Week 13

I have brought this point up in my emails, but people feed you so much here! I'm already a bit bigger, so the amount of calories being feed to me hasn't affected me, but some other missionaries gain soo much weight. And about the grandma :). So we had a gray dot in our system (showing someone who had been meeting with the missionaries) and we decided to visit. She opened the door and gave us a surprised/confused look and let us in! We had dinner and got to know them and then we helped her move some things in her basement. She has a lot going on. Basement was flooded, redoing rooms, just tons of things to do. At the end we're talking about religion a bit and she brings up some points and we lovingly affirm truth and then "correct" her. She also was like, "Make sure you read the Bible, so you see that your church is wrong!", and it was pretty funny because she said it in the most lovingly way possible. We did end on a good note however :). I think it confuses a lot of people because we actually agree with what they mostly say, but we just have additional points, so it confuses them. Great lesson about love! We can all love each other even when we disagree. 

This week we actually got the opportunity to set up Light the World in Gilbert! We set up the Light the World giving machines and got training on them! So we'll be doing shifts the next couple months which will be awesome! You can buy stuff from the machines like food for a day for a person, or a goat for someone in another country. Stuff like that.

Our area where we're in is pretty dead :(. Everyone "knows" us and most people reject us right when we get there (anywhere). We've been trying to love the people and just honestly get to know them and be their friends. We've met lots of cool people and it's awesome, but whenever we bring up the Gospel, they immediately shut us down. They basically put up this mental wall and we're just machines. We've been trying to show people that we're people just like them and just trying to share our faith in Christ and sharing messages about Him. 

Elder Bodily and I decided on something. We're radically changing how we go about doing the Work in this area. Through members! We usually do that anyway. Without members, you're very disadvantaged. But specifically for this ward, we'll need to do a lot of member work. Asking members who to stop by, have members bring a friend to every dinner appointment, invite friends, etc. We also are going to put a lot more effort into Ward Council and just getting things rolling. Our Mission President told us a cool statistic. If the Ward Council gives us a referral, 1 out 5 people will accept the Restored Gospel. When missionaries do work, just by ourselves the numbers go way down. It's up to the members. The Ward Council gets together with a list of names and as a group they pray about it and ponder it for a couple of days. (The Ward Council is a group of people who are over different organizations in our ward aka local congregation.) Then they pray about it again in Ward Council and they get a name that everyone agrees one and then they refer it to us! So super cool, we really want to implement it.

I can't believe it, but tomorrow I will be out for 3 months! I don't know how this week is week 13, but hopefully at the end I have 104 emails :). It's crazy, but I'm loving it! Lots of hard work and honestly lots of self-improvement. It's crazy how much you notice when your serving a mission! My companion is pretty awesome and a great worker, Elder Bodily. He's from Vernal, Utah, and he was a farmer boy, so he's a very hard worker. 

Japan news! So I don't have any updates really, but Japan opened up their Visa process, I mentioned that last week, but I just talked to some people in my ward and they served missions in Japan and I got to learn lots of cool and scary things about there! Not actually scary, just mainly hard. 

Something my companion and I have been focusing on this past week is 3rd Nephi 18:24. It's Jesus Christ when He's talking to the people in America and He talks about how as people we need to hold up our light and that light needs to be Christ. Christ is the Light and Life of the World. So something to think about is,

What do I hold up?

It can be sports, popular social standing, anything. But if we want lasting happiness, we need to hold up Christ as the object we hold. 

Love you guys! Have a great week!

(We're eating すし tonight!)

まてね みなさん！ 私はあなたがたをあいしています！ 

ロバトーソン長老