This week has been weird since we had a junkai with Chikushino Elders.
We taught A again. When we got there she said "Oh some of your church members came by the other day. They gave me this!" we looked at it and it was a Jehovah Witness book. Apparently we didn't explain the different churches all that well. We taught that and showed her a video on mormon.org (on her cell phone we looked it up.)
On Wednesday we taught our Chinese investigator L J. He is so hard to teach because his Japanese and English are not great. SO we write in kanji on a board as we teach him. He is earnestly seeking for truth and hopefully he will recognize it soon.
On Friday we went to Chikushino to junkai with the elders there. Elder Lee went with the experienced elder... I had two junior companions. This was scary to me because I have to take charge of all the contacts and guide the junior companions. It turned out to be a great day. We didn't have bikes so we went near a train station. Not exactly by it, but up the street. We met lots of amazing people. The sad thing is, within an hour of streeting there, we handed out a Book of Mormon. It's sad because that is the first Book of Mormon I've handed out in 2 transfers. It hurt to hear Knighton say "yeah my first Book of Mormon!" I don't know what I'm doing wrong here. Ill talk about that in a second.
But we contacted many people. One drunk guy tried to quiz me about Christ. Japanese people don't know much about him so he actually wanted to come to church because I answered him. We passed a family and we kept walking. But then I was really pained in my chest. I thought "man its awkward sometimes contacting the family on the streets but that family is so dang cute and they don't have the gospel." So I turned and ran back telling them to wait. It turns out they are a really cool family and they might come to eikaiwa. The lord always prepares people for you to meet.
We returned and on Saturday, we went to an apartment complex that had a lot of potential investigators there. For some strange reason we just didn't feel right. When we got home I turned to Elder Lee and said, "We aren't doing something right. I felt so good in Chikushino but I feel frustrated here. I feel like nothing feels right. I've felt this way since A came to church." He turned to me and said he has felt the same. So for 3 weeks or so we have felt weird. We realized that these past 3 weeks, we haven't involved the members at all. When I was with Mabuchi, he preferred not doing things with members so we never did. I just continued through this transfer. Elder Lee did a lot his first transfer here and it slowly died off. So we decided to really use every member as much as possible. We realized we didn't know much about half the members. I feel like a terrible trainer because we didn't realize this sooner. I know the less actives and people in the area book pretty well but I have no idea what some of the members ideas or experiences are like.
So from here we are going to spend time with members to build their trust. When the trust is built, we will build member missionary plans. Our branch president is an all go for this. He taught in church how the members duty is to help the missionaries. He taught right out of Preach My Gospel. Things are going to be great soon.
Yesterday we didn't get a whole lot done because we went to do service for one member. It was supposed to take 2 hours. It was weeding a garden and making it pretty. Well... we found 8 tree stumps there and up rooted 4 trees. It took a while to say the least. But now the bond is there.
Talk to you on Sunday! :)
Jameson
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