaries are not particularly excited to try. But when they "taught" about natto with a blessing focus (such as "we were promised by Elder Choi that if we eat natto every day, we'll have a better relationship with the nihonjin") they were able to make the natto at least 52% more appealing than by just explaining what natto is. They related it to how we teach the gospel. For a lot of nihonjin who barely know anything about Christianity, missionaries and the missionary lessons are kind of scary (like the prospect of eating natto) but if we as missionaries focus on personal experiences and the blessings that come from the gospel, it's way easier to help people become more comfortable with investigating the Church. It was a really good object lesson.
Wow that was a lot gomen. And that's just Tuesday! More to come!
Wednesday was hard. We met with a potential investigator with the elders and it ended up going really sour. The lady we were teaching asked a lot of questions, but it felt like more of an interrogation almost. There was something that wasn't being communicated, or a need we weren't able to discern, and she ended up storming out when Ashikari Shimai glanced over at the clock to make sure we would still be on time for Eikaiwa, saying "if you guys can't focus then I don't want to be here." The elders chased after her and apparently were able to resolve some of the frustration, but we cried a lot. And drowned our tears in Skippy peanut butter. It was really hard because we wanted to help her so badly, but her heart was just so angry and hard. I now understand at least 0.01% more of what God feels when we get angry at Him. Just really sad because He loves us so much and just wants to help us.
On Thursday we met with our fun investigator, Hashizume-san for sushi lunch! He's way cool. He's read the Book of Mormon twice all the way through and believes it's true, but he's still missing faith in Christ. It's a really interesting situation that we're trying to help him with. He sees God very much as "God the creator of the universe" but not really "God my Father in Heaven." I feel like if he can begin to really feel the importance of Christ personally, he'll want to be baptized. He really loves the church, there's just that one little piece missing, yet it's the most important piece.
FRIDAY WAS EXCHANGES WITH WOOD SHIMAI! I love her she's awesome. We worked in Takatsuki for the day in the rain and it was great fun. We had so many awesome contacts, and we got to share the Peace in Christ music video with people! A really nice lady we met in McDonald's even made us origami hearts! It was so cute we died. Also that day I invented a new kind of cookie (which, incidentally, is where the subject title comes from). I call them Melon Pan Cookies. The recipe is as follows:
1. Don't use a recipe.
2. Eyeball the wet ingredients. A couple eggs, butter, vanilla, sugar, all that good stuff.
3. Eyeball the dry ingredients. Flour and salt and baking soda and baking powder and probably other stuff I'm forgetting. But make sure you put in more baking powder than you think you need.
4. Mix it all together.
5. Dump a bunch of cinnamon, nutmeg, and melon pan taste in the batter.
6. Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for maybe 15 minutes I think???
7. Hope it works.
8. Congrats you have really delicious cookies!!!!
Ma. I'm tired now though cos this is a long email, but that's really about it. Other than that, we've found a really cool family history video that's good for sharing! It's called #MeetMyGrandma if you wanna go watch it on LDS Media. It's way cute I love it.
Love you all!! See you next week!!
Sherwood 姉妹 💕💕💕
19歳 20歳
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