Transfer 9 🌊⚓️🇯🇵 (Week 58)

Hello! How was everyone's week? If it was anything like mine, you must have been busy! Elder Thomson and I had a crazy busy week this past week with apartment cleaning, transfers, trainings up in Kichijoji, and Stake Conference here in Yokosuka. Being a trainer and a new district leader has been fun, but it is busy.

So this past week, a lot happened, and truth be told, I don't remember the details of a lot of it because it went by so fast. We'll see if I can cover it though. Last Monday, was p-day. We just took it easy and stayed inside all day because of the seemingly endless torrent of rain. Tuesday was our packing and cleaning day (packing for Elder McDonald and cleaning for the rest of us). That wasn't so fun, but we got it knocked out. On Wednesday, we saw sunshine for the first time in almost two weeks! It was nice to know that the sun still exists. That only lasted for a couple hours though, and then it went right back to those little blessings from heaven that they call rain drops. They say, the more rain water gets on your name tag though, the hotter your wife will be. So I'm not complaining to much haha. Anyway, Wednesday was good. We got to do lots of street contacting and got a couple compliments from some ladies who thought we were very tall and good looking. Always an adventure lol. On Thursday, we had transfers. Sent Elder McDonald off in the morning and then waited in the rain for over an hour for Elder Ota to arrive at YokosukaChuo Station. It was a long day. On Friday, we had District leader training up in Kichijoji. It was pretty good. Learned a lot about effective leadership skills and what type of person a district leader should be. On Saturday and Sunday, we had Stake Conference. We were supposed to watch a broadcast on Saturday and go up to Tokyo on Sunday to watch in person, but because of the typhoon that is currently looming above our heads, the church decided it would probably be best if we just did another broadcast here in Yokosuka. It was way good and there was a lot of talk about member missionary work. If there are any members of the church out there reading this, go coordinate with the missionaries and do some missionary work. If there are any missionaries out there reading this, go coordinate with the members and do some missionary work. Members should be the source from which missionaries find investigators. This is not the doctrine of Sadler, this is straight from the Big Man upstairs. If Jesus Christ says we should do something, we should probably do it!

I wanted to share one other thing in my email this week. Yesterday morning as we were doing personal study, I listened to a talk from Neil A Maxwell titled "Lessons from Laman and Lemuel" (fantastic talk, I would recommend you to check it out). In that talk, he talks a little bit about miracles and it peaked my interest so I did some study on it. If you look up "miracle" in a dictionary, it says something along the lines of "a marvelous event, manifesting a divine agent". In the bible dictionary there are several other definitions, but one part that particularly stood out to me was, "Miracles should not be regarded as deviations from the ordinary course of nature so much as manifestations of divine or spiritual power". I think that I had been looking at miracles all wrong the whole time. A lot of times, I have gone through a long day with little or no success and said, where were the miracles today? Did we not go out and try our best to find? Why will nobody listen to us? Those are the questions that I have asked myself many, many times. What didn't occur to me though, was that the guidance from the spirit that I receive everyday, the ability that I have to teach through the spirt, and the strength that I receive through the Atonement of Jesus Christ are all miracles that take place all day, every day. I felt that I had been called to repentance and I am so grateful for those miracles in my life everyday. It's amazing what a little perspective change can do for you.

Well, that's about all I got to write for this week. It was a little long, but I hope everyone enjoyed. Thank your for all your love and support. I love you all and hope you have a great week! 愛しています!