A ball of sass and awesomeness

I hope this is a better report than last week.

Honestly I understand the fact my wish of having a easy ascent to the finish line is somewhat a childish thought. I know there isn't an easy path to salvation. the probing question that has been in my mind is how can I better myself so I can help more people down that path. I know it is a change of my talents. It's how can I try harder, how can I try more earnestly, how can I be the best me so I can serve the most effective way. It's not anything against who I am. It's finding the best way I can use my skills.

I will admit Jensen is crazy amazing. He is such a hard worker. He tries to fit the square in the circle slot of one of those baby toys. He pushes and pushes until the toy breaks or until it fits. He is amazing at learning the language. He understands far more than what I do and he is ready to train.

But in my honest opinion, I also have been sent here for the sake of having friends of the companions. Someone needs to make it a good time and even though I have been rough on myself, Elder Jensen has showed me how to be better and overcome that, and for that I'm eternally grateful.

We have worked really hard and spent lots of our time trying to better this area this week. We have had a lot of deeper lesson plans for our investigators. I know if we were able to teach them, we would see a lot of success. But this week we only got to teach 2 lessons.

First with a old investigator named N. She wants to know which church is true so we tried to help but she said she is really busy so that she doesn't have a lot of time from now on.

Secondly we went to teach A. She is awesome. Just a ball of sass and awesomeness. We taught her the spirit world and we taught her the 3 kingdoms. She said her goal was the celestial kingdom so we extended baptism for her to achieve that. She said she wanted to receive senrei or baptism. She said she wanted to believe in our message so we went to give her Alma 32 to read so she can grow her faith. She wouldn't accept it at all. I bore testimony over something that I don't even remember. Cool thing is that after I said it she said okay and took it!

So sometimes we need to get out of a rut of how we do things. One day I remembered that Brother Sherman (our dear friend who served in Nagoya) told me to go to the city office to ask for service. This week we did that. Then we went on a hour long adventure to find the place that offers service in Miyako. We found it! In the winter they don't really do service but they said they will call us soon!

We had this really long contact with this guy this week. He kept saying that God maybe exists... and maybe he doesn't. It was really frustrating. He kept bringing up points that we haven't faced yet in Japan. He asked if God love us, why are people in Africa starving. Why in america so many believe in God but yet their crime rate is high and their marriage rate is low? It was hard to answer because of the language but we said that God tests the faith of those who he thinks can stand hard things. That's why bad things happen to good people. The other one with the America thing was too extremely hard to try to explain and frankly I couldn't come up with a clear simple answer.

So why in America do we have high crime rates? Why are the marriage rates lower? Why does this happen when lots of people believe in God? How can I explain that in simple terms?

Jameson 長老