Week 63 - Shinkotoni!

Dear Family and Friends,

Well I am in my new area, Shinkotoni, now! I love it! My companion
Sister Johnson is on her third transfer now, and is working really
hard on learning Japanese - I actually got to go on splits with her
once shortly after she first got here, and she has improved a ton
since then! She is from Spanish Fork, Utah, and the sweetest person
you could ever find. I am so excited to work with her!
We had the ward Chrsitmas party this Saturday and then church on
Sunday, so I got to meet a lot of the ward members early, and I am
doing pretty good on their names so far. There are about 50 or so
members that come every week, so I am hoping to have them all pretty
much down by next week before Christmas :)
It was so neat though, we were asked to attend Young Womens for the
first hour (they do it backwards), because as a Young Womens group
they made a Missionary Plan - inpsired by Elder Ballard's talk and the
family that had a Family Missionary Council one of the leaders decided
to do it with the Young Women. We came up with a list of some things
that we could do as YW, and came up with a list of people that we want
to be able to share the gospel with or to come back to church and made
a prayer list, talked about inviting friends to activities, and
sharing their light with the ward members, and strenghtening everyone
around them. We also decided to go out for about an hour just right
after church and go hand out flyers together - we split 3 and 3 -
1missionary, 1 leader, 1 YW - and went out in a blizzard to go pass
out flyers by the train station. It was so amazing to see the dendo
fire in the YW, and their leaders, and how supportive everyone was
when we got back to the church as well. People tend to linger after
church for a while here, and when we came back an hour later they had
some hot mugicha waiting for us by the door to warm us up. There is so
much dendo fire in this ward, I am so excited to work here!

We have one investigator in this new area, and she is doing really
well it seems - I am going to meet her tomorrow, but she has a
baptismal date for January 26th, that she made and committed to
herself. We are going to work really hard to help her acheive that
goal, and maybe even sooner than that if we can. I am excited to be
able to find a lot of new investigators, and those that are prepared
to hear the gospel here- I know that as we work our hardest, and be
obedient that God will bless us with those that are prepared to hear
the gospel.

I found some great scriptures the other day, and thought I would
share, first D+C 29:5-6 - God is waiting for each of our prayers, and
wants to answer them and bring us back home to him, and the other is
the introduction to the D+C. I have never payed too much attention to
that section before, but it really stuck out to me this time, and
confirmed to me that the D+C too is a strong testament of Jesus Christ
and his gospel, and is "of more worth than the riches of the whole
earth"!

I love this gospel. I love sharing it with others, and the spirit that
comes with a testimony. I am grateful for each one of you and your
constant love and examples to me.

Until next week! May we all have the spirit of Christ (mas) with us every day!

Love,

Sister Budge