Teach All Nations: Preach Like Christ

Hey everybody! It was good to see most of you on Skype last week. Things are good here in Japan. Today we got to go to the temple which was great. My new companion is Elder Fountain. He's from Utah and is a really good missionary. He's transfer 13. I'm transfer 10! Crazy right? Getting old... Not sure if you heard about the earthquake that hit us yesterday. The epicenter was actually just a few miles from where we live. It was level 5 so. It shook the apartment pretty good and had some stuff fall off the shelves. Pretty interesting feeling! Haha.

Last week was pretty good. We met with Hideaki several times and he is looking pretty solid right now. He really wants to be baptized on the 29th so we are hopeful it's going to happen! We'll be doing our best to prepare him. Yuuki is so busy right now it's hard for him to meet with us, but we are staying in close contact with him and it looks like we'll be able to meet a few times this week. That's about it for our investigators. We have been continuing to visit members a lot, both active and less active, trying to get the dendo fire up here in Koga.

I'm really excited for this transfer and working as zone leader with Elder Fountain! So for our zone motto for the transfer we came up with "Preach Like Christ". Then, for our zone focus, we thought about how we can become more Christ-like missionaries, what our zone specifically needs and also about the 3 things we have been hearing the mission talk about the most. So our focuses are 1. Charity 2. Youth 3. Preach My Gospel. With these focuses, we've thought about end goals that we want the missionaries to shoot for. With charity, it's somewhat difficult to make a measurable goal but we want to start by developing more charity for our companions because we think that's where it starts. We will be doing something that we have somewhat jokingly (because it's corny, haha) named the "Kiryu East love project", which is just something we will be doing to help the missionaries make a conscious effort to serve and love their companions. Of course we know that it has to come from within our hearts, but there are applications that can help us start developing good habits of showing charity! As for our focus with youth, we want to put the focus on Eiken (student's English test prep English class) and finding students through the youth members. We have asked the district leaders to create with their district members a goal for each ward as to how many students they will have at the Eiken class by the end of the pilot program. We want to do this so that the missionaries will always have the urgency for the Eiken as well as their other dendo. We also want to become best friends with the youth! And finally, for PMG we just want each missionary to be studying from PMG daily and striving to apply what we study.

It's been a good few days with Elder Fountain. He's really experienced and seems to have a lot of great ideas/dendo tactics. He's a hard worker and has lots of good ideas for the area. I'm excited for this transfer!

Love you all! The church is true!

Elder Snyder and Elder Fountain

スナイダー長老とファウンテン長老