Eric's Mission, Tokyo, Japan

Hey everyone! Whats up?  Right now I am on a train to Tokyo so that we can go to the temple!  From Tsukuba where I am right now it takes about 2 hours by train to get there so we have a long ride ahead of us.  I'm really hoping to get some inspiration at the temple today for a big Christmas devotional that we are hosting this Friday.  It's really important because it's the meeting to start out our big Christmas miracle.  We are going to have 100 baptisms from now to Christmas. That's going to be huge!  But we need to make sure that the meeting goes well. So we just got our transfer calls yesterday and I am really surprised because I am actually staying.  My companion is leaving though to open a new area for Elders.  It's pretty exciting!  I will be getting a new companion named Elder Scoville!  He is from Sacramento, California and he is amazing!  He was actually one of the district leaders who I have been...

Guess what, another transfer is almost over!  This is our last week till I'm a transfer 10 missionary!  Crazy right? This week went pretty well but it was so stressful.  Have any of you had to plan for a zone meeting with the sister training leaders, plan for a baptism in Japanese with the ward mission leader, and plan for a big 3 day zone blitz with the district leaders?  All I can say is that it was pretty stressful and I am glad that it went well.  The baptism was amazing.  My companion did the baptism correctly the first time and do you remember Elder Alred?  He was my companion last transfer in Tokyo but he came to the baptism because his companion used to live here and taught T...  It was really good to see him again.  The next day we had the confirmation which was also very stressful but I did it right and everyone said that they were amazed at my Japanese and how it was so good.  I'm telling you it wasn't m...

Hey Everyone! I don't know if you got my facebook post or not but today in Japan we are celebrating respect for the aged day!  So no mom, since you are 29, you don't count as aged. lol  I just didn't have any other pictures of my grandparents so I just added that on.  So everyone have a great day!  Also today is the 15th so that means that tomorrow is my 1 year anniversary of living in Japan.  One year ago tomorrow I was stepping off the plane into a very strange new place that I had only dreamed about.  And now look at me, I can get around just fine.  It's crazy how much you change in a year. This week, mom was totally right, we had a big all day meeting again. This time it was for 4 zones so we had over 1/3 of the mission attend. I got to sing in an octet with a violin and a piano so it was pretty fun.  The bass part was more of like a tenor part so it was a little hard for me, but also for the real tenors. I don't ...

Dear Family, We had a ton of meetings this week which made the days go by really slow but for some reason the week has already ended.  weird.  One of the meetings was in Tokyo and was called Mission Leadership Council. It is where all of the zone leaders, sister training leaders, and the assistants to the president meet with President Budge to talk about how we can improve the mission.  It was really weird to be sitting next to all of the crazy good missionaries who everyone has heard about.  I felt a little out of place but it was ok because I saw a lot of my friends from the MTC for the first time in over a year.  Even my MTC companion Elder Free was there, on skype.  He is currently back in Niigata where I used to live and it is so far away that they just have them skype into the meeting instead of taking the long bus trip down. Besides that meeting we had a lot of other meetings.  And guess what, we have another ...

Hey everyone! Were to begin...we were all over the place this week.  First off we were off to Mito so we could attend a district meeting over there. The first district meeting I haven't needed to lead in a long time.  It was still pretty fun just sitting there and listening to the training.  It's crazy how on my mission I have come to love meetings because you can learn so much from everyone.  After the meeting in Mito we went down south to Matsudo to have a meeting with the stake president of the stake we are serving in.  Apparently the zone leaders meet with the stake president every month to align our mission goals with the stake.  The stake president was really cool and I learned that my Japanese isn't that bad cuz I was able to speak during the entire meeting in Japanese.  Gift of tongues!  Just wondering, dad do you ever meet with the zone leaders in your stake at all?  How many zones do you have in the stake?  I...