Dear all:

Merry Christmas! It was a good week this week. On Tuesday we had our Christmas Zone Conference which was way fun, we had some delicious food and great training. Wednesday we decided to go visit some less actives, because President Yamashita has been stressing working with less actives more lately. So because we're still waiting for the ward to give us a list of less actives they want us to work with, we picked some random names on our ward list and went to visit. The first couple either shut us down or had just completely disappeared off the face of the map (like their houses just didn't exist anymore) but then we showed up to the third one's house and he was really happy to see us, invited us in and we just talked for about an hour. He told us he still does family history work like all day, reads the Book of Mormon daily, and has a very solid testimony. He told us he wants to come back to church, but his health is very bad (he has lung cancer, we think. It's very hard to understand him) and it's hard for him. He says no one really visits him and the missionaries came once three years ago but never came back. We left him with a prayer and went to our next appointment, but that night he called us just to say thank you for visiting him. He's a super solid man and we're really excited to work with him.

That same day we went caroling with a member family to some other members and less actives. It was super fun, and then they took us out to eat after. So all in all a good Wednesday. 

Thursday was Christmas. I got to talk to my family which was great (I only say that because they're reading this) and then we went to lunch with a member couple from Seattle. We had this Chinese food called Dim Sum (yes, we had Chinese food on Christmas. I just needed my Red Ryder). After that, we headed to the biggest area of our mission, Sakae, and caroled and streeted with our whole district for the rest of the night. It was way fun and then we went to McDonald's for dinner. 

From that it was kind of a boring week. I don't have a lot of time so that's about it for this week, but it was good. I felt really lucky I could just be out here serving the Lord to commemorate His birthday. I love this gospel and and happy to be here preaching it. Love everyone.

Elder Callahan

I got pictures to work, so here's everything from the past four weeks.

Left to right: Elder Anderson, Elder Hobdy, and some no name loser

We tried to talk to this guy on the street, turns out he was lost, we walked him to his house. He was kind of off, but it was fun.

We stumbled across this massive cemetery in the middle of a bunch of houses.

Hospital selfie

It snowed and we built a snowman.

Then we turned the snowman into a giant snow roll.

The hands down creepiest picture of Jesus I've every seen (sorry if any of you love this picture and this offends you, but it's true)

Sakae

We visited one of the sisters' investigators, and they lived in this giant prison style apartment. We called it Alcatraz.

It was an exciting week this week. I moved to the middle of Nagoya city, to the Gokiso ward, and am now in a three man companionship. It's pretty fun, and we get along really well. Gokiso is a cool place. It's super metropolitan, the biggest area in the mission in that regard (although one of the smallest boundaries wise) and there's so many people here. It's easy to find people to talk to. Apparently, though, it's not easy to find people to teach because when I got here we only had one solid investigator. Not good. So that's what we're working really hard on now. 

Some cool happenings:

-Second day here we met some members at the church to help them do a Secret Santa type thing. Turns out they're American, and the wife is the sister of a member we knew in Pennsylvania. Who knew? It was way fun, until the end when Elder Anderson, one of my new companions, tripped on a giant rock and ripped his pants. Even then it was still pretty funny. 

-They do an English class at the local orphanage here, so we went and played cards and taught English there, which was way way fun. The kids were super funny and it was fun to just hang out with them. 

-There's also a soup kitchen type event where we hand out food to homeless people that some members come to and we help out at, which is also really fun. I got to meet some of the members and help out some homeless people, so it was a fun 2 in one type of deal.

-This Saturday we didn't have any plans so we were planning on heading out to just talk to people, but right as we were heading out we got a call from a man who we'd been trying to get in contact with all week. He told us he had set an appointment with us that night and was at the church. None of us knew anything about that (two of us are new here) but we ran over to the church and had a really good lesson. It was way cool.

Other than that a pretty uneventful week. We're working on building our investigator pool right now because it's pretty sad right now. If we're going to get this area hopping again we're going to really have to rely on the Lord and His help to get the work moving here. It's going to take a lot of hard work and faith but the Lord will help us as we put in all we have. So that's my plan for this transfer.
Sorry for the short email but I don't have a lot of time.

Love 

Elder Callahan

No pictures this week because I can't figure out these computers. They'll come next week.