0152 hours (Is there still an s if its not 2 hours yet? wakanai.)
Companion:
So I have neglected to give you very much information on my companion. His name is Elder Breinholt. He grew up in Washington state (Duvall) until he was 14 and then he moved to Utah where he lived until he was 18 years and 11 months and went on a mission. He is 196 cm, 86 kg, brown hair, and blue eyes. His hobbies are swimming, water polo, and being silly. He is soooo humble and wants to do the right thing so its so easy to get along with him. After the mission he will go to school for the air force at Utah state and wants to get his mechanical engineering degree or become a flight surgeon for them. I can beat him at arm wrestling but he is way better at reading kangi then me.
Military ward info:
I figure you guys might find all this interesting so I am going to skip the Japanese culture point today. There are really 150ish members in the ward. There are 30 young families and two older (48ish year old) empty nesters. Very few of the families are normal military. We have 5 dentists and 8 doctors in ward and all the families have 3 or 4 children all under the age of 7. It's a waaay loud, way fun ward! These are some of the hardest working coolest people I have meant!
Fun food fact:
Miso soup. So when I first got here i didn't really like miso soup that much. It tasted like hot seaweed water. Now I LOVE it. I like crave it and have to make it. There are no real rules to how you make it (I used to think that there was). Normally you choose some vegetables (like carrots, onions, potatoes, mushrooms, these giant white radishes, seaweed, it doesn't really matter at all) then you boil them in water with this flavor stuff called dashi that I really have no idea what it is (some type of salty bullion). As the bubbles come up you scoop of the bad bubbles (its super important and I learned it from yamamoto choro). Then when the balance is right with the dashi (you taste it about 100 times and yes you get a tongue of steel it gets burned so much at first) you scoop some miso, a brown paste, into a really small metal strainer on a handle. Then you drop that in the still boiling broth and vegetables and stir the miso around tell it dissolves into the water. It's way good and supposedly the most healthy soup there is. I don't know if that is true but I love it!
Spiritual thought:
I had the experience of watching change through the atonement. The atonement is the act Christ preformed so that we can all choose to come back to God. It is because of the atonement that we can repent. Repentance always has this scary "you did bad and have to repent" feel but I testify all it is is change. There are two ways I have seen the power of that change. The first was this week when a couple were able to slowly become more humble, their hearts changing, so that they could make a decision that made them happier. The second change is that we can take bad decisions and the guilt and sorrow associated with them and change them! We can change our desires to better things and lose the sting of the old choices through the atonement. We can come unto Christ and become the better person we want to be and he wants us to be! What a blessing and power. I don't have time to explain how to use the atonement but if you find some missionaries where you live they would be glad to show you how to.
Picture update:
Be soooo jealous. We get up at 5 and play ultimate Frisbee on Saturdays for exercise. Yes that is a turf field and yes it did snow once already but we run and you feel totally warm after the first ten minutes.
Funny story:
So everyone in our district in Misawa is new except for my companion Elder Breinholt who has been here for about 4 months. So when we showed up to church our first Sunday (American ward is from 10-1 and the Japanese branch is from 2-4) there was a whole bunch of introductions and the such. It was the end of the third hour of the American's meeting and we were on the stand (they use it kind of like a classroom for third hour) and I kid you not, 2 seconds after the amen of the closing prayer this little head pops up and is looking at us over little half wall of the stand. It was an Obachan (older woman) I later found out is 78 years old and about 4 foot 8 inches. She looked super suspicious of us. Then she marched right around the stand, up the stairs and straight to my companion and asked ウィタル長老はどこですか。"where is elder Whittle?!" (that is who I replaced when I transferred) and the normally rather calm Elder Breinholt is like sweating his guts out and stammers out in Japanese that he transferred to Sendai. I am kind of confused why she seems so mad and about to introduce myself when she just goes off on him! I kept up for the first 4 insults of his intelligence, but then it started getting ugly and the only words I recognized were ancestors and fecal matter. My trainers always told me there are no cuss words in Japanese but I started to doubt that when I felt the heat of those words. It was out of love for the previous missionaries and settlement of not being informed something was changing though. She is totally a stud and I love her sooooo much! But I about died inside I was laughing so hard and trying to stay calm. All the Americans were just shell shocked and didn't understand. Elder Briendholt was too terrified to really understand. Please picture him 6' 5" and her 4'8" and him terrified. Eventually we got to swear an oath to her that if there was ever a transfer again that he would notify her immediately. Then she was satisfied.
Love each other for me!!
Elder Law
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