Email September 24, 2018

Email September 24, 2018 – Elder Jackson Burton

Hey Everyone!

                  This week was awesome! There were a lot of miracles! On Wednesday we tried a new method of Dendo where we made a big sign that said "Do you think God exists?" in Japanese, with Yes, No, and Why? written on it. Then we stood outside the eki (train station) and asked people who walked by whether they believed in God and to write why or why not. It was super great! We were actually way surprised because we had a ton of people say yes, they believe in God, with all sorts of different answers for why. Only one person who wrote on the board said no, so it was cool to see how many people believe in God, which I think also influenced some people who were kind of on the edge to say yes. The best part was we found a new person to teach, and he's from Algeria! He couldn't even read the sign, but he asked us what we were doing and when we told him he said yes, he strongly believes in God because he's Muslim. He's married to a Japanese woman and just moved to Japan a month ago. He's a really nice guy, and speaks really good English. He said he loves learning about other churches and believes in Jesus Christ and all the prophets in the Old Testament. We met with him yesterday and taught the restoration and he thought it was really interesting and really wants to read the Book of Mormon. As he keeps progressing I'm not sure exactly how it's going to play out but we'll do our best to help him come closer to Christ. On Friday we got another person to teach that the sister missionaries passed to us so that's exciting as well. For the past couple weeks we've been struggling finding new investigators so this week was a real blessing.

  

                  Yuu Kim is also doing really well! He's the person with a baptismal date on the 6th of October. He came with us to eat at a member's house on Thursday and had a great time, he also came to the music night we had on Saturday, and he came to church, although he was only able to stay for sacrament meeting. The music night was awesome by the way, a lot of people showed up and I feel like it really helped strengthen the ward's unity and love. They all everyone was super friendly with Yuu Kun too which was great. I think he'll be ready for his baptism, the biggest hurdle right now is he's 19, which in Japan is still not an adult, so he needs his parent's permission to be baptized. He's a little nervous about that but I think it'll be okay. But pray for him please, pray that his mom's heart will be softened everything will go smoothly as he prepares to make this covenant with God, one of the most important decisions he'll ever make. I'm so excited for him! I'm so grateful for all the miracles God has been blessing us with lately, we're trying to work as hard as we can to show our gratitude and love for Him.

                  In other news, today we went and did service again, we helped in a library that was tossed around by the earthquake, we moved a lot of books it was fun. The library also doubled as a museum so we saw some ammonite and dinasour fossils it was cool. They wouldn't let us take pictures though but I'll send some others. I hope you're all safe and well! I love you! Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Burton

I think the pictures are mostly self explanatory haha. The statues were outside the library. For volunteering we were given a coupon for curry so that's my companion eating curry. There's also the poster we dendoed with. And a bee on a flower I thought was cool.

Also, we tried posting some things on Facebook this week, one is a video of my companion and I playing "I Know That My Redeemer Lives" and the other is a video the missionaries in our area made reenacting the first chapter of the Book of Mormon, not super well done haha and in Japanese so most of you won't understand it but it was fun, maybe something will come out of it!