3/29 My last week in Toyama! :(

Konnichiwa minasan!

Lottss of News this week! First off, this has probably been one of my favorite weeks of my short 20 years, everything happened even better than I hoped (prayed) it would, which is saying alot, cause I dream pretty big! haha The work is going so great here. We had to plan for 32 people for weekly planning this week between our investigators, Potential investigators, and Former investigators that we`re going to meet with..it took three days! Haha But it`s so great to be so busy! Just on Tuesday we had 6 lessons! And found 4 new investigators! That`s more lessons than I taught my whole first week! Crazy! Haha
Really the huge success we had this week was because of the members, we visited members whenever we could, and invited them to come do something with us, like visit less actives, or to our next appointment whatever we were doing at the moment. So we were able to have alot of member present lessons this week (9 of em!) and they usually took us out to lunch after which was great too :D

One fun one was on Wednesday, we were visiting a really old couple, the Ooi family, they`re super great, but they talk forever so our lunch visit with them ran over until we had our next appointment with a really old couple that was a former investigator some years ago. They were dropped before because it`s really difficult to get them to focus and stop talking long enough to have a lesson...so in the middle of Ooi kyodai going off, I got the prompting to ask him if he would want to teach the plan of salvation today. It turns out he had been preparing a plan of salvation lesson all week for his seminary students as a substitute and then the real teacher came back so he wasn`t able to teach it. So he was overjoyed to get to put to use some of his studies and we went and taught the lesson. It started out as usual with the ikeda fufu talking alot of about life for the first 10 minutes, but then as soon as we got to start sharing our message Ooi kyodai went off on them...oh it was so great. I was wondering which of the chatterboxes would win out, and it looks like we came out ahead. He`s a way good teacher, so I didn`t mind not being able to teach much. By the end he had pretty much taught them all the lessons...and they were committed to read and pray about baptism. Which was pretty awesome :D So yea for old people power!

(gomen `going off` mean talk alot, slang I picked up in the MTC...)

Soo the really big news that I`ve been trying to avoid talking about issss....transfers. Man I`m so bumbed. I getting transferred to Toyota. It`s all good, I`ll go where the Lord wants me, but we were really getting into our groove. We have good companionship goals, the ward is super dendo fired now, we have of ideas and plans for this area. It`s turned into a gold mine. And now I have to leave... :( It`s kinda funny actually, I`ve spent all my P-days cleaning this apartment and doing stuff for this area, I wrote all three hundred members (less actives really) birthdays in a list, so I could call them or visit them on their birthday, and I bought a map and cut it up/blew it up, so we could put stickers where everyone lives, and visit less actives in the area of wherever we`re going...I organized a monthly missionary news letter with the bishop and ward mission leader, with the wards goals, upcoming activities/pictures from old ones, Ballard`s 90 challenge (to Japan) and a bunch of other things. And I feel like most of it will not be continued/used when I leave. :( That`s what I`m most sad about...

I kinda think I`m getting transferred because my current companion needs to go to the gym for two hours a day in order to get in shape for the air force acadamy, and they don`t want me as a bean chan to be wasting all that time, when I should be studying Japanese and training. Which is true, we rarely ever have time for language study, I just figure I`ll learn it by doing it, so I just try and talk all the time and have my training fix things when I mess up haha. Which has worked pretty well so far. Oh well can`t change it now.

So...for other news. Our mission president came to our ward on Sunday, he spoke in Church, and had a dendo fireside afterwards, which was fantastic, helped everyone get hyped. He focused mainly on Less actives. We had 4 investigators at church, so it was cool having them meet him. He is so nice, I`m going to miss him. He`s leaving after next transfer, so this was the last transfer calls he made. 

So a bit about Toyota, if you couldn`t tell, that where the car company is located, there`s a large Brazilian population there that works in the factories. My MTC companion is there right now, so I`ll be working with him, last I heard from him (2 weeks ago) he had only taught one lesson, and it was in Portuguese...haha so it`ll be fun trying to get the work started up over there haha. I`ve heard that the ward over there is kinda crazy, but pretty awesome too, they have alot of big families with lots of kids, one of the members apparently got up and called everyone to repentance for 20 minutes last fast and testimony meeting. Sounds pretty fun :D I was hoping to learn Portuguese after I learned Japanese, but it looks like I might end up speaking Portuguese first haha. My new companion`s name is HardCastle, he`s a transfer 5 missionary I think? So that`ll be fun, trying to survive without a perapera (fluent) companion. Apparently he was also in the air force academy, and is even bigger than my current companion (which is insane...seeing as he`s 6 foot 3 and can bench 400...) so hopefully it`ll be good :) Transfer calls came a week early, this time, so I still have a week in Toyama before I go over there and meet him.

Hanging out with some college kids we found by the international college! They`re from Russia, Korea, and China, but we all spoke Japanese to each other haha They made us dinner :)

We take pictures with Less actives and then next time we visit we give them the picture with a note on the back :) This girl gave us a big box of chocolates, but half of them had alcohol, or coffee in them...haha

This is one of our investigators (sorry don`t know how to flip pictures, everything is in japanese...) He`s a professional piano player, we went to a concert he had on Saturday, and then taught him afterwards. He`s way cool.

These are the Toyama missionaries :) Mineta shimai is the asian one, then Wilcox shimai, then Frost Choro, toshiaki, a potential investigator (he comes to Eikiwa) then me :) The shimai are super fun to dendo with, and super funny. We lucked out with them. We live in the same building so we trade food alot, they even made me a cake yesterday :)

​Dinner Party at the Yasui`s! They made me beatbox for them because they heard about it from the Takoaka members haha. It was fun :)

Alright sorry for the long, kinda mendokusia email. 

​Everyone better enjoy this Easter week and watch Because He Lives! I`ve been looking forward for this video to come out for ages :D It`s super great! Give it a watch!

http://www.mormon.org/easter?cid=HP_FR_3-27-2015_dMIS_fMRMN_xLIDyL1-A_ 

Keep praying everyone God is listening!

-Elder Coleman

Oh and sorry if I emailed you this out of the blue, I just pick random names from the address book to send emails too haha :)