Eternal Investigators and Bruce Lee

Hello Everyone!

It's a bright and Sunny day here in Okegawa!

Elder Gallacher and I are rocking are newly purchased workmans pants and tabi.  I've wanted a pair of these since I first came to Japan last year! There so great and so comfortable! I wish I'd had a pair of these when I was working my old tending job, this is what every construction worker wears. Are they not awesome?  They look like Ninja pants and Shoes. So we took a Ninja Missionary picture.

This is totally what missionaries in Japan should wear. It's been a wonderful week for us here. Elder Gallacher and I hit it off nicely. In fact he's more of a friend than a companion. It's awesome! I've sure been blessed to have good companions so far. We teach really well together which may be what gives us our success here in Okegawa. We have a few "Eternal Investigators." Wakutsu-san is probably our best investigator, but honestly investigator isn't the right word, he's simply just not a member. He met the missionaries here 15 years ago and has taken every lesson and learned every commandment multiple times. He reads the Bible and/or the Book of Mormon daily, he's prayed and he says he know's the church is true, he's met many members including our Stake President, President John Dorff, and he lives the Word of Wisdom and everything else. He's even said he wants to be baptized, his daughter is even a member. The only thing he won't do is come to church on Sunday because Sunday is his busiest day at the hair salon that He owns. In 15 years he's been to church twice. He's a great guy. really smart, he just doesn't know where his priorities are, it's the weirdest thing. We are going to keep working with him. We actually are going to visit him tonight so Elder Gallagher can get a haircut and so we can follow up with him. We'll see what happens! I'm trying to have faith.

We've been working with so may part member families that we haven't been able to do any serious proselyting to build a teaching pool. Today we're going to try to find some people. Our zone is focusing on inviting people to church. We're trying to bring 2 new people to church per week. so that it widens what we call the Funnel. If we have 26 investigators, then 6 come to church, of those 6, 4 will set baptismal dates and of those 4, 1 will be baptized, and that's if we get 6 people to come to church! the funnel tends to be a lot smaller statistically, but if we find by inviting people to church that funnel automatically widens so by the end of this transfer we want to have 10 people consecutively coming to church. It'll be interesting to see what happens but Saitama Zone is the smallest in the mission and we've already had the highest number of people coming to church on Sundays. It's time to find more sheep. Bruce Lee said

                             "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the
                              man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

This quote has to do with focus, as we focus on our goals we WILL see miracles. Stay focused everyone!

As this conference, from what I've seen so far, has to do with missionary work there is a sweet book that I want to recommend. I haven't read it yet because I can't manage to find a copy in English but I'm going to get it because of a training we had recently. It's called "Every Day Missionaries" by Clayton Christensen. It's amazing and it applies to my mission as much as it applies to you all! :) Get it! Read it! That's my commitment to you! (you knew it was coming, I'm a missionary.)

Have a great week everyone!
愛しておられます！
ハワード　長老