Week 59

Dear everyone,

I never quite know how to start these emails, other than it was a good
week and a lot of things happened. We've run into several walls this
week, particularly with husbands not wanting their wives to get
involved with religion. We have one investigator who is so ready to
get baptized ... we are just struggling to get her husband on board.
(Religion is not for the weak!) But on the phone last night, she says
to us, "I guess this is just part of enduring to the end, isn't it." I
have full faith that it will work out.

I feel like the luckiest missionary alive being sent to this ward.
Just this morning, we got a call from the bishop's wife, inviting us
and an investigator's family over to dinner after hearing about our
little hantai husband problem . Earlier this week, another couple took
us out to sushi (and bought us ice cream on the way back ... ). Today,
a lady in the ward is driving us an hour to attend an activity where
one of our potential investigators is playing the violin. Togane loves
missionary work (I do, too).

Our apartment consists of two Japanese sisters, one half-Chinese, and
one half-Japanese sister. Talk about international, especially in a
mission that is full of Americans. Sister Yasui and Teruya have
started playing a game where they speak in the most complicated
Japanese that they can to see if I understand them. It didn't take
them long to stump me, haha. This might also be the first transfer
where I have not lived with someone who eats peanut butter out of a
jar by the spoonful (yay, America!)

One thought for the week: We've been studying the Christlike
attributes (PMG chapter 6) with investigators, and time and time again
I get hung up on patience. It's ironic--this week I was wondering how
I could develop more patience, and then a couple of wrenches got
thrown in the way that tested my patience. I guess it's only natural
that in order to develop, we need to experience. It dawned of me that
patience is the one attribute that ties all the others together.
Without patience, none of anything is happening.

A nice little scripture I found during personal study this morning
(Romans 8:24-25):

24 For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for
what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?

25 But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

When we have patience and hope, "In the depth of winter, [we find]
within [us] and invincible summer." (Thank you, Albert Camus). Or if
you are in the heat of Chiba, vice versa. Until next week!

Love,
Sister Margaret Willden

(Monday, July 21)

Pic 1: Goya. The famed vegetable of Okinawa. I love veggies but ...
somehow I cannot get over the bitterness. But I am trying. Good thing
we have much of it in the refrigerator.


Pic 2: I had no pictures to send this week so ... a selfie from the elevator.