For the Beauty of the Earth
Yes, I titled my email with a hymn name. Yes, I have completely become a missionary. I’m even forgetting song lyrics when newer missionaries start singing regular music, it is pretty sad.
Anyway, two pieces of large news this week. One, General Conference was amazing this time. I think maybe I’m just listening with my spiritual ears a little closer, but I am able to pull a lot more personal and applicable doctrine and principles from GenCon now than I ever have in the past. Plus one of the Sister missionaries I have become good friends with in my district dated Elder Pearson’s son, and Elder Snow spoke at our last mission conference, and Elder Stevensen speaks to us here in Nagoya tomorrow. It was a very fun conference to be at, and very spiritually uplifting. My favorite, however, was Elder Holland’s talk about the Savior being alone in his burdens for a short period of time. I think I am a sucker for hard doctrine in the first place, but that talk struck me hard. I never really thought of God purposely removing his Spirit from Christ just so that Christ would be able to understand completely the loneliness and spiritual death of the world. It was a simple doctrine that really bent my mind and helped my understand the atonement just that much better.
The second big piece of news - sakura. Also known as Cherry Blossoms, these plants have now passed the Japanese Maple as my favorite plant on earth. I am attaching a couple of photos (they will be huge, sorry, I have no way to size them down when I’m on a library computer), so I hope they are visible, but these pictures don’t even near do the experience justice. We arrived at about 4:00pm, and stayed until about 8:00pm, giving us enough time to see regular daytime light, the sunset view, and the night sakura that are lit up and absolutely stunning. I have some videos too you can watch when I send the card home. I tried to catch the ‘sakura snow’ on video, but I only got a few seconds. When a strong breeze comes, the sakura petals literally fall like snow, and it looks like huge pink snowflakes are swirling all around you. I hope you enjoy the pictures.
Anyway, in the past seven days since we last emailed, I have spent two traveling, two in Matsumoto for GenCon, and three in Ina (one of which was to go see Sakura) so I don’t have a lot of exciting news this week. Our investigators are continuing to progress, and we now have two more less actives returning to church, one of which has two children that have not been baptized, and asked me this morning on the phone if I would teach them and baptize them. Transfers are coming up in exactly two weeks, so I don’t know how that will turn out, but I am very excited to begin teaching them.
Glad to hear everything with Kathryn is going to be ok, though the pain is no good. Stick it out sis, you are already pulling through really well. Sounds like the surgery is already giving you hope, and I am praying it all goes well.
Thanks for the packages that you sent, both Karen and Mom and Dad. Neither have arrived yet, but I wanted to say thanks early and I am excited to receive them.
In answer to some questions I got: Japanese keyboards are layed out slightly different, but they do have a standard qwerty style keyboard, so I can type just fine. To type in Japanese, you just hit a button and type the phonetic sound in english characters and it is auto-corrected to either Kanji or the basic alphabet, depending on the word.
We get the Liahona every time we go to interviews, so the Ensign isn’t really necessary - though occassionally the articles are slightly different, I think I will be ok with the Liahona for now.
Yes, Mom, as Mother’s Day gets closer, there will be more information on the phone calls. I would imagine, actually, I will get most of the information tomorrow at our mission conference, so I will likely be able to update you next week. Waiting from May to December is a bit of a bummer, but you are right, talking next May before coming back in July is a blessing. Oh, and by the way, my returning date here now says early June. I need to get that changed.
I think that is all for this week. Sorry, not exactly the most exciting, but we are busy and travelling all over the place. Tomorrow morning I will be up at 3:00am to catch the bus to Nagoya for Mission Conference, so I might sleep at 9:30 instead of 10:30 tonight. Otherwise I will be dead tired by the time Thursday comes along.
Glad to hear everything is well, I’ll try to get a package off with all the pictures and a letter of to everyone. Talk to you all soon!
PS: Delete the email after you read it, it is huge in size.
Greg Burnham
gregburnham@myldsmail.net
1-304 Itakadai
Meito-ku Nagoya-shi Aichi-ken
465-0028 Japan
