Jared's Mission

Shoutout to my boy Elder Matthew Leone, he single handedly (probably actually used two hands) wrote the best missionary email I've ever read! Elder Matthew Leone, if you are reading this, stop right now and write another one please. I'm dying to figure out what will happen in Matthew chapter 2. This week I told myself (and God) that I wanted to work on being humble. Elder, I need to take some notes and maybe one day I, like thee, will compose an email as magnificent as that one.  Almost 4 transfers in ... you know what that means ... next transfer  they  get here ... time to really start PMG chapter 14 ... (I'm not going to explain that joke, but that is all it is, a joke! ... 多分) Food trends over the past 5 months since I came to Japan:  I don't think there has been a week where I haven't made curry once or twice  Seaweed is good if it has the weird sweet/sour stuff on it. If not it's just bitter green paper  Nato isn't bad, I actually think its kinda good...

Good morning!  This week I went on my first exchanges as District Leader! They were lots of fun! On Tuesday the Miyako Island Elders came to Ishigaki and we did a little exchange, I was with Elder Lyman, it's his first transfer! Elder Yamanaka and Elder Hashimoto were together, 2 Japanese Elders, that's pretty rare! (They can't really teach english class very well) Then after that the Zone Leaders came to Ishigaki for an exchange. I was with Elder Baldauf and Elder Yamanaka was with Elder Self!  Its fun to be with other missionaries but I also just like working in my area with my companion lol.  I cut my hair today, it looks pretty good I think!  We cut Pday short so Elder Yamanaka could call and I wrote a cool email but it's lost on the computer now, we never got the rest of the pday time so this is my pday time!  On the computer I wrote about confidence. Self confidence and confidence before God! This week's Come Follow Me is about the Stripling warriors, the ...

Sheesh I don't even know what week it is! Probably almost Day 200 maybe! This week is done! Another week in the books! (Or I guess in the email, I haven't journaled in a bit) (I always keep a spiritual journal, but my daily activities journal is a little bit empty...) The Path of Least Resistance This week I was studying President Monson's teachings (Chapter 7 of his book) titled "Finding Joy in the Journey." It was so fantastic! I learned so much! President Monson's words reminded me a lot of Elder Uchtdorf's most recent talk about looking for joy. We do not find joy, we make it, and we can't make it if we don't look for it. From that I made a training for my District about finding joy in missionary work! There are only 4 Elders in the district (and a senior couple), 2 of the Elders just came to the mission the week before last, and Elder Hashimoto and I came 3 transfers ago... Pretty young district lol. But every day this week when we did our dai...

Woot woot! I've flown 4 times since my last email, it's crazy (expensive) !   I went to Fukuoka to pick up my new trainee, Elder Yamanaka! He is from Aomori Prefecture and is so sweet! He is learning English right now so we pretty much only talk in Japanese but we are working on that! Right now we do an hour per day only speaking English! We are going to add another hour every week until the end of his training (12 weeks) so by the end he will be able to do the whole missionary work day in English! (That's crazy, I was just doing that to help me learn Japanese!) Yesterday we did our first hour of only English and it was so hard for me to remember not to speak Japanese, while we were cooking Curry for dinner I kept slipping up and talking in Japanese! It took a few minutes to get back into english mode and then afterwards it was hard to get back into Japanese mode lol, missionaries trying to learn a new language, SYL really does help! Elder Johnson went home this week...