Letter from Matlock – 30 August 2010

Dear (Family in Japanese characters),
This has been a crazy week. We’re still catching up on church introduction lessons for the recent influx we’ve had in eikawa. Last Wednesday we taught a man an introductory lesson. He is 66 years old, doesn’t have a job or a family, and therefore has lots of free time. When we taught the intro lesson the spirit was among the strongest I’ve felt it. He said of course he would like to take the missionary lessons. We invited him to church the next Sunday and he did come and stayed for all 3 blocks of it. The 3rd block was combined for some emergency prep presentation and a ward member (sister) sat next to him and they became great friends! They talked a lot and she answered all of the questions he had. Then afterwards she arranged with her husband to have him and us over for dinner the next week, as well as to teach a lesson. Right after they set that up he turned to me and said – I had a dream last night. And in that dream a man came up to me and told me that I would meet lots of nice people at church the next day. I was astounded! I asked him if he thought the dream had come true and he said that it had! We’ll be seeing him a lot this week – we have a lesson tomorrow, eikaiwa, and 2 dinners/lessons with members set up. It’s fantastic! After church we sat down with him really quick to answer questions, talk about his experience, etc…Another member was there two and he apologized since he lived so far and he came by bike and church was long so he was probably tired. He said, no way – this place gives me energy! We gave him a Book of Mormon with a not in it from each of us and he accepted it graciously and was excited that we had addressed it to him. We think we can challenge him to baptism next week.
We had another interesting experience – we were biking along, when a man driving a bus full of mentally handicapped people hails us and pulls over to talk to us. He came out of the bus with a photocopy sheet of cards from old missionaries, notes they wrote him, and a pre drawn map to his place. He gives it to us and tells us to come next Monday at 11:00 and also bring our cards. (The business card type thing we have.) These missionaries are from before Japan Tokyo South and North merged into one mission. So we went today and found out it’s a bakery/sweet bread shop, and he has handicaps help him run the place. Well, he gave us lunch then had us help with some chores. He wants us to come for 3 hours at a time once a week but quite frankly if there aren’t any lessons involved I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Oh- we went over to a member families home to teach a short English lesson since we couldn’t do it at the church. We stressed that we didn’t want her to feed us since then it would turn into some 2-3 hour thing and we had plans right after anyways. Well despite that she still brought out some fruits and snacks. Then she brought out two fish. I mean whole fishes. There have been several times on my mission where I’ve stared at a piece of food and thought “do they really want me to eat this? Do I really have no way out of eating this?” This was one of those. I still don’t know what I think about it. It was just some fish, but it was the whole fish. The tail was the worst part I think. Never considered eating that part before, but on the other hand I never considered eating 4-5 other parts on that thing…..
Well - Love to you all,
Elder Wyman