Week 04 :: Kohai
MTC 12/12/2018, 2:39 PM
Aloha kakou!
This past week has been full of many good things. Thank you to the Seiuli family for the cookies, my family for the fun christmas package, and Aunt JoAnn for the care package :) I feel so loved.
We have two separate people we are teaching regularly (all in Japanese) until we leave the MTC. Their names are Iwagi san and Tsukamoto san. Although they are real people they’re not physically here, but they are people that my teachers taught from their missions. My teachers just act as if they were them.
Iwagi san is 30 years old, single, his mother is a member and he is currently unemployed because of an injury. His injury was caused from an accident, and he is rethinking life. My companion and I have taught him four lessons now, he doesn't believe in God, but he believes in miracles because of what happened to him. We've invited him to pray three times and he still hasn't done it. Its hard because we want to say so many things to him, we just don't know how to. We gave him a book of Mormon and invited him to read 3 Nephi chapter 17, its when Jesus Christ visits the Americas and heals the sick and afflicted. We testified that Christ loves us and can heal us through our faith. He’s only read a little bit of it and doesn't understand. He seems skeptical of the things we teach him, but we’re working on getting to know him better for our next lesson to understand him. We've been praying that we can be guided to know what to teach and say to him so he can feel the spirit and we can accommodate his needs.
We've only taught Tsukamoto san once, shes 20, single, attends the local English class we offer and is interested in eternal families. We taught her about the plan of salvation very briefly, how families are central to the plan and that the gospel truly blesses families. She seems very open to the gospel, I have a good feeling about her. We taught her about prayer as well, and invited her to do so. We're hoping she was able to pray when we meet with her next, and that she understands the importance of it.
Choir is so good. Our choir director is Brother Eggett, he's an institute teacher at some college around here. Anyways, the reason why choir is so good is because of the things we learn from him and the spirit we feel there. On Friday we had the opportunity to perform the song we learned last week, "The First Nowell" (tabernacle choir version) at the ecclesiastical leaders banquet as a surprise. I started crying while I was singing because the spirit in the room was so strong. There was about 400 missionaries surrounding the room singing, I looked around and noticed many of the people singing and people we were singing to were crying as well. This weeks song we sang is "Praise to the Man". I never realized how powerful of a song it was until he explained the history of the song and stories of Joseph Smith. We decided to sing this song in honor of his birthday this month.
We said good bye to our Dai Senpai on Sunday. Those who have been here the longest are called Dai Senpai, the ones in the middle are called Senpai and the lowest rank (my rank) is called Kohai. Were supposed to move up "ranks" next week because we have two new kohai coming in next week. We don't usually have such low numbers of incoming kohai, in fact this is the smallest district we've ever had here for Japan missionaries. I'm excited to meet them, and also cant believe how time has gone by.
Sorry for the fat email, i hope you all have a wonderful Christmas break!
xoxo Horito Shimai
