Bird Poop and Lessons

Happy 10/10/10 Day! It has been an amazing week full of miracles. Most importantly, it sounds like BYU won! Ok, ok, that's not most important, but it still finds it's place high up on the priority list.

I find it interesting that the missionaries bore their testimony in our ward today. I can honestly only remember a few times when the missionaries ever came to our ward. Such a difference from Japan where nearly every ward or branch has missionaries assigned just to help out that one unit.

Anyways, I will try to fill you in on all of our awesome experiences this past week. On Monday night Elder Tuttle got his first flat tire of his mission experience. (Ok, this wasn't an awesome experience, but it has some humor connected with it, so bear with me.) I walked him through the steps of patching up his tire. He was pretty happy once he finished the job and he felt pretty accomplished...at least he felt that way until it went flat again the next afternoon. His patch job wasn't as stellar as he had thought and the patch hadn't completely sealed. (Side note: we actually had a couple lessons that we needed to teach and God somehow blessed Elder Tuttle's bike so that it didn't get flat until after we had taught those lessons.) So during dinner time on Tuesday evening, Elder Tuttle went back to work fixing his tire, making sure that he did it completely right this time. He finished the job quickly and mentioned to me that he is now a "pro" at fixing tires. Well, his ego got deflated 30 minutes later when he saw that his tire was deflated yet again. So later that night he fixed his third flat in two days. Now he actually is a pro and I think that his "training" from this past week will prove invaluable later on in his mission.

On Wednesday we had a ton of miracles. We didn't have any lessons scheduled, so it was going to be a full day of finding. But with God's help we were able to teach 9 lessons and spend 4 hours just teaching! We had planned on working in an area to our west, but we needed to go a few blocks east at the first to drop off a DVD to one of our investigators. 2 hours out the door, and we were further away from the area that we wanted to work in than when we had started. He had taught 4 lessons to people on the street and we weren't moving at a very fast pace.

That night we went to house the International Student Housing complex for Hokkaido University. It was way cool and everyone was happy to see two Americans. We talked with people from the Philipines, Vietnam, Bangledesh, Poland, and China. The coolest part about it all was that we got to teach a couple lessons while sitting on couches! Japanese people don't really have couches, but all of the foreingers did, and it was awesome. We found a really good man from Bangledesh that is Islamic. We learned a lot about their religion and we taught him about the Book of Mormon. He had a lot of interest and commited to reading the BoM right away.

On Thursday we had an amazing Zone Conference. It was my last one. In fact, I am now officially the American in this mission with the most time in Japan. I am so old! I am the grandpa of the mission.

Anyways, after ZC on Thursday we didn't have a lot of time left for missionary work, but we really wanted to find a prepared person. So we prayed and headed out. Within 10 minutes we met a guy named Shohei that had met the missionaries a year or so ago. He has a Book of Mormon and wants to know whether or not God really exists. I thought that he seemed prepared, but I didn't realize how good he was until a bird from overheard pooed on him. He sort of tried to wipe it off, all the while keeping his full attention on me. Truely God had led him to us and he knew that he needed to hear our message.  Not even Satn's vicious attempts to distract him with bird tird could sway him.

On Friday we had another miracle. We had been trying to street down one road with no success, getting only cold shoulders and even colder rejections. Elder Tuttle and I decided to switch which side of the road we were on. When we got to the other side, I saw no one in sight on our side. Across the road, on the side we had just come from, I saw people bustling to and fro and I thought, "We must be crazy. Every good missionary knows that in order to find people you have to go to where the people are. Right now the people are there, and we are here." But since we had both felt impressed to switch sides we decided to continue and what happened. Within 10 minutes we were able to stop a nice high school kid and teach him. As soon as his lesson ended, I stopped the very next guy that I saw, and we were also able to teach him. God must have needed us on that side of the road. It was a good experience.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this email. It took a long time to write and now I'm really tired. I try every week to write a good email like this, but this is the first week in a long time when I was actually able to do it. I'll try to make it a trend for the rest of my mission.