Temple Day!

Hello friends and family!

Weather update: last night it poured all night and my comp had trouble sleeping it was so noisy, but today the sun has come out so it's a nice muggy warm temperature. :)

Yay for the temple and e-mailing at PBO office! They're so nice to let the missionaries come and have time here. So how is everyone this week? Austin you keep telling me about Sakura-con but I have no idea what it is...??? Are you going to dress up as Ichigo? A strawberry? Or the bleach guy.. ;) And we're going to have to work on your planning skills bigtime when I get home before you go out :) Maybe I'll send you a 'daily planner' for missionaries and you can practice! hehe. Basically we plan all the time.. you have weekly planning once a week for about three hours (usually in the morning of a day not very busy otherwise) where you talk about your investigators and what they need, and then what you can do this week to find new investigators, etc., how you are going to work with the members, and roughly the week's schedule 'draft'. Then you also take a half hour every night as soon as you get home to plan out in detail the next day. It's amazing how much you can make time really worthwhile though! And true we don't plan out things down to what dinner we'll eat but some companions do! It would be fun for you to give it a try. You could plan out when you'll study for school, your classes... when you'll work on your CTR lesson.. :) And the next day is written out in 30 min increments on our schedule so we are told to try and have a 'meaningful activity' for at least every hour of the day. I've definitely learned a lot about time scheduling...

Phew! This week felt like we have been all over the place, and seeing some good results. We have a new Potential Investigator (PI) or friend. :) She's from China and contacted us through a Japanese class we're signed up to help volunteer at. She has lived in japan a while but just wants to polish up her language skills. I think she's just a bit better than me, so I'll be leaving that basically up to my companion, but she also said she wants to make friends. Especially because she is a freshmen at college but said the people there all just like to party... so she wants 'good' friends. Yosh! We'll be sure to bring her to a SA activity asap and she can get to know tons of really nice and really good people! :) Then we had a good lesson with Iwamoto kyodai and shimai, which seemed to go really well! We finally figured out we just have to keep things really simple and really well laid out, with a lead on to the next week's topic. He's been being taught for over a year, so it's hard to figure out which topics to choose, but we're kinda reviewing right now. He doesn't seem like he's really understood much of what he's been taught, and he is kinda a grandpa so we just have to be really patient I guess. I think he really will get baptized sometime but it will just take more time, and a tad bit more effort on his part to know if this is true or not. Then we had a service project on Saturday at the local park with our investigator Mari-chan. We wrote nameplates for the trees and then went with the park staff to hang them up. We also go a couple times or so a transfer and do other service for them. This week I got to keep up my 'playing in the dirt' skills, aka weeding. :) Then we had a couple lessons with less active sisters, a church tour, and two new people show up to church by themselves on Sunday, one in each ward! It was pretty interesting (one is an eikaiwa-- english class--student and had come a couple times before but like last year..). Oh and we also celebrated the RS anniversary for both our wards with a shokuji (dinner) and presentations. oishikatta! it was yummy!

Oh! Then one last thing, we finally ran into a deaf person on the street and got to use our Shua (Japanese sign language!) we've been trying hard to learn it for our deaf members in the morning ward and I was sooo excited to be able to street with it! We weren't able to make an appointment but told her about church and invited her to come in the morning or to our shua conversation class. She said she wasn't sure but maybe she'd try. But the fact it we could (kinda) talk! That was exciting. I'm so glad the Lord can bless us to meet the people we are prepared to help! :)

Well, thanks so much, sorry this is a little early but we wanted to get this done so we can get home early because we have a lesson tonight with the Iwamoto's again.

Love you all lots !

(Oh and I'm working on the letter to write still!!! Sorry--I'm trying to organize my pictures so I can send my SD card too but that keeps taking time! :)... trying!)

Love,
LeFevre shimai