Hello everyone!
I hope you are all doing well.
First off, I'd like to thank the Pasadena Ward Primary for sending me their cards and letters. I loved them! They made me tear up... One thing I've definitely noticed on my mission is that I've become a softy! I just cry at everything. Tears of joy, tears of sorrow, tears of frustration, tears of confusion. I swear, my tear glands are directly connected to my emotional center of my brain. It's kind of amusing to me, but still, Im not quite used to it. Tojo Shimai just says I have an open heart ;)
Anyway, so this week we had an investigator email us suddenly a couple days after we gave her the "soft" invite (will you be baptized?). A couple days later she emails us saying, "Can we meet tonight?" An investigator never just wants to "meet." So we meet. She's almost at the point of panicking about accepting our invite for baptism. I felt that we needed to get off the busy street where we met. I suggest we take a walk. We do so. It was a lot better atmosphere. She says her concerns. We ask questions. We testified. We were trying so hard to help her. I thought everything was ok. Afterwards, apparently not.
Tojo Shimai tells me that apparently she doesn't want to take lessons anymore. I felt like somebody had nailed me in the heart. She was doing so well. What she said was, "I really like you. But I just don't want to have lessons anymore. But we can definitely spend time together." It felt like a break up. "You're a really great person, but I just don't think we can date anymore." Yeah.. "ok" Nevertheless, I'll take an open door when I see it. Of course we're going to still meet with her, it will be less formal.
Then this past friday we had Zone Training meeting. Woo woo! I say that because we got a new binder. It's called the "secret binder" out of joke by our zone leaders (whom we work with in the Shimogamo ward). It's really awesome. It has all of the training plans since Zinke Kaicho has been president. Pretty much we have everything that we could to teach anybody with any needs. Now, we just have to use it, practice, mogj, and work hard.
Funny thing about how you mentioned numbers. Here's my two cents. Numbers are important. They help us to understand where we need to focus our labors. If our new investigators are lacking, than we need to work on finding and teaching our first lesson. If we don't have enough progressing investigators than we need to focus on our new investigators and so on. Every number is precious to me because they are people. I'm just grateful if our daily numbers are not all zero. :) (which happens... a lot.) But I know that Tojo Shimai and I worked hard. That we did our best and we're going to keep doing our best.
Recently, we've been blessed with a lot of appointments and lessons. I've never been so busy. The mission time warp is real. Time is wizzing by. It keeps me motivated to keep my nose to the grindstone. To use my time wisely and not waste it on little things. There is a greater work to be done. Because we've been so busy we haven't even finished weekly planning and the week starts today!
But interesting story... So one of the investigators we inherited from gomez shimai and ohata shimai hasn't been contacted since August. I was thinking of dropping her because her record says, "Strong Catholic, never been to church. Difficult to contact. Husband is hanti" (doesn't like the church). So my thought was, "if we can't contact her, we're dropping her. We need to sift through our list of investigators to see who is still interested and who is not."
So on Thursday we try and find this place. I accidentally forgot my name badge because we were rushing out of the apartment. So thus I got Tojo Shimai's MTC tag that has huge letters that are not my name....
We eventually find her apartment. We ring her bell... no answer... we wait longer than usual... we ring again... someone begin to open the door. We ask her if she is who she is. She says yes. We're stoked. She says she doesn't have time to meet but asks us to come again on Tuesday at 3:30... What? What just happened? So I'm excited and a little scared for tomorrow. We're preparing a lesson. We'll see what happens.
One more story. We had grilled cheese last night for dinner! So good! It was Tojo Shimai's first time. So naturally I took photos ;) We got this huge bag of cheese from a member and we needed to use it.... I think we'll have a round two this week. She really liked it :D
Wish me luck. Thank you so much for your love and support. We're working hard. Trying to help people come closer to Christ.
Bevan Shimai
