New Announcement and New Friend

Coming to you from Komatsu on the interior coast of the Sea of Japan, it`s another week from Elder Fuller.

It has been a great week and we have a new, and progressing, investigator. His name is Yoshimi (meaning good look) and he is the 30ish year old father of two children and a very kind wife. His kids are 12 and 2, and they like the missionaries too.

We met Yoshimi last week as we were going house to house after meeting with our other progressing investigator. Everyone in Japan has those speaker-doorbells so they just tell you to go away usually. Sometimes they come to the door, but then they just say they`re busy. However, when we came to this normal looking house, the wife asked us to come into the entrance. She then went and got her husband and the whole family of four gathered to hear what we had to say. This kind of thing never happens. Never.

We explained a little who we were and then asked them to watch a five minute dvd we had called "finding happiness" which is sepcially made for Japan. We then said we would be back in a couple days (monday) and would talk again.

Well, coming back, the dad talked with us. He gave us back the DVD and said something along the line of, `I`m sure Christianity is great, but I just read this book by some person who lived about a hundred years ago who said that there were a lot of problems in Christian doctrine and that there a lot of unanswered questions. I don`t think...`

Well, we agreed to say the least. We then had an hour long discussion about apostacy and the restoration. He invited us back for saturday (three days ago) and invited us to eat dinner with him too. I started to really like this man.

Well on saturday we met again and watch the restoration. He asked a bunch of new questions and was so excited to know that there was a prophet alive today on Earth. We even said a kneeling prayer at the end of the lesson.

And so we have a renewed commitment and desire as the Lord has blessed us with one of His choice children and the opportunity to teach him truth. Hopefully things will continue to move forward.

We had Zone conference yesterday in Kanazawa. Big announcement - Elder Uchtdorf is coming to our mission on May 22nd to do a special conference and a special member conference as well. That will be pretty amazing, especially speaking to such a small gorup - we only have 100 missionaries in our mission right now.

I am doing quite well. I got new scriptures!!! SO exciting!! I even started to mark them today - that was hard, and I still don`t have a set marking system that I like, but here I go. It is so nice to have the word of God again.

Japanese is going well. They have this new thing I bought - all the church video`s Japanese tracks on CD - that I lsten to now on free time so that my listening can get better. Some of the translations are pretty funny. When Christ tells the sea to "be still," in Japanese he tells the sea to "shut up." I guess the sea was being rude or something.

Anyway, it`s fun adventures one after another. I love you all.

May He be with you,

always,

Elder Alexander Todd Fuller
Japan Nagoya Mission
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints