Come Follow Me: IZUMO! RAIN EVERYWHERE

November 16, 2015

Hello Amazing Family and Friends,
First, DUTCHIE BOY!! Happy Birthday! I love you and can't believe you're getting so big, have a great day buddy!! Miss and love you! Auntie Lauren will be thinking of you all the way over here in Japan. Well it sounds like everyone is just great in America!! I'm so happy to hear that. Knowing that everyone is good and okay is such a blessing as a missionary. All the pictures were adorable, thank you SO much! Those nieces and nephews of mine are too dang cute andgetting so big way too fast! Grandma Bonnie, thanks for the love and putting forth the effort of emailing little old me in Japan. Love you! But keep being great all of you. You're the best! Well a hard but good week... So my comp got a bad cold this week so 3 of the days we had to stay inside, which is always hard but she us better and we got back to work. It's been super rainy too, like pouring rain. Haha but it makes it an adventure right? So we have a recent convert named Himo and she is just so sweet and we meet with her every week and help her with things and we just are her friend. This week we got to make paper cranes with her. It was great She has been struggling with the word of wisdom just because she grew up drinking green tea like everyone else here. But we just shared with her a message about Latter Day Saints Keep on Trying and talked a lot about not giving up and you can tell it really helped her. She is so sweet and I can't wait to teach her and grow closer to her each week! Ekaiwa was good! I teach the beginners class and my comp teaches intermediate. Most of my class is young people with a mom as well. The girl I am in a picture with at Ekaiwa is this cute girl who said I was the same age as her sister and she wanted a picture with me cause an American was the same age haha it was cute but not much else about Ekaiwa for now...There is this less active named Inoda Shimai and she is about 60 something and just is struggling with the pressures of what others think of her and also that her husband isn't a member so she doesn't have the "perfect" Mormon family so she is embarrassed to come to church. We are kind of having a hard time knowing what to teach her right now.. She is stubborn haha every time we meet with her, we have to go to lunch at this sushi place every time.. Haha she made me try eel and squid sushi! Yup, I did it haha it wasn't too bad. I quite enjoyed the eel but the squid texture, oh boy! Unique.. Haha but she is great and I hope we can help her more and more to overcome those things. So every Wednesday we teach these two Brazilian girls English from our branch. They are SO cute Cristal and Cindy, they are twins. So we start with talking about our ponderizing scriptures and share our testimonies with each other then teach them English for an hour then their older brother feeds us and it's always SO good ha they fed us Brazilian food this time. It was delicious! So we will see how that continues to go. I love them! so I don't know if I mentioned Mami Shimai or not last week but she is this adorable young mom in our ward who is married to mark Kyodai, a Philippino from America so they speak English to each other but he learned Japanese as well and they have an ADORABLE 2 year old named Mea. She is too cute. So Mami Shimai has been a little down lately, so the other day we decided to call her and just check up on her. Well she had been having a very hard day so we stopped and bought her a treat, visited her and shared a message and you could see the difference in her day. The spirit is real, all we had was a thought to call her and it ended up changing her whole day and strengthened her. So that was amazing to see! Also this week, Mark and Mami were so sweet and brought us homemade chili cause my comp was sick. IT WAS SO GOOD! American food, yay haha but they are so sweet and just LOVE the missionaries so much. Well Friday we has district meeting in Matsue. First random fact, where we went to eat, there was a baskin robins right next to it, YUP! You bet we went there haha ah American ice cream! Dreams do come true but the meeting, It went really well... We focused a lot on faith. But I will share this one thing our district leader said about prayer that just hit me. "When you ask for specific things, you WILL receive specific answers or blessings." And for me I have been really been working on prayer lately and being sincere and such. But now I have another thing to work on. Be specific! Another challenge for prayer this week sorry haha but look at your prayers some more this week and see if you are being specific and truly asking for certain things, even if they are tiny, and I promise with all my heart, he will give it to you! So please try that this week Sunday was a good one but also hard. So our investigator, Onon (the Mongolian) said she could come this week, one of our members planned to pick her up. Well, she couldn't come... It broke my heart. I know church will help her progress so much! So I hope and pray she can come next week... But I seriously love the people in this branch so much. They just love us missionaries, but they all have such strong testimonies and sweet spirits about them. They just are so happy all the time!! Nothing is better than a happy person right?! But I just LOVE this area so much. Today for pday, Mami and mark the took us to a famous shrine here and it is surrounded in beautiful autumn leaves and water falls. It was such a great day. I love them so much and it was great to see more of Japan and just enjoy the day together. I'll send pics! But the work is going better and better, I love being here! I love these people, and I am forever grateful for this opportunity to be here. This gospel is true, it brings SO much happiness and joy into our lives. Never take it for granted, and please share it and serve others!! It'll bless your life immensely! Love you all and miss you all!! have a great week.
Smith Shimai スミス姉妹