Dear Loved Ones,
This week was a difficult one. We have been having some struggles with out investigators lately, hitting opposition or dissappearing or the many various things that they sometimes do that make their missionaries so so sad. Like Te and Dawn still struggling with the law of tithing and coming to church, or ones that just don't respond to our calls or texts.
Then to top it all off this weekend I got influenza. Saturday morning it was just a cough, but then after dinner I started feeling a little woozy, we went out biking and finding people along the way and I just didn't feel good, I felt like my limbs didn't have a strength and I was just not all the way there. We got back at night, finished daily planning and then I just fell in my bed at only 9:27 when we finished. Sunday I woke up feeling even worse, but we had several appointments that day with new investigators and church so I did my best and went to church wearing the classic face mask that japanese people always wear when they are sick. I wanted to feel excited and happy, and I would try and make myself feel so, but the moment I stopped trying I just went back to feeling pretty crummy.
But then in sacrament meeting I had an amazing experience. According to the suggestion of another zone leader, saturday morning I had taken a little 3x5 index card and wrote on it my concerns and worries to ponder and recieve answers for at church then put it in my scriptures and forgot about it. When I sat down in church I remembered it and prayed that I could recieve answers for it, I had been worried about our investigators, worried that I wasn't doing good enough as a missionary, and I was worried for the future of the church in Nagasaki and in Japan in general.
Then in fast and testimony meeting a 55 year old single japanese man named brother Komori got up and bore his testimony. A somewhat strange fellow, he hardly ever talks to us, yet every week he brings massive amounts of vegetables to our doorstep and leaves us before we even realize we have 16 cabbages in 3 boxes that we don't know what to do with.
Anyways this Japanese brother got up and he started bearing a powerful testimony of the priesthood and the truth of the church, a testimony I had never heard from this usually quiet brother. He testified with power of the truth of the restoration of the priesthood by John the baptist and Peter James and John. And of the blessings that had come into his own life. Then he said with great sincerity, "And all of this, is thanks to these young missionaries, and their fathers and grandfathers who come to share the restored gospel with us, I amso incredibly grateful to them and I wish and pray with all my heart."
By the time he finished I was a wreck. Tear drops were dripping from my eyes wetting the chapel carpet floor. To this brother, he was just sharing a simple testimony, but to a sick, discouraged missionary, really just a kid so far from home, it meant everything. I saw right then in that brother why I was here, what I am doing and why it means so so much. God had answered my prayer.
God knows each one of us. Our worries, our challenges, our fears. And He is ready He wants to speak to us and answer our prayers! He loves each one of us so so dearly much. And so often he answers those prayers through others and especially at church!
I invite you to this week make a simple card with your own questions and concerns and worries, pray and ask the Lord for answers and then go to His place, church with full assurance that He will answer them.
He answered mine.
Elder Walton
Nagasaki Japan
Pictures: The Masked Missionary. Dendo in Disguise
The great Mican Temple
Bus roller coaster!
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