Koiwa Continues

(Ginsu Mumford slices and dices vegetables for Mabudoufu)

Here is Elder Mumford's e-mail from Japan, dated June 1, 2010:

Dear Everyone,

It's good to hear from you all :) And no worries, the package(s) and letters all arrived safely. The cheese was just fine. Even better, we made tacos again. We actually were having lunch one day, and we had made Mabodofu (a chinese food with tofu, meat, veggies, and rice). We decided to just finish off all the taco meat from the last time and throw it into the mabodofu. It ended up completely overpowering the chinese flavor, and just ended up ttasting like mexican food anyways. So we brought out the tortillas and wraped it up!

VIDEO:

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Also we've been trying a lot of new things, with the materials we've got. We've been having a lot of breakfast for dinner recently, with various kinds of pancakes. So a few days ago we threw in the reces pieces bits into the batter and fried it up. It was very peanut buttery.

(Frog Shaped pancake, created by Elder Mumford)

Also in the package, I was excited to see the pop rocks! Wow it's been a long time since Ive seen those. I had some, but then we had to go and so I left the open package on my desk. When we came back that night, I went to finish off the pop rocks, and to my suprise the humidity in the air had actually fried them all into a kind of goo that had fused into the package. Kind of cool I guess. They were always more of an 'entertainment' food than for actually eating anyways :)

Today before we came to email we had a mini-cleaning of the apartment (halfway through a transfer it gets really dusty and junk starts to pile up everywhere). So that was 'fun'. But I've really come to realize that I cannot live, I just can't survive without a garbage disposal. That is the one thing Ill never be able to give up in my life. You know everything that goes down a normal sink? Bits of food, crumbs, every scrap of crusty stuff on each bowl/dish? All of that goes down the drain and is caught by a handy little net/baggie thing. Which then fills up slowly with all the food bits and eventually turns into a putrid light brown goo. The sinks literally do not accept anything except for 100% liquid, so we have to use the nets or else the sinks will eventually clog. The hard part is changing the nets, but we pulled through it ok. Its just that that will be one of those simple gifts that Ill be happy to embrace once Im back. :)

VIDEO:

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But this week we have seen so many miracles. Let me tell you about a few of them;

1. We were walking along the street, and Elder Williams talked to this guy who was just leaving a convenience store. He asked him 'why do you think people die? What is the purpose of it?', and the guy thought about it for a while, and said, 'I dont know, but come to my house and you can tell me all about it'. So we followid him to his house, we sat down and taught him about the Restoration. Which just blew his mind. He's kind of busy at the moment, but we're going to meet with him in a week or two to talk more about it. We was very interested in the Book of Mormon. His name is Sekino. He has a pet turtle named Leonardo (just thought that was funny).

(Turtles in the park, in Japan)

2. Elder Williams stopped this really old nice grampa walking dow the street. When he heard that we were voulenteers for 2 years here, he wanted to buy us coffee for some reason. Unfortunately we cant drink coffee, but he insisted on getting us somehting, so he bought us both strawberry parfaits. Way funny guy, but after a few minutes we could tell he really only had interest in talking to gaijin (americans) than really hearing about the gospel so we had to leave him with some information and say goodbye. Very nice person. He talked a lot about how in Japan no one ever hugs eachother or holds hands or expresses love in any way.

I wanted to show him that our Heavenly Father loves us, and so I asked him,

'you have a daughter, so do you love her?'

and he said, 'yes'

'so how much do you love her?'

and he said along the lines of 'maybe a little bit. kind of.'

which really blew me away because most people will usually say 'a lot' or something like that. So I wansnt really sure what to say to that, but we still told him more about God and how he really does love us because we are his children. It was just a very interesting experience

3. A few weeks ago (I forgot to tell you, maybe?) We were walking down towards the train station, and we stopped someone, who turned around. And he turned out to be from England, which took me by suprise because he looked completely Japanese from the back :) But we ended up talking to him all the way back to the train station, about what we're doing in Japan and what kind of message we share. He was curious about Mormons, because he had heard that we cant drink coffe. And he asked why we dont... if there was some sort of a reason. We told him that of course there are things like that that we follow, no alcohol, coffe, tea, smoking... but just by looking at that you might get the impression that we follow it for health reasons. But we explained that really, no one needs religion to tell them what is good or bad for thier health. You dont need God to tell you that smoking is bad for your body. You can get that information without believing in God.

But the real reason that we follow the word of wisdom, as with any commandment, is because it is just that... a commandment. We do whatever God asks us to do because it is a test of our willingness to follow him. And he wants to see if we are responsible enough to recieve the belessings that he has to give us. In reality, it comes down to 'did God really ask me to follow this, or did someone make this up? Is this a true principle, or just someone's opinion? If it comes from God we follow it, and we can all know, individually if it is true or not. Quite literally we can recieve an individual answer to our prayers, which will prove to us what is true. Because if this church is not true, there is absolutely no purpose in following its teachings.

So we explained that the most important thing in this church is for everyone to know for themselves whether it is true or not. We dont want anyone at all to be blindly obeying because their parents told them too, or because it sounds like a good idea, we want each person to know 100% with that assurance from God (not from other people, but from God Himself) that this is the best path we could be taking in life. Nothing short of that will cut it. And if you really want to know, and ask him, and are willing to follow whatever answer you may get God will tell you, guaranteed.

He thought that was pretty cool. Of course this was all in English so it was way easy to explain (I somehow doubt that I could say all of that in Japanese), but I htink he rocgnized that there was something important about what we were doing here. That we're not here to try and convince or trick or persuade someone to join our church. We're not here to promote 'good morals'. We're not here to make the church bigger. We are here to tell people how they can know (for THEMSELVES!) that it is true. That is the best part of being in Japan for me.

Anyways there was some other cool miracles this week, but I think I forgot them already. I hope that everyone is having a great time, enjoying themselves and working hard. Thanks for the great letters! I got so many at once due to the mailbox misunderstanding, but it was WAY fun!

Thanks for everything, I love you all!

-Elder Martin Mumford,

TOKYO JAPAN.