Faith Forging

Dear Family and Friends,

So on tuesday we got transfer calls.....and

I get to stay! Yes!

Sister Ito is gone to Fukuoka, and Elder Henderson got sent way down,
basically the farthest transfer possible to a little tiny island south
of Okinawa. And in the place of them Elder Wynn is training a bean,
and we are getting....

Four sisters!

That means Saijo now has 10 missionaries! That's more than any area in
our entire mission! That's a little more than our number of members.
How crazy! What if my home ward had the same number of missionaries as
members? A ward with 350 missionaries? That would be pretty
ridiculous.

And the funny thing is just about all of us are from Utah. It's just a
bunch of crazy kids from Utah out in Hiroshima Japan preaching the
gospel of Jesus Christ. But our one missionary not from Utah is from
guess where?

Taiwan!

Yes! She is a Chinese speaking missionary! A miracle for Saijo where a
third of our investigators and 2/3 of our recent converts are Chinese!
It 's really going to help God's work here!

Speaking of Chinese,
Before my mission I loved Chinese, I never got good, but I loved it
and actually hoped I would go to a Chinese speaking mission. Well I
got called to Japan and I was way excited for that too! But the crazy
thing is I that got here, and turns out I'm teaching all these Chinese
people! And we meet so many that don't speak English or Japanese so I
decided to start studying Chinese, and now I've been teaching Chinese
people on the street in Chinese (hopefully I can find some families
for Sister Tseng to teach) So as I imagined from the beginning, I am
here teaching in Chinese the gospel of Christ!

It's so much fun! We'll stop some chinese people and talk in Japanese,
then find out their chinese and switch to english and they'll
understand a decent amount. But then I pull out the chinese and
finally they all go "ahhh" and finally understand what we are trying
to get across. So 3 language contacts are a pretty normal thing up
here in Saijo.

As far as the work goes we've been pretty successful in everything
this week except actually our own investigators, we got a lesson for
the other elders. we got a lesson for the shimai. But we couldn't seem
to get any for ourselves. The finding was a little rough this week.
Weekly planning and numbers aren't bad, until you have to put zero's
on almost everything...

But we know we are giving it our all, and the Lord will provide in his
own timing as we are faithful and press on. We are just so grateful
for all the blessings he gives and the joy he puts into our hearts.

I'm so grateful to be here, and for all your love and support! And I'm
so grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Love you all!

Elder Walton



Pictures:
-Me and Elder Rees put notes on the sisters door for the 3 new ones,
we had notes in 6 different languages from all the different members
of Saijo.

-We did some intense cleaning on the ping pong table a member donated
from the chuch.

-Missionary Coordination meeting: with the 10 missionary, mission
leader, the 2 ward missionaries and their families and the other
member that stayed to watch it included just about 7/8 of the people
that come to church anyways haha.