BRRRR

So hope everyone is fabulous! Life in Hokkaido is still fun and cold.

We’ve started using the bus to go to and from Teine. The snow all melted and so now it’s just plain cold. It’s kind of a problem when we go to talk to people and our mouths are numb, haha. but this week was pretty much normal missionary life. We did A LOT of housing. We’re really struggling to find new investigators. When we go housing, people will interrupt us after we’ve only said where we’re from or sometimes we can even say the name of the church, but they’ll interrupt us and be like, “I’m not interested!” and then shut off the intercom. We’re really trying to work with members and encouraging them to invite friends or family to church or activities or to meet us. I know there are people prepared to hear the message of the gospel in Teine, we’re just having a bit of a hard time finding them. But we have met some really nice people and the members are way awesome and all the sisters are super excited about us being in Teine and want to do missionary work. I think as we continue to encourage them and as we try our hardest to find people, together will will be able to find people to teach the gospel to.

So I’m just going to get on my little soap box here for a sec and just say that everyone really is a missionary. The full-time missionaries really do need the members help. Knocking on doors for 4 or 5 hours a day is sort of fun and we meet some really interesting people, but it results in very few investigators. When members invite their friends to listen to the message of the gospel they are more likely to accept. Every member can do missionary work! We need your help!  Okay, I’ll get down now.

Anyways, so sorry I didn’t really have anything exciting to write about this week. A lot of walking. A lot of walking. A lady we stopped to talk to on the street at first was like, “Ya, I’m not interested.” But then she kind of leaned in and said “I do have a question about something.”  And we’re like, Oh yay, please ask! And she said, “I received this necklace from my grandma and it’s a figurine of Mary (I think that’s who it was, I don’t really remember.). But she was like, “I want to know what it means and stuff." We’re like, "uh….we don’t really know the meaning…" and she was like, "oh, okay". And then we were like, so….you don’t want to hear our message? haha and she was like, no. So that was a let down. But she was nice and maybe someday she will decide to learn more about the church.

While we haven’t found a solid investigator here in Teine, we have been able to share our testimonies countless times and introduce people to the church and the gospel. Every time we get to do that I feel so great and I just hope everyone of those people that say they aren’t invested or have a religion someday meet the missionaries again and choose to listen.

I hope everyone has a fabulous week! 
Love, Murray Shimai