This week! The first half was really unproductive with a lot of cancelled appointments and noshows, but the second half was good. We taught our progressing investigator, Mori, twice this week and it was way good. He's so smart and understands everything really well, and just wants to find answers to his questions about life. We're going to try to set him up with a baptism date this week. Thursday I went to the neighboring city of Matsumoto (sister city of Salt Lake, btw) for an exchange which was way fun. In the morning we studied Japanese together with a Canadian named Calvin who was really nice and really bad at Japanese haha. The Matsumoto elders met him through a free Japanese class that Matsumoto city puts on and they study with him when there's no class. We spent the rest of the day pretty much just trying to find people because their two other appointments cancelled. It was fun. Friday we found a couple more investigators and one Brazilian potential investigator who said she would come to church and bring her two friends. She didn't come haha. Saturday we helped one of the member families move to another part of town, which was way fun. Felt like I was back in Provo. It took all day and when they brought us back we forgot we'd left our bikes at the train station so we were stranded at our apartment. On Sunday after church we had to give a blessing to a man in the ward who was sick who lived kind of far, and without bikes it was like an hour and a half walk. Pretty much the whole Sunday was spent walking from one end of the town to the other getting bikes and giving blessings. Fun stuff. That's pretty much the story for this week. Love you all, have a good week.

Elder Callahan

Lake Suwa 

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Fun exchange with Elder Hall

This week was good. It started out slow, didn't really meet anybody or teach any lessons (the few we did have set up cancelled on us), and then Elder Schuh got sick so we were confined to the apartment for a day (on the bright side, as a result of that I've watched all 7 hours of the "Church History" DVD and read every conference Liahona back to 2010). Then on Friday we had our Zone Conference, which was way fun and a super great spiritual boost. We got home at like 6:30 and our appointment had cancelled so we decided to just go out and house. We got rejected pretty hard and met a guy who believes in this creepy "hand light" religion that they believe can heal you. It's weird stuff because it works sometimes. Anyway, super bad fuinki. But, the very last door we had time for that night, this man opened and we started talking. He spoke some English so we talked in English for a while just about us and where we're from, etc. Then he kind of out of the blue asked where our church was, and if we could meet again. His name was Mori. We traded phone numbers and then he came to church on Sunday. I've never seen an investigator come to church off a first contact before so that was really awesome. There was an Area Seventy visiting, so he heard a really awesome talk about agency. We taught him a lesson during second hour, and his beliefs about God are pretty much exactly in line with the Church. Plus he hit it off super well with the members and was participating in the third hour lesson with the Area Seventy. He had to leave early but came back at night for a broadcast by Elder Nelson of the Twelve to all of Japan. It was way way good. Elder Nelson was talking about how to answer questions you get asked about the church, but in the process he explained a lot of the fundamental principles as well. Afterward Mori came up to us and said how he didn't really understand most of it but he wants to learn more. Sweet! We're excited about him. We also housed into this Fillipina woman right before the devotional who was a Born Again Christian. We talked a little and she invited us back to talk next week. I have no idea how to teach Christians, or teach in English. This will be fun. Other than that we've been doing a lot of roleplay lessons with members and it's really helping our teaching skills and getting them to trust us more. The branch here is great and really wants to help us out. It's the best. Love you all, have a good week.

Elder Callahan

Some delicious ramen that one of the members made for us. I'll try to take more pictures next week.

Dear family and friends,

This week went by kinda slow. We didn't get to teach a whole lot or meet with a lot of people. A couple good things that did happen:

There is no ward mission leader in the branch, so the missionaries here have been kind of flying solo for the past little while, and when I first arrived the missionaries hadn't been doing a lot of work with members. But last Sunday I was talking to one of the members about it and he said something basically to the effect of "what? There's no ward mission leader? Don't worry, I'll set up appointments with the members for you." and basically appointed himself as our assistant. The next day he called and said "I set up four appointments with members with you this week." It was way funny and way cool. So now we're working a lot with the members and having them help us with our teaching skills which is really helpful.

We visited a former investigator that had some really really good potential but got dropped a couple months ago because he wasn't returning phone calls, so I suggested that we just go out and visit him. We did and he still had a lot of interest and questions so we've started teaching him again. He's a way good guy who loves his family and just wants to know about the purpose of life.

We went housing Saturday night and accidentally housed into one of our investigators haha. He's the one closest to baptism right now and we hadn't been able to meet him this week so it was kind of a miracle that we got to talk to him. We knocked on the door and did our housing approach and then he said "wait hold on a second. I know you guys." and came to the door and we had a good talk about the Book of Mormon. Pretty funny and definitely revelation. We had been praying to be able to meet him, but he wasn't returning our texts. We didn't know where this guy lived, so we couldn't drop buy and visit. That night we decided an area to house in and decided to house the first apartment we found. He was the only one home in the entire building. God's got our back. It was way way cool. 

Hope everyone has a good week. Love you all.

Elder Callahan

Well another transfer's begun and I'm in another area. Suwa is the name of the city and it's this tiny little town way up in the middle of nowhere in the Japanese Alps. It actually really reminds me of the little town we stayed in in Switzerland. It's absolutely gorgeous, but it's also terribly, terribly cold. The winds reminds me of when we lived in South Dakota, bitter and just chills you to the bone. Everyone says it's been getting warmer, but it's still been between 0 and 10 degrees F plus wind chill. It snowed like crazy last night and the snow all stuck to our coats and hats, so we showed up to an appointment with a less active looking like snowmen. I thought I missed out on winter by staying in Nagoya, but I guess not. Too bad, it was light sweater weather back in Gokiso. My new companion is Elder Henrique Schuh from Santa Cruz do Sul, Brazil, my second companion from Brazil. Maybe I'm supposed to learn Portuguese, not Japanese. He's a pretty cool guy. Pretty chill and quiet but we get along just fine. 

The Suwa Branch is really great. It's about 40 people and they're all super kind and friendly. The Branch President is the man and has so much fire for missionary work. He's also kind of crazy but in the good way. We had a 3 hour meeting with him yesterday where we set goals for the branch and talked about where he wants it to go. His biggest goal was a baptismal service each week, even if there's no one to get baptized. He said we'll just do mock baptism services until we find someone haha. Like I said, he has some unconventional ideas but he's way way awesome. 

Missionary work has been kind of slow here recently, both because of the bitter winter and because of it being such a small, old fashioned town, but we're definitely seeing some success right now. We have one investigator with baptism date and another who we have really really high hopes for. I'm positive things will start picking up from here. 

That's all I have to report this week. Hope everyone is doing well. Love you all, the gospel's true.

Elder Callahan

There was this cool foot-bath sauna type thing at a train station where we had a layover. Felt really good.