Week 34- Drawing The Line

Aloha 皆さん、

Sorry I didn't send an email last week but no worries my parents gave me a little bit of an earful bahahaha. These past two weeks have been a bit up and down not gonna lie but we got through it and are pushing to better days. Recently we've been going through and talking to all of our friends and meeting with them and really talking to them about what they believe about God. Why they really meet with us and if they have a slight desire to hear about why we are here and what we have to share. It was really rough talking to a lot of friends I truly cared about and built a real connection with and hearing them say they really didn't have an interest in what we share. Some of them hung out with us for various reasons like Eikaiwa, or activities or just because they thought we were cool. Especially talking with Hirotaka felt like a knife stabbing my heart. 

Lowlight:

So we had a lesson with Hirotaka basically just a big heart to heart about what he wants in life and what his beliefs are. He's met with the APes for 3 months before I met him about a month or so ago, so he has been meeting with missionaries for over 4 months. He is on baptismal date and I've gotten really close with him so as we were talking with him and hearing him be pretty much indifferent to the Gospel. He always told us his faith was about 50% and over time I thought we were really making progress with him especially as over time he's asked more questions and been more engaged. But I asked him where his faith was at the time and he said 50%. I followed up asking where his faith was when he first met with the APes. He said 50%, after that it felt like every thing he said was twisting the knife in my heart. It sucked. There's no other explanation I can really say to explain how I felt. 

With that recently I've been thinking about when to draw the line. It's extremely hard in Japan to know exactly when to stop meeting with a friend and when to keep nurturing that relationship and putting that time and effort into that. Because in Japan there's been success stories of friends that take an extremely long time to be converted but also there has to be a line to some extent in order to make our time effective. It's been really weighing on my mind wondering about when we should draw that line with some of our friends. If any missionaries have insight or anyone actually please share lol.

Highlights:

-One piece

-Exchanges

-Food 

One Piece:

Yeah so I think the last time I talked about one piece I had one singular deck, my parents weren't very happy when I told them I now have 3 and I am building a fourth. BAHAHAHAHA yeah I've fallen deep. But yeah it's been super fun and I've met so many new people through one piece and building those relationships with new people has been amazing! It's also SUPER fun to play on p-days and a lot of the Zone is getting wayyyyy into it. So just an overall topic that's always talked about, at least between the Elders. 

Exchanges:

Had exchanges with our DL and I got to go with his little Bean. It was a lot of fun. I always love exchanges. But literally tomorrow I'm doing an exchange with my loving Elder Medeiros. So I'm super stoked for that as well!

Food:

So last week me and my companion ate a total of 7 kilograms of chicken. Then the following week we accidentally bought 4 kilos of Chicken SKIN instead of regular chicken. So we wasted a bit of money haha. Not really a highlight but proud of the first bit and a little embarrassed about the second but oh well.

Not much highlights but that's just cause my memory socks but Das all

SHOOTS!

愛してるよ

エリス長老

TheRisingSon