Michael's Good Experience: The last birthday email!

Dear Family,

Well this week was the last week of the transfer which means...Everyone is wondering if I'm staying in yamate right!? Welllll I am! Woo! But unfortunately Elder Carlini is taking all his stuff over on a 10 minute train ride to kamiooka area (his very first area) to finish his mission there. So unfortunately there is one person changing in the apartment. My new companions name is Elder Spackman and I haven't heard anything from him yet, nor have I ever met him so all will be revealed in next weeks email! But for now everyone knows that I'm getting a new companion, am still district leader, and am staying in yamate. So that pretty much catches all of you up! But first I've got to tell you about the week.

So this week we tried so hard to meet with our investigators, especially after having both of them at church last week! But they were both busy this week, they weren't able to meet us and they weren't able to go to church, but they are still in contact with us. Aoki kyoudai specifically. He's even still reading and praying (we keep in about every other day contact, sometimes daily) so we are pretty caught up on him so that is going well. I'm excited for him, we think he's ready for a baptismal invite, and we may be meeting for a lesson on Saturday so pray for a birthday meeting! Woo! With this being transfer week we made sure we stayed real busy and we did a lot of member visits and dendoing near them, so that was fun. I also was able to go on splits with Elder Lobaccaro on Thursday. We had a party on splits, didn't talk to a ton of people because the conversations lasted a long time and we had a blast sharing the gospel with them.

This week we went all over the place though, we were able to help sister Takahashi move again, basically we helped her situate her house and built her children's beds. And we met a less active immediately after that, we've been trying to help him in his goal to become active again and ended up giving him a blessing that night as well, so it was a pretty service filled day. Then Wednesday we were just dendoing like normal when we got a call from president Wada, that usually means you did something wrong, so we were pretty nervous. But turns out he was on his way home from an interview and wanted sushi so he invited us to sushi. In our minds that was a once in a mission opportunity so we immediately accepted and got a time figured out... Only problem was that we were walking (bikes were at the church) and we had to meet him in 20 minutes. Well we were 30 minutes from the church and 10 minutes away from the sushi place after arriving to the church... So we ran, we ran the whole 30 minute walk and rode like the wind to make it on time. But, we did it!! So we had a nice sushi dinner before eikaiwa with the president, and we took a lot of funny videos! So enjoy! I also had my smoothest district meeting yet on Friday, it's amazing how the right hymn choice sung for long enough will really help a meeting go well. So that was great. Then on Saturday we did talent show and we were able to get 4 people there! None of them are investigators and all but one are pretty far from it but it was a good activity for them. The talent show went really well and the missionaries didn't even have to perform so it was really nice and we could talk to investigators a lot.

Another fun thing from the week was last night going over to a young family in the ward's house. (the Etchu family) it was lots of fun because the guys younger brother served in this mission and just barely ended about 4 months ago so we all knew him, he actually filled out my health insurance form. So we talking with him a lot it was way fun, he misses all the mission friends that are still missionaries. Then another fun thing, we spent basically the whole day with a potential investigator of ours named shu. He likes bowling so we've been trying to get a time to go bowling all transfer. We finally did it and it was really good, we went to yakiniku afterwards and we actually got to start him on the road to investigator. Now he's not just eikaiwa but full on potential investigator and he's reading the restoration pamphlet right now! Woo! So today was a productive Pday, I also bought a couple Japanese Pokemon games before he got to the bowling place, they are super cheap here, probably $500 at very most for the old ones. So it's been a fun Pday and week, but in all the fun we still worked as hard as possible, I promise.

I'm glad dad and Kaiden had good birthdays! It's crazy that I'll be there for the next one. Hopefully dad can buy a lot of bullets, gotta go to the range for some fun! Sorry to make you cry with the video Meagan! Emilee and Ryan seem to have been having a lot of fun! Keep enjoying life! And Morgan... If you guys come to pick me up I'm going to make you close your eyes before you eat anything or else you will starve for a week or so. If you go on a mission, and if it happened to be here, you'd have a lot of food trouble lol so good luck! Love you! がんばてね〜 I'm glad you made it safe to Utah mom, keep me posted on Oliver and Meagan! I hope everyone has a great week! It's been a great week over here, I'm praying for all of you all the time so I hope it goes well this week! Now I'm transfer 10! A veteran! Crazy stuff! Love you guys!

Love,

Elder Gailey

P.s. I got my packages this week! I wasn't sure weather I should wait or not... So I kind of opened the package already, so THANK YOU!!!! It was a great birthday package and the sweaters are so warm and I definitely needed them already this week. So thank you so much! I'll send lots of pictures and videos!

Elder Carlini, President Wada, and Elder Gailey