Hey all!

Another fantastic week at the wonderfully exciting Missionary Training Center. Nah, it was way boring. But that doesn't mean it wasn't good. There were some bright spots amidst all the studying and class work. Last night, we did TRC again. However this time we did a skype TRC, in which we got to Skype with a Japanese member living in Japan. His name was Miura kyoudai. It was especially exciting because this man lived in Nagoya and he told us to come find him when we got there. We had a great discussion about the Book of Mormon, and he shared with us the story of how he was converted by reading and praying about it. Then we talked about our favorite scriptures and why they were important to us. That book's got some power, I'm telling you. It's not just a story someone made up. It can change lives. 

We saw that last night with Miura kyoudai. You could just see how much he loved the Book of Mormon and how happy it made him to talk about it. He just lit up when he shared his favorite scripture and talked about why he loved it. That doesn't come from a mere fairytale. It's God's book, straight up. The Spirit was strong that lesson. He was a way cool guy too. He wrote down our names and afterward took our picture so he could put it on facebook and share his experience with he friends. That was really cool. 

Another fun experience this week:
President Mills, the man in charge of all the international MTCs did a "fireside" with our district on Tuesday. He used to be the mission president in Fukuoka, and he talked to us about our expectations of missionary work in Japan. We talked about how much power our expectations had over what actually happens. Something he said that I really liked was "Expectations shape attitudes, attitudes shape actions, and actions shape results." And so he talked about how when we come in expecting that people aren't going to accept our message, they won't. But if we act like we're expecting them to listen to and talk with us, it becomes far more likely that they will.

That's something that has kind of struck me a couple times this week, the power of our attitude. Something Miura kyoudai told us last night after we were finished was that he loved how positive we were and happy about what we were talking about, and it made him more willing and happy to talk too. That's a powerful tool to wield. Your attitude (shaped by your expectations) can change other peoples' attitudes and their willingness to listen to you.

I changed my name in our missionary investigator lessons from Voltron to Andrew, because it was too hard to take things seriously. However, in the companionship that we teach, the member named himself Chris Brown after the rapper. So that is hard sometimes. 

Some other fun things we've been doing:

Sometimes when we're burned out and need a break from studying, our district makes lists. We pick a story or genre and give everyone characters from that story or genre. For example, on Tuesday we did Harry Potter characters, and everyone got a good and bad character. We've done that with Disney and with Superheroes. Sometimes it gets heated because people get angry about what character they get assigned, but it's all in good fun. My least favorite was when I got Vector from Despicable Me. That was a low moment in my life.

....and that's pretty much all I can remember. I'm sure we had some more fun moments but I guess they weren't fun enough to remember. We got another district in our zone yesterday so that will be exciting.  One day we got 12 letters at once. That was pretty cool. 

As you can tell it's getting kind of monotonous here. We've got 17 days left before departure and time is running way too slow. I'm so so so pumped to get out to Japan and actually start helping people. I'm way excited. We may get our travel plans sometime this week. That will be great.

Hope everyone has a good week. 

Love

Elder Callahan

(It has come to my attention that some of my pictures have not been coming through. I apologize for this fact. I'll see if I can fix that. I may have to forward some other emails to do it.)

One of the aforementioned lists

We're going crazy in here

Somebody sent Rees Choro a tomato. Just one tomato. Oh! which reminds me. If anyone has some extra real, not steamed or cooked, raw vegetables they want to send my way I would be the most grateful person on the planet. I miss them so much.

This is the cake I talked about in my last email.