Christmas is coming! Dendo is growing!

Good morning everyone! I hope you are having a good week! Its too cold here for me! President Boss, send me back to okinawa please! Just kidding! I am loving Yatsushiro and its lack of unbikeable hills (boo shimonoseki) and since the Shimadas are back home now there wouldn't really be a reason to go to Ishigaki... I guess I can survive the cold for a bit longer! At least I'm not in Sapporo!

I saw this picture and repented for any complaining about the cold. This past week: Christmas Conference! We had our Christmas Zone Conference last week in Kumamoto! We got to go up on Tuesday night! A super nice member drove us like an hour from the station to the stake center (the traffic was super bad), we talked the whole time in the car and he said if I ever came back to Japan I could stay at his house if I was visiting Japan! (I already forgot his name though these japanese names go crazy sometimes) He gave us donuts and a bunch of other snacks and stuff. The conference was so good! We focused so much on Jesus Christ and how we can focus our missionary work on Him. Exchanges with Dobosz Choro! Zone conference normally ends at 2 pm so I scheduled a lesson for 5pm thinking we would have plenty of time to get back to Yatsushiro on time.... Then the ZLs said that the Christmas conference was going to be longer and it would end somewhere from 4-5pm. Ummm yea. We had to leave early and were actually starting exchanges after Zone Conference so I went back to Yatsushiro with Elder Dobosz. We ended up being 20 minutes late to the lesson (told him well beforehand) because there wasn't a bus that lined up with our later train so we had to walk all the way from the station to the restaurant we were meeting at. Because we started dinner late it went longer than planned and then there was also no bus from Hamazushi to the church for us to teach eikaiwa. We ended up being 30 minutes late to eikaiwa but everyone was super nice and waited outside. A member picked us up and drove us the last little bit back to the church. At that time we were carrying so much extra, I had my bag, violin, and suit coat from zone conference, and Elder Dobosz had all of his stuff for exchanges. That was a fun half run, half walk. But the lesson was so good! The first one was with someone who moved from Cambodia named Surei (shoutout to all my friends in Cambodia! We are almost 1 year it yall!) I'll talk more about his lesson below. We also had another lesson planned for that night with the Thai speaking sisters and two of our friends but it ended up getting cancelled. The next day we had a lesson with Risa and her boyfriend. It was such an awesome exchange. I just wish we had more time to find people. (Elder Dobosz is in his 5th transfer and he has never found anyone in any of his areas. One time someone walked into the church and asked to learn more but other than than his areas have never found before.) (which is kinda crazy, like I know Japan is hard but wow, infelix) Elder Dobosz is an amazing missionary, he is striving his best to be perfectly obedient and I think his biggest flaw is that he can't eat vegetables. Like he could barely swallow the onions in the breafast burrito I made for him and he ended up throwing the rest away... Not my fault on the cooking btw, those were some good breakfast burritos! Lesson with Risa Risa is someone we found while housing! We shared a little bit about Jesus when we first knocked on her door and then we shared about the plan of Salvation with her and her boyfriend(?). It was a cool lesson but we weren't able to make a return appointment. We are planning on going back on Christmas to share another little message though! (Christmas isn't as big here as it is in america) Lesson with Surei (Cambodia!) So I found this guy on facebook! We met up at Hamazushi, a sushi restaurant and he is super awesome. He asks so many awesome questions about what we believe and why we believe it. I hope as we continue to invite him to do things he really keeps our invitations and applies them to himself! New years week is P-week (party) Ok its not actually Party week but since Japanese people really celebrate New Years we will be not really doing missionary work for the first part of the year but Boss Kaicho has some cool stuff planned for us to do! (One day he said no dendo just deep clean our apartment) I'll probably talk more about that in my next email! Ok I love yall! I haven't wrote my japanese email yet and if I google translate this one to japanese it will probably be not as good as going from japanese to english like last week! My Christmas plans: Christmas Eve night, eat dinner with the Branch President and his mom and siblings Christmas Day, open the last few things I got from my family! Make the thing that they got for me and my companion (I definitely didn't peak and see gingerbread house) Okay bye bye! Elder Rasmussen Sorry if you wanna see pics look at last weeks email!