|
7/22/13
 | | ||
And my companion lost :P
Hey everyone! I have a bit of a story today, related to the name of this e-mail, but first I'll answer your questions!
New Bike?
Yeah I have a new bike it cost about 450$ and compared to the bike I had been using, which I nicknamed "Dirtbag", it is way easier to ride! I meant to get a picture of it and send it but I forgot :S I'll for sure have one for you guys by next week! It is pure black, has really thin wheels and no shock because it is a city bike and I need you guys to come up with a name for it because Elder Bradshaw insisted I have one for it.
Hows the language coming? easier to speak or understand?
Oh its going awesome! the way I see it, I'm almost a month old Japanese missionary, and everyone I've talked to says that they could speak fluently at month 6 or 7, so I figure I'm 1/6th of the way there, ne? I for sure understand a lot more than I speak. In fact, I can understand almost everything in every conversation unless I loose focus, which happens in long meetings, such as church, or when little old grandmas rattle off a trillion things at breakneck pace, but other then that I've got it down. The speaking is a bit harder more because I didn't really speak much in America and the habit has kind-of carried over :S but I'm working on it for sure!
Favorite spiritual story?
mmmm.... somewhat of a hard question seeing as how every moment here we try and focus on spiritual stuffts. There was one time specifically I can think of where we had a companionship inventory and Elder Bradshaw mentioned that his biggest problem with understanding anything was changing declarations of doubt into declarations of faith. At that time I had been testifying to him very powerfully how I know that if God wanted me to go down to the street, talk to some random person in perfect Japanese, and commit them to baptism that Sunday I could do it. At the time I hadn't realized how strong of a testimony I had, but the spirit was there so awesomely! because of the spirit I was able to answer his question "How do I change declarations of doubt into declarations of faith?" by first asking him to tell me one of his doubts in the way of "I doubt that I can _____", which after thinking a while he said to me "I doubt that I can make Atsushi(one of our harder investigators) accept the lessons" and as he said it I wrote it up on our whiteboard that is leaning against our wall, affirmed that it was what he felt, then very simply I crossed out "I doubt that I" and wrote "I know that God" so it came out "I know that God can make Atsushi accept the lessons". For him it was a perfect explanation, which is incredibly hard to do because he thinks very differently than most people, but that was like the coolest moment in my mission so far because of the spirit I felt right then.
Do people here remind me of people at home?
Not a bit haha maybe I'm just too focused on what they are saying, but they seem to be pretty much varying degrees of exited or really chill
Random Story Time!
So Elder Bradshaw likes to do Parkor, but when he came on his mission he had decided to stop because he felt it wasn't exactly safe, but one time we were on splits with the Machida elders and Elder Gallacher talked to him about using his talents for dendo and told him to pray about using Parkor to get peoples attention in dendo, so he did and felt good about it, so the next morning we went out to the park by our apartment and he did a couple backflips, which he explained to me he hadn't missed one outside since the first one he tried to do because he had been nervous. Anyways, that Wednesday after Eikaiwa we were talking to our Eikaiwa coordinator, Takuya, and he mentioned he didn't know what Parkor was, so I told Elder Bradshaw to do a backflip. I don't feel bad about that because I knew he could do it, but anyways he screwed it up cuz he got nervous from doing it on concrete after so long. So then we went back to the apartment and I noticed he was limping, so I asked him how he felt and told him we would call the Mission President the next day if it looked worse than that night. That night in the apartment we looked at it and both of his big toes were a little red, but not too bad.
The next day his left big toe was turning purple and his right had swollen to about the size of his wrist.
Needless to say, we called the mission president and had a member come do a house-call to check it out. Long story shorter, he had strained his right toe and fractured his left, so he has been emergency transferred to the honbu and I have a new companion who happens to be Elder Gallacher and he will be going home after 3 weeks but by then Elder Bradshaw should be well enough to get back to dendo!
We have been less busy recently, but Elder Gallacher plans to rejuvenate this area and I am ready to do it as well!
Luvs to you all!
Younger Elder Brooksby
No comments:
Post a Comment