Baby On The Way!

Wow, so many things have happened in the past few weeks I have no idea where to start! The entire Christmas season was wonderful. Here are some of the highlights of my life recently: Having the opportunity to visit care houses and singing Christmas carols to all of the wonderful Elderly Japanese people and seeing their happy faces as they clapped along to Jingle Bells and Santa Clause is Coming to Town and other English Christmas songs since there's really not many options in Japanese. Going to a super fancy Lions House Club dinner for Christmas eve and being sung American Country songs by a Japanese man wearing an American Flag T Shirt and Cow boy hat. At that same event, an 80 year old man came up and grabbed my hand and put his arm around my waist and began dancing with me to the music for a moment before Eddy Shimai came over and saved me by cutting in. It was definitely a night to remember :) Then Christmas day we all woke up and opened our packaged from the Branch and from our families and we all got to call our families and just soak in the Christmas spirit. And despite the lack of snow, we were still able to have a white Christmas because one of our branch members 8 year old daughter decided to get baptized! It was a wonderful Christmas that I will never forget. This past Saturday, we had the opportunity to go to our neighboring area and serve at an orphanage. We made mochi (Which is basically just smashed up rice with warm water until it becomes a gooey paste that you form into balls around sweet beans) with the children, and played soccer and games outside (Yea its still that warm here) for a few hours until it was time to leave. That same day, our neighboring area was having a baptism which we got permission to attend. However, the church over there doesn't have a font built into it, therefore, we had a portable font that we literally had to fill up buckets of warm water from the sink upstairs and take all the way down stairs one by one and dump it into the font until it was full. It took like 2 hours with 8 missionaries doing it haha. Then we were dumb and didn't put the drain outlet by the door that led outside, which meant we also had to drain the font by filling up buckets and dumping them outside until it became light enough to move towards the door and drain completely. Anyway, besides that chaos, the baptism was wonderful! It was for a young man named Koike who has known missionaries for like 6 years now and has finally decided to get baptized! To add to the madness of Saturday, I received a call from the APs on Saturday evening telling me that I needed to come to Fukuoka on Monday to receive training in order to become a trainer!!!! I feel like I just barely got here, but now I'm gonna have to train a baby missionary all by myself! She's probably on the airplane heading to Japan right as I'm writing this. I'm a little bit scared, but super excited and can't wait to meet her! It's still just babies raising babies here in the Japan Fukuoka mission! Anyway, I want to send pictures of all this madness so I'll end my letter now. I know God will help me because there's no way I can do this alone! Thank you everyone for all your prayers and support and I hope you all have a Happy New Year!