13 November 2011

Letter from Matlock - 10-26-2011



Dear 家族、
     
      Had a pretty decent week last week. Just a decent solid week. Started with splits which went really well. I went with one of my companion’s past companions. We went out to sushi and I convinced him to eat something besides the salmon and maguro which are basically the only two things that are considered safe and guaranteed to taste good. With every weird looking thing that went around I asked if he wanted a plate until he caved and ate one. Turned out to be clam. I tried one too and it was pretty good. I'm going to eat more clam in the future. I've missed out on clam chowder all this time I never really knew what I was missing out on. And all of you don't know what you’re missing out on until you eat it raw!
     After sushi we found a guy on the street who is interested in religion. Not necessarily interested in joining on but he is interested in learning. Hey good enough for me! Gave him a Book of Mormon and scheduled a time to meet the next day. Later that day I saw a blonde haired blue eyed guy crossing the street and so naturally I had to talk with him. The general rule is if you meet another foreigner in Japan you have an instant bond and connection. Unless that person is from America and is living in Japan. Then they automatically don't want to talk to you. In fact that is the last thing they want to do. I lucked out, this guy was from Sweden. He is a college student and came to Japan to... well learn Japanese. Sounded like a good reason to me. He used to be a believer but as time went on faith lost to science, but science hasn't completely dominated as it cannot explain everything. In other words he has some dormant faith which we intend to revive. Yesterday we got our hands on a Swedish Book of Mormon and will hand that to him in due time. We also taught him the next day. It went so, so good. He was really interested and he knew what we were talking about so we basically took the pieces of the puzzle and put it together for him. Usually we have to put the pieces of the puzzle on the table ourselves. We taught someone with a Christian background in English and it was amazing. It was SOOOOO much easier. I cannot express how much easier it was than teaching someone brought up only knowing that Christians like crosses, pray a lot and go to church with big stain glass windows. Missionaries in America don't know how easy they've got it.
      Our first new investigator’s lesson went pretty well. He doesn't intend on being baptized or anything (yet) but he is super interested and wants to read the whole Book of Mormon. If he reads with sincerity he won't make it to the end of that book without experiencing a lot of goodness. Cause that book’s awesome!
     Later that week we had splits again, this time with a bunch of prospective missionaries. This is to give them some experience and up their desire to serve. It happened to rain that day so not all of the young adults came that they were expecting. As you can expect as many missionaries as intended to come, came. A little bit of rain doesn't stop us. Unfortunately however this meant we had more missionaries than we really needed. So we paired of and split amongst ourselves. Guess who I got to work with? My very own MTC companion. First time since we left America. It was really good, we both had a great time, much better than we did in the MTC. I could probably even be companions with him again.
     The other big news was, my companion and I got pretty sick, I think it was a cold. Spent a day or so sleeping and crawled out of bed only so we could teach English class. We got there, set up and were actually making plans to end the lesson early and hand things off to our roommates while we went back to rest. When we announced that in the beginning one of the members who usually comes and helps out said that he would teach the class for us so we could go back and rest. I haven't felt that much gratitude for someone in a long long time. Nicest guy ever. We got out of teaching class and got to go home and crash.
      The end.

love you all!
--Matlock Wyman

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