weekly mission email

Ichinomiya has divine potential 

I’m not sure if I’ve ever fully explained the potential that Japan is headed for. Over the time of my mission, even, there have been major developments and I’ve witnessed this country prepare for the miracles to come. I’m part of the fulfillment right now. 

Prophesies: including President Eyring, Elder Holland, the dedicatory prayer, among others. President Gay of the Area Presidency is set on fulfilling these prophesies. 

An excerpt: 

“Your children will live in a Japan which is very different from the Japan you see now. This is because the Church will begin to achieve a marvelous expansion. It will obtain a prominent place and people will want to know about it. They will be interested and come. Your children will grow up not feeling embarrassed to testify of Jesus Christ in their schools and in their regional societies. They will tell their friends they go to school with and even their teachers that they are Latter-day Saints. They will have no fear. Not everyone will join the Church, but many will become members.” —President Eyring 

Youth: I see it so many times, the current generation has no fear or prejudice against Christian churches. Many, even, went to Christian pre-schools or colleges. More often than not, parents' determination to remain in Bhuddism tradition prevents kids from learning more. But with increasing global perspectives and ways of thinking that are creeping into Japan, hearts are opening and the youth are key to the future. 

English: Just expanding off the last thought, many Japanese people plainly recognize that English is a necessity for advanced positions in the work field now. More people than ever are striving for at least a basic understanding of, or else encouraging their posterity to learn English. 

Foreigners: there are so many! A population decline caused the government to encourage limited numbers of foreign people (who must prove Japanese lineage) to move in to fill the vacant worker positions, mostly lower level work. Japan is increasingly an interesting diversity of races, mostly Asian + South American but also the odd “other.” 

Some survey I heard about: it’s true, only about 1% of Japan is Christian, currently. 

But, in an NHK survey, roughly 50% of Japanese people attributed religion to feelings of peace, comfort, and fulfillment, and maybe 40% said to have prayed for something before. 

And now Hygge. Japan's Society is renowned for its work, work, work type policies. Recently, there’ve been movements to increase personal time for relaxing. Many companies are letting people off early on Fridays, so now we have a bunch of workers loafing around the stations because they don’t know what to do with themselves. They’ll go to arcades, or read more manga, or idk. 

Denmark is reportedly the happiest country in the world, and they attribute it to this Hygge (fu-gge) thing. In a nutshell, people who don’t know each other get together for fun. They eat dinner, play games and such with a seat open for the next stranger to sit down at. 

So we’re running with this idea and setting up a TGI Friday at the church for these people. It’s been successful thus far, and I bet the more we spread the word the bigger it’ll become. 

There are so so many ways that Japan is progressing, I love it. 

愛しています！

カードん長老より

Elder Cardon

weekly letter

Ichinomiya 

The Zone Leaders rang our doorbell at 7:00 A.M., right when we wake up! We were very surprised. We probably didn’t look the best with bed head, either. But it turned into a fantastic Wednesday. 

Actually, the Zone Leaders were on splits with the AP's, so it was Splits-ception and Elder Magalhães worked with Elder Cox for the day. I get the feeling that most APs are tall, lean foreigners. 

They had a cool experience. When knocking door of a high rise apartment building, one lady listened for a long time before saying she thinks her son already goes to this church. Turns out the son is semi-active! He wasn’t home at the moment. The mom has interest, though. 

They were coming back home and waved at a mid-aged dude on the street. He slammed his bike brakes and asked what’s up? Turns out, it was the semi-active son! Nice 👍 

愛しています！

カードん長老より

Elder Cardon 

weekly email

This guy in Ichinomiya appeared out of nowhere! 

Last PDay, it was down pouring and we weren’t in much a mood to go anywhere, and so waited at the church with a delivery order from McDonald's on standby. A man walked in, and I went out to pay for the food but he actually was waiting for a friend here and wasn’t the delivery man. We held a quick church tour for the man, and he looked into the baptismal font and asked if he could hear more about Jesus Christ. After we taught the Restoration, he was particularly interested in repentance and being made clean, whole spiritually. 

Being PDay, we weren’t equipped with our regular supplies and couldn’t find any other materials nearby except a nice new Triple set of scriptures. We decided to loan the man the scriptures, and committed him to coming back for church on Sunday where we could give him a personal set to study. 

The man came back after church on Sunday, and we taught him again the principles of repentance through the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the Plan of Salvation. He felt ready to accept an invitation to baptism. Immediately afterwards, there happened to be a large lingering of members playing card games and he left to join them. He later texted saying how glad he was that he went! 

God went beyond the details in providing a way that this man might come unto Christ. 

I’ve often reflected that our moods (spiritually tuned) are a huge indicator for the work the Lord wants done.  Even last night, after a lot of meetings and coordination when we weren’t feeling up for a huge bike ride as we usually would for finding, we decided to stay close and remembered a bimyo appointment we had with three Philippine men earlier that day. We had missed the appointment, but it was close so we went anyway. Turns out they had waited for us! We taught them and handed out Books of Mormons, rejoicing in their commitment. Just like we can always search for opportunities to serve God, God will always search for opportunities to serve through us. 

We had so many guided moments last week: 

A clue of a broken lock to go visit a long uncontacted referral instead; the urge to text people and then bump into a long untaught Eikaiwa student; the blessing of an investigator who is more for the progress of members than for himself; the reminder to always be obedient in the small things, else an unlocked bike becomes a stolen one; a recent convert who made the life changing decision in his old age.. 

I honestly have no idea what will happen each day, 

愛しています！

カードん長老より

Elder Cardon

Linnea asked: Who had their bike stolen?

Paul replied:

It’s a funny story I didn’t write up. 

We were on exchanges, pouring buckets and buckets of rain that day and so we decided to do studies in the afternoon and go housing at night at the biggest apartment around so that we wouldn’t have to go outside in the rain after we finished housing the place we went outside back to the bikes to brave the storm and my bike was not there I say no! Somebody moved my bike I’m pretty sure it was security and so we thought my bike was stolen but it was actually OK it’s just really scary. 

weekly email

Recently for Ichinomiya I’ve only written a lot of finding miracles as we continue to seek the elect of God. Last week, too, there were some pretty cool finding stories, but I’m tiring of only writing about those so today I’ll focus on the how, instead. 

On the mission, it’s a constant struggle to hone your skills and faith in order for the Spirit to take over the work. As a young missionary, you often rely mostly upon Faith and your companion's skills to accomplish this; on the other hand, like a teeter-totter the longer you are out, the more skills you develop and the easier it is to lose a firm grip on “Faith reliance.” 

Recently, as we’ve practiced thousands of times approaches and methods to help people listen more to the Gospel, I’ve noticed our companionship lacking the vitality and energy that comes from “Faith reliance.” 

That is where is becomes essential to try new things. New areas, new ideas, new approaches push us to rely more on faith as we develop our skills in different ways. If you don’t change anything in your life, it becomes monotonous, routine, and boring; you cannot expect anything different to come from doing as you have always done. 

So, recently, we’ve tried jumping straight into a lesson on the doorstep instead of asking to step inside or set a next appointment. It’s been tremendously successful, and we’ve given away many more Book of Mormons, set more solid Potential Investigators, and felt more joy in proclaiming the gospel than before. Truly, spoken word (aka testimony) is the enzyme to joy. 

Life is an upward climb, but the higher you climb the broader your view becomes.

愛しています！

カードん長老より

Elder Cardon