Dear Everyone

So this week.... 

We went to visit some of our investigators, and it was super crazy. 

We road our bikes a little ways out of town went though a long tunnel, and found a house that had around twenty bikes parked outside the front door. 

The Nepal Jin.   Jin just means people. I just don know if they're call nepplaiese or something weird in English. So Nepal Jin it is. 

They all look like people from India, with dark skin and those sweet noses, but they're different... 

All of them speak a very rudimentary English, that I haven't gotten used to yet.

Ask me to do an example of how they speak when we skype next week. 

It seriously felt like we were in a different country. Milan, one of our investigators, when he saw that we were there yelled in Japanese upstairs "KINASAI!" 'Come!'. They are here. 

They all gathered around us and just talked and listened to us. 

Diness is our other investigator, and he's super funny. His English is so bad, but he feels like it is good. Laugh. So funny. 

It was only recently that Brienholt Choro found out that his name was Diness. They had been calling him Bokurell for some reason for the couple of months that they had been teaching them. 

Man... It was a different county in that house. It smelled different, everyone looked different, and they all acted different. It wasn't the Japanese way of having classy conversations, sitting around a table, drinking tea (mugicha, the OK tea) and eating rice crackers. 

Nope. Everyone just flopped on the floor, not in seiza (on their knees) but with their legs going every which way, some laying down some sitting. 

I think they call us 'God men'. And they all believe and listen to what we say. It's just difficult to get them to church because they work so often. 

We only met about six or seven of them, probably because the other ten were working or something. It was awesome. 

We visited this family that we'd gotten from a referral.... Yes, a referral.... In Iwaki, the members give referrals here. It's amazing. 

We visited them and talked about our church and religion for a while with the husband while the wife cooked dinner. We ate dinner, which was absolutely amazing.... I love Japanese food. We had Tonkatsu, breaded and fried pork.  

During dinner he told us, pretty bluntly for a Japanese person, that he didn't have any interest in our religion and that he really liked us. He said we could come over any time to "asobu" meaning "to play". Bla... It was kinda disappointing, and I felt like we had just wasted all of that time. Their house was in another town 45 minutes outside of the main town in Iwaki city. 

As we were leaving packing up our stuff, Brienholt Choro looked down at the Book of Mormon on the table, and reached down to scoop it in his bag, saying as a joke "It'd be funny if we left this." 

I looked at him earnestly and said "do it." So we did. 

Unfortunately as we were riding away, about fifteen minutes away from the house, on a freeway like road, a car sped past us, with a woman screaming holding something. "WASUREMONO!!" 

You forgot something! 

So... they pulled over and said that they were luck to catch us, so they could give us back this important book.... They got the important part right. 

It all seemed to kinda stick. We had to ride up hillish for around 45 minutes, on a pitch black road, with the wind blowing like crazy, and a light rain falling, me only wearing a short sleeve shirt. But for some reason I was still happy. 

I was shivering as I was riding, and prayed that God would keep me warm. Then a few minutes later I was warm as ever despite the wind and rain. Probably from going up the hills. 

Blessings!!!

Wheew... 

We visited this other investigator who lived, yep, forty five minutes away. Yosh... 

We showed up at their house and they practically pulled us in. 

The father and the son (our investigator) both smoke pretty heavily.  the father just went off rambling about all sorts of stuff.

He used to be an investigator, but then... well. He just wasn't progressing. Probably because the missionaries couldn't actually teach a lesson with him.  So now the key was to get his son to meet with us at the church, so that we could actually teach a lesson. 

We started teaching a lesson to both of them, then as I was teaching about the atonement I asked "Do you know what the atonement is?" The father screamed "YES! I can write it! Let me show you!" And went off for a good while. Brienholt Choro took one for the team and distracted him, as I taught Masato-Kun. I testified about Christ and how we can receive forgiveness from our sins though baptism, and his eyes filled up with tears. I got his phone number, set up an appointment, and committed him to read the first chapter of the Book of Mormon all in about 10 minutes or so. 

Then his father made him show me his electric guitars. Masato-Kun is awesome... He's so good. 

I tried to play, but.... It's just different. I was trying to do a nice plucking song that I learned on the acoustic, and... well. It's just not the same. 

Hopefully that all works out. 

I love his mission. I love the Lord's work. 

I love you all!

Elder Wheelwright

Tyson's mad acting skills in a training