One month!?!?

Yesterday (November 19th) marked two one month marks. The first one was it had been one month since Ikeda Shimai and I became companions. Yay! The second is that I leave my beautiful Japan in one month you know the meme with (I think) Kevin Hart and he’s like “She wasn’t ready!!”? Well, that’s how I feel right now. Life is just smacking me in the face and I am not ready. But it’s okay. Because that’s just life, right?

In other news, this week started off really hard with a lot of rejection and feeling like I just wasn’t doing what I had been called to do. It was rough. But then things turned around. We have an eikaiwa student who I LOVE and she has been pretty shy about church things but has slowly (VERY slowly) opened up. About a month ago we were able to give her a Book of Mormon and then this week when we followed up on if she had been reading it she said she had! Yay!! It may take some time with her but I feel like she could really truly accept the gospel one day. We were also able to give a copy of the Book of Mormon to a cute girl we met on the street and she was super happy to take it. That was such a good moment for me. Of course I’ve done it before and it felt good but that day it was exactly what I needed to feel like I really was doing my best and even though it doesn’t always turn out exactly how we want it to, if we are patient and keep pushing on we can and will see success in one way or another. (Wow, run on sentence much? Sorry to all of my former English teachers..) 

Another cool miracle we saw this week was with our investigator that we’ve been doing half English, half gospel lessons with. After we said the opening prayer she said “I can learn English on my own but I can’t learn about church things on my own. Is it okay if we just spend the whole hour from here on out to talk about church things?” Um... YES! It was great. Seriously. It made Ikeda Shimai and I so happy but at first we were kind of like “what do we do! We weren’t prepared for this!” Because we were so shocked haha. 

Saturday was craaaazy. We met with one of Jenny Shimai’s friends daughters and just talked with her for a little bit. She has a lot of different things she believes and is still looking for exactly what it is she believes but was waaay open about talking about religion and things like that. I am not sure if we’ll be able to actually teach her but I’m praying that we may be able to spark enough interest in her to have at least one lesson to help her really feel the spirit testify of the truthfulness of this message. She’s super cool, though. I like her. After that we hurried back to the church and helped at an English speech contest that was actually sponsored by Utah Valley University. A member of our mission Presidency was like the head dude of it all so he asked us to come so the participants could practice talking to native speakers. It was pretty cool. And one girl even went up to Ikeda Shimai and asked her first about religion (because the announcers were all church members and very open about us being missionaries haha). Whaaat? So cool. Then we hurried to a members house and got to meet with her and help her come up with her own mission plan. Super busy but a super good day. 

Also, to end the week on a fabulous note, one of the American members in the ward invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner last night! Yaaaaaas! It’s just him and his mom and they don’t eat meat so they gave the missionaries all the left over turkey and you can bet I’m making turkey sandwiches for days now. And the stuffing. He gave me left over stuffing. Bless Brother Oba’s heart. But really, we’re so blessed to have great members who are so kind to us. I love them. And it just makes me want to work harder to serve them!

Scriptures! Yay! 3 Nephi 27:20, 30-31, and Mormon 2:12. Please read and enjoy and think about our Savior and His Atonement

Have a great week, everyone!!

Stay safe. Stay classy. Stay sassy.

Love you!

愛しています

--フィッシュバーン姉妹

We went and met Jenny Shimai and one of her friends and there were these quilts on the wall.
So I immediately thought of grandma Dixie and then thought “mom would love this!”
So I took a picture.

Then Jenny Shimai was like “this one
is American! Stand in front of it!
Give me your iPad!” So that
picture happened.

We walked past this Christmas tree and
she was like “where’s your iPad! Go sit!”
Then Ikeda Shimai was like “this is
so embarrassing!” Because there were
toooooons of people watching us..
yeah.. but it’s cool.

A nice selfie of Ikeda Shimai and I waiting to meet new friends😊