Wildflower Thoughts : Week Eleven.

Dear mom,
I will get to listen to the conference talks this coming Sunday in English! I am excited to hear what the apostles have to say about member missionary work. I am glad you made a personal mission plan too. Member missionary work is very very important! Make sure to build good relationships with the neighbors so you can help them! I have faith that through your efforts, you will help someone get baptized and start on the path towards the temple. Have faith!!
Okay and about all the news, OH MY. So many things are happening in my family! I had a dream last night that all my cousins were getting engaged and lo and behold, my dream came true! Everyone is getting married! Sam, Susie, Isaac... everyone! Congrats to them! I am excited about Baileys new boy and I didnt know that Paige was pregnant until right now! That is so exciting!!! Congratulations to everyone.
We still dont have any investigators unfortunately. But we received some referrals and have one potential investigator that we found housing so maybe things will finally get started. I am currently serving in a branch. It is pretty small but everyone is really nice and I have met some great families that I feel I will be friends with forever even if I cant talk to them at all right now ha ha. The language is still coming like it always is. I can understand maybe 3% of what people are saying now ha ha but really I am still clueless. It doesnt stress me out really though. This week I made a pretty good Language Study Plan that I think will help me a lot. I am going to have more courage too and ask the members to help me with my Japanese and maybe do some mogi (role play) lessons with them. It is an assignment from the mission president anyways to do mogi lessons so we just need to schedule them into our week is all. Thanks for thinking of me in the temple!
The weather is cooling down a bit. It is getting a little windy. I need to buy a coat today probably. Today is Morita Shimais 22nd birthday so after emailing we are going to the mall and going shopping! Maybe I will find something good there.
So here is a recap of my week.
On last weeks P day after I already sent my email we had district P day and went bowling! It was really fun and I got to wear pants! Yay! And then after that we went to this sushi bar which was way fun. I tried lots of interesting food! Then we road our bikes up this terrible hill and walked up like 1000 steps to this haunted Buddhist shrine. It was so creepy and scary, but really fun! It was good exercise for sure ha ha. I had a good time bonding with my district. They are all so great!
So now it is October and Pres. Rasmussen asked the whole Sendai Mission to do a special sacrifice of something we really love for the next 3 months so we can get a new investigator every week and hopefully see 25 baptisms in the next 3 months. My sacrifice is bread. It is so hard! The bread here is so good!
On Wednesday I taught kids eikaiwa again. That will always be my assignment. Morita Shimai and I taught them body parts and we did Head Shoulders Knees and Toes with them and they seemed to have a good time. I like eikaiwa because I get to speak English! I also experienced my first misting on this day. It wasnt quite raining but it was still wet outside. It seriously felt like it was misting. It was kinda nice!
On Thursday we went and taught Hiro san again. I dont remember if I referred to her as Sato san or Hiro san in my last email, but it is the same person. She was a lot more genki this time. But I dont know if we will really keep teaching her because she has schizophrenia and cant really comprehend the covenants that she would be making if she got baptized. We taught her lesson one and I shared a bit about the BOM and Jesus Christ. We are going to teach her again this coming week and this time with a member. I will let you know how it goes.
That same day that we taught Hiro san I had a cool experience with my companions. Earlier we were looking at this big map of Aizu and we didnt know where to go housing that day so we layed the map out at prayed together about where we should go. Then we took some time to think and on the count of three we pointed at the area we thought about going to. After a cycles of doing this we were able to agree on an area so later that night we went housing in that area. We met a potential investigator named Otaki san. He was busy when we met him but he said we could come back later which is a big deal in Japan! We will go back this week to see if we can teach him. We also met a guy from spain when we were riding our bikes home and he spoke english! He wasnt interested in Christianity because he was Shinto but he was really nice!
On Friday we had Zone Meeting in Yamagata. It was so nice to see my whole zone. Jones Choro from my MTC district was there and it was comforting to see him and the other elders from my doki. We all shared about the progress we had and apparently their investigators are crazy too ha ha.
Yesterday we went to the Koriyama for church. It was testimony meeting and I bore my testimony. Oh man it was so scary! But lots of people told me good job after church so that was good. I also went to Young Womens and shared an experience about tithing. It was really simple. All it was was When I was a college student, I didnt have money. But I knew that tithing was important. So I payed my tithing. Then I received a miracle. I received two jobs. After that I had money. Ha ha... really simple!
Okay so I have a BOM question. Right now I am reading about the interpretation of Lehis vision and in chapter 11 it says that the Spirt of the Lord was teaching Nephi about the Tree of Life and showing him the vision. But then in verse 11 and 12 Nephi asks to know the interpretation of it and the Spirit says, Look! So he looks but the spirit disappears! And then Nephi sees the Heavens open and an angel comes down and ends up teaching Nephi the rest of the interpretation and then some. Who is this angel?! Do we know? At first I thought, is it Jesus Christ?? But I wasnt so sure about that. Do you know?
Thank you for your prayers and your thoughts. Congrats again to my family! I love you all! This week was much better and I am getting happier every day. I love you all so much!
Love, Miranda

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