Sister Wells Just Had A Baby!

Wow so much has changed since last week! Sister Eddy is now in America, Heaton Shimai is now a Sister Training Leader over in Kagoshima, and Sister Lane (who was my sister training leader back in the MTC) is now sister Cullison's companion and my green bean is here! Yes I am still in Nagasaki and I am SO HAPPY! I could honestly stay in Nagasaki my entire mission and I would not complain :) My new companion is wonderful. Her name is Cook Shimai, no she does not like to cook, as all of the Japanese people keep asking her. She is from St. George Utah, is 21, has a degree in chemistry, is fluent in Spanish, and I think she's wonderful! We've been able to do quite a bit of finding the past couple of days since a lot of our investigators were gone for the holidays, and she is just fearless. She'll say hi to and stop everyone she sees! Much more fearless than I was when I had only been in Japan 4 days. Can't wait to see the miracles that this transfer will bring! This past week was New Years in Japan which is a much bigger deal that Christmas and we had meals with members like the entire week. It was great. I got to eat all sorts of unidentifiable food with varying degrees of deliciousness. One of the most interesting dishes consisted of cracking a raw egg into a bowl and then dipping cooked meat and vegetables into the raw egg and eating it with rice. It was actually pretty yummy as long as you didn't get a huge glob of raw egg in one bite. Then it was just kind of gooey. A good lesson I learned this week came from one of our investigators that I will refer to as T. We met T at English Class about a month ago and have been teaching her ever since. However, last week after church we had a short lesson about reading the Book of Mormon just a little bit each day. It seemed to go well, and we scheduled an appointment for the next day. However, the next day she did not show up to the appointment, nor did she respond to any texts or phone calls. We tried again a few time later in the week with no avail. I was quite stressed as to what had happened to her, what someone might have told her, or what we did wrong. This past Saturday, we were just waiting at the street car stop to head back home for dinner when I just thought, "I'm going to try to call T one more time". SHE ANSWERED! And she just happened to be like 10 minutes away from where we were and she agreed to meet us. Cute little Cook Shimai just worked her magic and helped T feel at ease right away by being super friendly and excited to meet her. We then walked to the church together and talked about how she had been lately. Turns out, she decided that studying the Mormon church was simply too much work! Looking back, I now realize that we taught this woman, without any Christian background whatsoever, all of the lessons in the space of like 2 weeks! She is currently looking for a job, so she was able to meet a lot, but that doesn't change the fact that we were seriously asking this woman to change her life for someone that she had only heard about a few weeks ago! Basically, my new goal is to really listen to these investigators and check for understanding and help them develop a relationship with God and with Jesus Christ rather than just spouting off a bunch of words that they've never heard of before. Otherwise it's basically like I was talking to someone saying "Have you ever thought about jdsfue3nslhdgsdgvn before?" Or "How do you feel about asl;kfjsdlfj?" For real though. That's probably what it sounds like sometimes when I go out and talk to people. Just a jumble of sounds that they've never heard before. How will they even know how they feel about baptism or repentance or Jesus Christ if they don't even know who that is or what those words mean?!?!? Anyway, lesson learned. We got our investigator back, and we're staring from the beginning at a pace she can understand! That was the lesson I learned this week. Because I know what it feels like to be spoken to in a language that I don't understand, and that is not what I want other people to feel like when we teach them about this gospel! Anyway, pray for me. Pray for my investigators, and Pray for my bean! I thank you all for your prayers already and I love JAPAN! Mata Ne!