Sunday, June 29, 2014

June 23, 2014 letter

1828 Hours Somewhere in the West Pacific

Fun Food Fact
Cabbage: I have grown to love cabbage since I came here. The funny thing is a cabbage can run you anywhere from 3-5 bucks which is more than I would have thought.  But I buy it because it’s still way cheap compared to most stuff and it is way good to put in anything raw or cooked! My favorite thing to do with it is chop it up really tiny then boil it for a few minutes then rinse it in cold water and put it in the fridge.  I eat it with a salty chicken soy sauce based dish on rice. So oishii!

Culture Point:
So, I think I have talked about this before, but the words in Japanese for ``you`` are slightly rude. If you have heard someone’s name, then it is pretty rude unless it’s like a really close friend. You can say “anata” if you just met them and of course no one will even blink. But if they can, I’ve noticed thy almost always avoid it. There are a lot of ways to avoid it, but my favorite is they call you by a rank in a family. For example, when people don’t know my name and they don’t know I am a missionary, they call me “onisan,” which is the word for older brother. When I meet a man on the street and I ask him if that is his bike, I say is that “father’s” bike? and so on! grandma, sister, mom, you use anything! I think it’s pretty cool.

Spiritual Thought
Something I thought was very insightful was a talk I read by Elder Bednar (Pray Always) about how every time we pray it is a continuation of our last pray, or to say it better it is connected to our prayers before.  That just like when we pick up the phone to call mom in the morning and then call her again that night, she remembers what we talked about in the morning and so that is how we should talk to her. I really liked that and I think it is true.  We know God is listening and wants to answer our prayers. Let us not forget that relationship. It’s been very helpful to me. It makes me more responsible and is helping build my relationship with God.

Funny Story
You can’t bake in the apartment we are in now. There is just a stove top, a dinosaur of a microwave, and a small toaster oven that you can make two pieces of toast in. (I eat two every morning). Fresh baked goods are therefore a bit of a treasure. So when we found out there was a store making and selling muffins every morning we all got way stoked!! (and paid way too much money for one muffin a piece) We were just having a ball about this. But when we got to the church, Zone Conference started and we got really busy. We had a bunch of meetings after and then a little mishap occurred and it ended up being late in the night by the time we got home. Our beloved Simonsen and Willey choro had been kind enough to wait for us to eat their muffin.  So we get in the apartment and first we need to do some planning. Then it is muffin feasting time! So we are being all spiritual and trying to do a really good planning session and I hear the other Elders come out of their cave and start roaming around the kitchen. (this is about 9:45 at night) and then all of the sudden I hear this howling. If you mixed an baboon call and a small giggle you would have the sound I heard. So I rush into the kitchen ready to fight for someone’s life and at first I was a little confused because the lighting was all off.. like a little too bright for that time of night and a little too orange... then I see these two black silhouettes in the corner by the before mentioned toaster oven. (this is the area the sound was coming from. What was happening is they were trying to blow as hard as they could while having a giggle fit. They were laughing because I think they saw that muffin video on You Tube after the newspaper muffin, and they were blowing because of the old testament style pillar of fire that was coming out of the top of elder Willey’s "strawberry milk muffin.`` All ended well when I added my huff to the fire brigade. The lesson learned by Elder Willey was not to put paper in the toaster oven.

Love each other for me!

Law Choro

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