Elan here. Emily has sent photos in the mail, so this blog will be much more interesting next week when they arrive!! But in the meantime, here are highlights from Emily's email dated 1-28-09:
hi, family!
they have infrared here in japan. you put the tips of your phones together and press a button. then your phone number and any other info you want (name, bday, email etc) will transfer to the other phone. i don't think infrared is in america. we were just given permission as missionaries to use it.
we ate at a member family's house with one of our investigators named sylvia. the mom said a good analogy. when we ask Heavenly Father for an apple he might give us a seed.That seems confusing but if we plant the seed then we will have many apples. What I learn from that is we need to trust the Lord's perspective and timing.
Next week sister mcmurtery goes home. that means i am the senior of the area. it is a big responsibility. i need to know the area, how to use the map, and i am in charge of explaining about our investigators to my new companion. when i am getting my planner ready for next transfer i think of that. as a missionary you always need to be on top of things. it is very stressful. luckily i understand how the map works and my comprehension of japanese has improved. my ability to speak hasn't improved much though. that will come with more syl. it is always easy and temping to revert to english.
my companion and i have colds. we are achy and have sore throats. i don't have a runny nose my my comp does. the elders have all gotten sick recently and they gave it to us. how kind of them to share. haha.
last night my comp and i want to go to bed early so we called our district leader elder holmes at 9:50 to turn in our stats for the day (he usually calls us around 10:20). I said we were sick and wanted to tell the stats early. we got a phone call at 10:20 from matsuhashi choro, our zone leader. i had already fallen asleep so i woke up. miku shimai answered. matsuhashi called for only one reason, to ask how we were doing and if we needed anything. then he said to read mosiah 4:27. that is the one about not running faster than you have strength. at first i was mad i had to wake up but it was so friendly to call that i became happy.
we made up a term called park hopping. it sounds like party hopping so that is why it is so exciting. we define park hopping as going to different parks to dendo, just to vary things up a bit.
for district meeting yesterday we had a scripture search in japanese. elder holmes started reading from the nihongo book of mormon and then we had to find where it was. when we did, we started to read a long. the first person to read along got to pick the next scripture. i use the term we loosely because i couldn't do it. even in english i think that is hard. can you imagine in japanese?
last saturday we traveled to yakosaka to sing at a baptism as a zone. i couldn't figure out why the whole zone needed to be there, but we went. i realized on my mission how much i love and miss singing and music. matsuhashi choro sings bass very well and holmes choro sings tenor well. i love when we sings parts at district meeting or wherever.
speaking of music, i forgot how hard singing in english must be for people who speak japanese because we have sounds they don't like v and th and sometimes we sing the as thee. so today i am going to back it up a little bit and work on the pronunciation to get the confidence up when we put parts back in. we are singing for the beauty of the earth. (NOTE: The missionaries give weekly English classes; Em teaches music/chorus as part of the instruction)
today i did something really funny. sis miku asked for advice how to be a good mom and how to cope with life after the mission. so i looked in the scriptures for answers. you should try it! i was amazed at how you can apply every single story in tje scriptures and pull out one attribute or principle that can help you be a better mom or dad or child or anything for that matter.
that is neat how elder williamson can bless peoples lives through music. i get to play in sacrament meeting on the 22nd of february.
well, that is pretty much all for this week. i show our family picture and all my photos in my photo book to people i meet. they love to look at them.
today sis miku and i are going out for sushi after we do our emailing. then we are going to nap and then we dendo from 6-7 and then we have eikaiwa (English Class) . for eikaiwa we are watching the search for happiness video in english because we teach the advanced class. it may be an english class but our purpose is to find people to teach at eikaiwa.
love sister mcmahan
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