Miracles

E-mail dated 6/6/10:

Dear Everyone,

First of all, the non-spiritual stuff :)

I put the SD card in an envelope last week... and we never sent it. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) we have been blessed with a lot of teaching/finding opportunites, and we have not had a spare moment to hit up the post office. But to day is finally P-day, and I will send it right away.

Ok, now for this week's experiences:

Miracle #1- About a month ago, Elder Williams and his trainer Elder Macdonald met a sumo on the train ride home. It turns out he lives really close to us and to the church, and so they exchanged phone numbers. Then, two weeks ago, we called and were able to set up an appointment to meet him over Udon (thick Japanese noodle soup) to talk about what we do here in Japan. We met him in the restraunt, and asked him a lot about what kind of training it takes to become a Sumo, which there is a lot. (bad english, sorry)

(2 Nephi 4:34)

(click on scripture reference to view)

I thought there might be some sort of diet or special perscribed food, but he just said that they can eat anything at all, as long as they eat a lot of it. (He's a very, very huge guy. He's only 20, and he's dual majoring with economics and sumo wrestling). So then we asked him if there was any mental training involved, and there was, a lot like meditation. And so we connected it to how in life of course we train our bodies, but in a very similar way we are here to train our spirit as well, and the more we work at it the stronger it gets. And God has shown us the way, but like the coach and the sensei give directions on the best way to improve. We may think that we know best, but in reality if we follow exactly what the sensei and coaches say, we will improve more than we could by ourselves.

So that turned out to be a great meeting, and he wants to meet us agian sometime for a legitimate lesson. Of course, we had to take pictures after :)

(More "old Japanese arms")

Miracle #2 - We met a chinese college student on the street on sunday, and then on monday we had an appointment with some members for dinner. Right outside their house, we were 5 minutes early, so we crossed the street to see if we could talk to maybe one more person. And right there we met the same guy again! His name is Taiun, and he just barely came to Japan 2 months ago. He was going home to make dinner for himself, so we invited him to come with us to the dinner with the members which actually turned out great! We happened to have a Chinese book of mormon on us, which we could give to him. So we basically all just explained what the book is about and why it is importnat to us.

And now we are going to meet today too, to talk more about it.

Miracle #3 - MAPLE SYRUP... THANK YOU!!!! that is so precious and valuable. I think with the bottle, and the make-it-yourself bottle we now have enough for the rest of this transfer and the next. Thanks so much.

(Precious "maple" syrup- A real treat in Japan.)

Miracle #4 - On sunday, we met with 3 other chinese college students. (there are actually a LOT of chiense people living in our area), who we were also able to give 3 more book of mormons to. One of them had studied religions of the world pretty thuroughly, and the other two were very interested. So that was a miracle as well.

Miracle #5,6,7,8,9... etc... This week was nothing but miracles, this coming week is also lined up to be amazing. Im sure I forgot most of them, but Ill try to de better at remembering next week. I actually have a little less time now, because we have started getting some peoples emails on the street, and Im using a part of my email time to talk to them and see if we can meet. But I think it will just be a temporary thing. but thank you everyone for the great support, I really can feel the love of everyone praying for me and supporting me half-way across the world.

This is the best time ever,

Thanks, Have Fun!

Elder Martin Mumford,

Tokyo, JAPAN.