Eadie Choro and Me (and Day Choro in the background)

Dear All:

It was a good week this week. Last Thursday, the temple was closed on account of pioneer day. Stupid pioneers. They could have walked just a little faster and gotten there and established zion one day earlier, but no, they had to ruin our pday. No consideration, those pioneers. Pioneer day is the worst. 

We ended up with four or five free hours with nothing to do, seeing as the MTC isn't necessarily known as a rockin entertainment center. I learned from this experience that it is a bad idea to give a large concentration of 18-20 year old guys unstructured free time in a closed environment. We spent most of the morning at the gym and field playing basketball, volleyball, and soccer, but in the afternoon, during our temple time, our district invented a fun game that mostly just involved two teams standing on either side of the hallway and taking turns hurling that nerf ball at each other as hard as they could. I took a nap. 

Our Pday Hallway Game

Our week was kind of uneventful. We had a great fireside by John Groeberg, the man on whom The Other Side of Heaven was based. He talked about testimonies and how sharing them is the core of misisonary work because when you share your testimony it creates a spiritual bond with those you share it with, and their spirit resonates with yours kind of like two identical tuning forks. He also talked about how the person you are and the person you're trying to become is a testimony of that in which you believe. I though that was cool, because on Sunday we watched a talk from Elder Bednar called "The Character of Christ," in which the main point was that Christ completely put of the natural man by turning outside of himself and being completely selfless at every point in the way. That was His character. So in order to truly have a testimony of Christ, then He is the kind of person we have to be trying to become. This means being as selfless as possible. I thought that was a cool logical progression on one of the reasons to strive to be selfless. 

Our lessons have been going much better. One of our investigators, Shohei-san, committed to baptism in our last lesson after we talked about how following the commandments of God brings everlasting happiness (Mosiah 2:41). I really felt the spirit during that lesson because it was a move away from our (unfortunately) usual process of teaching something, then asking him what he thinks, then teaching a doctrine related to that thought, then repeating the process. We just walked in and asked what he had questions about. He said he had read the story of the tree of life and was curious what that meant, which led to our conversation on commandments. We mostly just bore our testimonies in that lesson, and it was really cool. That's the kind of thing we want to do more often. 

I also had an interesting experience teaching our other investigator, Toshi-san, yesterday. We planned for the lesson in the morning, and we really wanted to just spend that lesson getting to know him and figure out what he really is missing in his life, because we really hadn't up to this point. We also decided to plan to teach about the gifts of the spirit, because he is a singer and wants help to become better. For some reason as we were planning I kept thinking that we should prepare to talk about the nature of Heavenly Father. I pushed it aside because we had already talked about that and thought that what we were talking about would be better. Well, we got into our lesson and our discussion almost immediately moved to his perception of God and what Heavenly Father is really like. We were woefully underprepared to answer his questions, both Nihongo wise and scripturally. We struggled through it and it ended up going ok, but it was definitely yet another wake up call that I can't know what our kyudosha need to hear about, and that I need to listen to the Spirit way way more. 

Other Fun Things:
One missionary (Monson Choro for those who know him) came into our classroom looking for his burgundy colored notebook.  By the end of our encounter, I had him convinced burgundy was a country next to russia, only after his European companion backed me up. This probably makes me a bad person. 

Monday was our teacher Gregory kyoudai's birthday. We wanted to do something, so one of the elders in our district (elder hilton) asked his family to send him some balloons and another elder (elder mitchell) asked his mom to send some brownies. Well, the balloons we got were left over from a baby shower, so on Monday Gregory kyoudai walked into a room full of "It's a boy!" balloons. He was really confused (and kind of worried) for a little bit. 

All of the older missionaries (the ones who were at six weeks when we got here) left for Japan on Monday and Tuesday. It was pretty sad because I got pretty close to a lot of them and they were all really cool. (I wrote that only because several of them are reading this) It's weird without them here because now we're supposed to be the Japanese and MTC experts in our zone. Which is unfortunate, because we know nothing about Japanese or the MTC.

This is Mihara Choro, who I mentioned in my last email. Like I said, he's crazy.

 Also, this means that we will be expected to give talks in sacrament meeting (they call two of us up at random to give talks in nihongo) which means we all have to stop writing 3 sentence talks and calling it good. On top of this, we got new roommates. Eadie choro and I had a four man room to ourselves, but last night we got a new kohai companionship in there with us. It's fun, but also kind of hard because we can't each have 3 closets any more. All of the new kohai are really cool. I'm excited to get to know them all. 

Other than that it was kind of a boring week. 

All my study material. Also note the picture of the first presidency handing lopsidedly by a twisted piece of tape in the background. We love the first presidency here.

My scripture this week is something I've been realizing a lot as I observe all the different missionaries here, and as I hear stories from the Elders in my district about friends they have and people they know. I mentioned it earlier, but it's Mosiah 2:41:41 And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it.

Love you all and hope this finds everyone well.

Elder Callahan