Dear all:

Not a lot of time this week so this will be brief, but it's ok because it was kind of an uneventful week. We've been meeting a lot with our Chinese investigator with a baptismal date, and he's getting less and less sketchy and looking more and more like he'll be ready by the 25th. It's exciting, especially to see him begin to feel and recognize the spirit and realize the truth of this message. On Wednesday we did a church tour with another investigator who has had a really hard time coming to church. He managed to find time on Wednesday though so he came then. We did the tour and he loved the family history center (what?) and the chapel. We asked him what he thought afterward and he told us he loved the way it felt inside the church and that it was a magnificent building. Rock on. 

Most interesting story of the week:

We work a lot with a Peruvian less active woman, Sister Watanabe. Her kids are active and come to church every week but she's less active and her husband is in the hospital (has been for about 8 years now). She asked us to come give her husband a blessing at the hospital yesterday, and we said sure. She told us to get there you have to take the bus from a stop that's on the edge of our area, and it's about four stops over. We figured that it was on the border enough that it would be best for us to go, so we hopped on the bus after church and headed out. We waited for our stop to be called, but it never came. After about 40 minutes on this bus, we decided to get up and check the map, found a stop that we thought was ours, 3 away. Luckily it was our stop, but when we got off we were definitely way out of our area. We saw a sign that said "Kasugai" which is neither in our area, nor our zone. In fact we went through a different zone to get to that zone on our bus ride. We figured we were already there though so we went to give the blessing. After wandering through the streets for a while (the directions we had were super sketch) we finally found the hospital and visited with the husband and wife for a while, then gave the blessing and left. Sister Watanabe decided she was going to go with us, so we left together. We get down to the ground floor, slip off our slippers and into our shoes and she puts on running shoes. She tells us the bus leaves in 7 minutes and that we're going to have to sprint to catch it, and she takes off while screaming at us in Japanese/Spanish to follow her. So that's how we found ourselves chasing a crazy Peruvian woman through the streets of an area two zones away from ours. It was a fun night. What was supposed to be an hour long thing turned into a day long adventure. Good times. On the bright side, we found a really good-smelling Chinese restaurant that we couldn't eat at because it was Sunday, so if we ever accidentally find ourselves in Kasugai chasing Peruvian women through the street, we know where to eat. 

That's about it for my week. We got transfer calls on Saturday, Elder Hobdy and I are staying in Gokiso and Elder Anderson's heading off to Gifu-ken. Our trio was fun while it lasted. Hope everyone has a good week.

Elder Callahan

Gokiso District