exciting / panic-inducing as time goes on. (PS I'm staying in Sado.
Still going after all the old grandmas and grandpas).
So I am organizing this letter into things that I observed / occurred
to me / were otherwise floating around in my brain this week:
1. Sado may be behind the trend by about 20 years, but at least they
have good taste in music. At five o' clock every day, this kind of
pitchy chime plays "Yesterday" by the Beatles and tells all the little
kiddies to go home. (Or have a dance party ... ) They also play Celine
Dion at the fast food restaurants around here.
2. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. This week, some ladies
started waving at us from their car. "Weird," we thought. People
normally just point at us and drive on. She handed us a business card
and asked us if we would meet her for lunch. What on earth. Lunch
turned out to be she and her friend trying to convert us to some
religion that I don't get the jist of ... something about Nirvana. In
addition to a sort of not tasty bowl of curry. I just pulled the "I'm
too dumb to read the kanji in the newspaper so no thanks card" and got
up and left. Not after attempting to testify. #swindlefriday I guess I
shouldn't have gotten mad, but that was an hour and a half and 650 yen
that I was never getting back.
3. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. Again. We got a
referral from the elders, saying there was a lady who was way pumped
to hear about eternal families. I flipped when we go and visit her and
there's another old lady there, and they look at each other and mumble
under their breaths, "What should we teach them first?" They then
proceed to pull out the exact same newspaper that the two ladies from
the day before tried to give us. Testify, get up, leave.
#swindlesaturday
3. If it's too good to be true, it also might not be. Meet Koya San. I
think I mentioned her before. She wandered into the church because she
says the missionaries all have nice eyes and wanted to learn more. We
asked her if she would like to be baptized. She says, "Yeah what time?
I'll be there if I don't have anything going on."
#stillworkingonteachinghowimportantbaptismis But she's great and has a
lot of sincere desire to learn.
4. This week, we broke twenty people at church. It was a miracle. Once
we break thirty, we get to look for a new church building.
5. Missionaries are like professional stalkers. We were biking down
the street and one of our Filipina investigators who we hadn't been
able to meet in a while honked at us. We were housing about an hour
later and found her at her apartment. Fortunately she believed us when
we explained that it was a coincidence (or rather a non-coincidence)
that we found her, because she then called her other Filipina friend
to come over and meet us and she became a new investigator.
6. My decrease in Japanese language comprehension is due to the area,
not decreasing brain cells. There's a dialect here that even some of
the members can't understand. Sister Mondano says she can always tell
by the look on my face if I'm just pretending to understand when
obaachan is telling me about her rice paddy and I have no idea what
she's saying. I've gotten really good at just nodding my head and
"mmmhmmming" in acknowledgment when we hit someone who speaks Sadoben.
4. Ask God, not Google. Quoting a letter I got the other week. How
many times do we worry ourselves about decisions, whether big or
small--and not bother to ask the one in charge of it all? If there's
anything I've learned, it's that Kamisama knows a whole lot better
what we need than we do ourselves.
That's all I've got. Aside from the fact that I hit my 9-month mark
this week. HALFWAY.
Love, Sister Margaret Willden
(Monday, February 24th)
Missionary bikes outside the Church
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