Am I looking at this right? It's June 26th?!
Ok, I don't super have a good excuse for why this is 2 days late.... but it wasn't because of the Typhoon, we were in Kumamoto the whole time it was around the Oita area, and it never really made landfall over here, so it was just a lot of rain, and that was about it.
But, Wow this has been a super quick couple of weeks! This week especially went by super fast! So we headed off to Kumamoto on Monday, had a nice 8:30 bus ride for 3.5 hours, and spent the day at the Kumamoto Castle! It was way fun to go see the castle again! I think we ended up having a group of 16 missionaries or so raid the castle. There were a bunch of volunteers this time working as Samurai, Ninja, and dressed in other fun Japanese costumes. There was an old Samurai from Alabama, and 3 others that just liked to pose with everybody. We got some fun pictures. :D
That night was a little intense because 12 of those 16 elders at the Castle all went to go stay at one of the apartments over there in Kumamoto (Actually the Shimizu apartment where I first started my mission) and because of the rain the veranda wasn't an option this time, so we ended up trying to cram everybody into the rooms.... it was a little bit cozy.
The conference on Tuesday was a really awesome one! It was the very last one for President Margetts and it was an awesome send off! We had training on the importance of social media in proselyting! Ok, so we don't get to really use it while we're missionaries here, but we've been encouraged to get familiar with the site Mormon.org, and create a profile on there. Soon I should have my profile up... I think, and there is a ton of cool things to look at on that site! They have videos from a bunch of different people, information on our beliefs, our values, and a whole slew of neat stuff to see on the site. It's definitely been a fun way to Dendo recently, just inviting people to go see the site (it's been a little hard because it's all in English but by September they'll have a Japanese one too.... hopefully). Also they focused on how easy it is now when we come back from the mission to encourage our friends with just a little push of a button. It's sometimes hard to talk to people you know about the gospel. But to send them a link, no strings attached, just a cool video, a good thought, a feel good video … we all can do that!
Then President Margetts gave us his last talk on just some life advice. Right now I don't have any of my notes with me so I'll just say the one that still sticks in my mind. "First pay the Lord, then pay yourself (have some fun), and then go pay your bills." If that tells you anything about our mission president :D. We also had these really cool slide shows all about the mission. We had one chronicling a day in the life of the missionaries in the Fukuoka mission, a slide show of the entrance photos of all the missionaries, and then a slide show of all of the baptisms from the past 2 years! It was a really special experience to share with all of the missionaries there and to really reflect on how the mission has been up to now. (Which, looking back, is really hard to imagine that it's been nearly 14 and a half months! That's just crazy talk!) Man this mission is great though!
So this week was a little slow as far as missionary work goes, but that's because we spent half of the week in Kumamoto, a good 4 hour bus ride from our apartment... It took out Monday, Tuesday, and Sunday, then with Eikaiwa, weekly planning, and other things that come up, the time for Dendo was a little bit less this week. But it was a good little bit of dendo time! We always plan out our days the night before and write it all out in our daily planners; and one day we were planning and just came to a point where we had absolutely no idea what to do that day. We thought about it, prayed about it, and thought some more and eventually decided to go on our fall-back plan we always have and just pick an area on the map and visit any member, investigator, or former investigator that may be around that area. So this day we ended up deciding to go and visit this one member, mainly because I hadn't met with them while I've been here, and had that as our plan. It was a good thing we decided to go visit that family, on that day, at that time, because they happened to have their inactive son there who hasn't even seen the missionaries in a couple of years. One of the Daughters opened the door, and got really excited when she saw the missionaries there. She let us know that they hadn't had any of the missionaries visit them for a little over a year, and how happy they were to talk. We also got to have a really good lesson with the son about building your faith and going strong. He even committed to try and strengthen his faith! It'll be awesome to see if we can eventually get him to start coming back to church, too. He tried to tell us that he couldn't come to church because he drinks, he smokes, he quit the church when he was 18, and that a person who does at that couldn't possibly come to church. We just told him "Church is for everyone, it doesn't matter what you do or think, the door is always open waiting for you to come in." As we come to know the gospel, and feel the love of the Savior, our desire to continue contrary to the commandments will diminish and we will slowly become the people that, deep down inside, we know we want to be. Really, it just takes that first step back toward the church, and slowly but surely, everything else with come into place. Just take that step of faith (Indiana Jones could do it and so can you!)
Well, that's about what I have for today. Check out www.mormon.org, go do some cool things, have a good week, and I wish you all the best!
Elder Everettエベレット長老
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