weekly email

Last week in Tsu ,

Brother Iwamoto's cousins 

One day, a door opened up to a 13 year old boy who was home alone. Can’t do much there, but we asked if we could come back the next day when his parents were home. Actually, he doesn’t live with his parents, he lives with his two older sisters. 

The next day, we came back late and caught one of the sisters just as she was returning home from work. Having contact with the boy was kind of our “in” to starting a conversation, and as the talking went long the other sister joined us in what turned into a lesson on the Restoration. When we pulled out the BOM to present to them, they all made the connection with our message and the Mormons. “Ah! I know Mormons! My Aunt is a Mormon.” Kind of thing. 

We found out later in the week that these people were actually related to one brother in the ward, and had asked questions before about the church but had never met with missionaries. 

John Peter 

A referral came in from the sisters. This boy has actually learned a lot, but because of his part time job the sisters could never take an actual appointment with him. This week, we were finally able to catch him at home. 

One of the biggest problems is that although John Peter speaks English, it’s not quite good enough for the vocabulary of the lessons. The same goes for his Japanese. 

So finally, Elder Miole was able to clear up all the parts that he didn’t understand before. 

John Peter met with us at chance when we actually were just leaving from his apartment after talking with his dad for a while. On the way out, we found that although he doesn’t have a phone (which is why it’s so hard to pin him down), he has a Facebook, so we were lucky to trade that. 

Then, later in the week, we invited him to a basketball activity. The activity itself wasn’t so good, and we hardly even played any basketball, but there was a lot of chances to talk during the down time, and it turned out that John Peter didn’t have work the next day. Ah, miracle! We invited him to church. 

We picked him up, brought him over, and walked him through church. All the members were fabulous fellow-shippers. John Peter wasn’t expecting the service to be three hours long, haha, but it was ok. During second hour, we sat down and talked about baptism and following Christ. John Peter accepted the commitment to be baptized. 

Bread Ears パンの耳

In Japan, everyone is a spoiled little child when it comes to their sliced bread. There are no butts! And, oftentimes the crusts are pre-cut off of the sandwiches. Japan is missing the most nutritional value of bread! It doesn’t even offer wheat or anything like that. 

This last week, we went hunting to find where all these pieces were mysteriously disappearing. Most stores simply throw the crusts away, but at last we found one who had neglected to do so. They willingly gave us a bag of the leftover, free of charge. Maybe we should order our bread every week like this. 

愛しています！

カードん長老より

Elder Cardon