Our First Zone Conference

Today was the first Zone Conference of our brief career as mission president and I must say we were not prepared for what we experienced. It was absolutely powerful. Of fifteen missionaries in the Zone, four were native English speakers while the other eleven were Japanese. Most of the Japanese (Nihonjin) are second generation in the Church, and many of their parents also served missions. They are sharp, knowledgeable, and have a tremendous spirit. The mission is scheduled to have six baptisms tomorrow, and four of them will be in this (Aomori) zone. I wish I could say I added a lot, but I didn’t. I interviewed all fifteen missionaries, participated in an introduction with Pam, and had closing comments at the end. I also paid for lunch and for treats! Actually, we fine-tuned the format of the conference and shortened it by cutting the “training” segments from three to two (the Assistants trained using the training model on establishing better relationships with local priesthood leaders; the Zone Leaders trained on being bold in establishing baptismal dates), and by reducing the testimony meeting from open-ended to 45 minutes, then I took the last 15 minutes for closing comments. We were through by 2:30 when it would previously would have lasted until 4:00. I also took the opportunity of interviewing each missionary for 5-7 minutes. That was a choice experience. I learned that one missionary’s mother passed away this year on Mother’s Day, another missionary’s father passed away two years ago and her mother delivers newspapers to help support the family, another missionary’s parents have separated since he left on his mission. These are the sorts of issues that our missionaries are dealing with, but they are very strong in the faith and work hard. They have only been back in the Sendai Mission for maybe 10 weeks at the longest and 2 weeks at the shortest. So it is really encouraging to be looking at 6 baptisms already! I invited the District President, Brother Murakami, to attend the conference with us. He was happy to do so and spoke to the elders and bore his testimony. We will do a better job of involving local leaders in our missionary activities. Actually, we modeled for the missionaries one way of linking arms with local leaders by inviting him to the luncheon and having him speak and bear his testimony to the elders and sisters. I think he was pleased to be included.

After the zone conference, we dropped the sisters off at the eki (train station) and headed southeast for the 2.5 hour drive to Morioka where we are staying tonight. What a beautiful city. The church overlooks a lovely lake and park. We met the branch president tonight who was just arriving at the church for branch president meeting. What a nice, positive fellow he is. I have really good feelings about the church and missionaries here in Morioka.

After we checked into the hotel, we decided to eat at a small shokudo (café) across from the hotel—last night we just had juice and a banana in the room. We ended up in a sushi place and ordered shrimp, salmon, and tuna. It was really good. Pam didn’t understand any of the chatter going on around her, but seemed to enjoy the experience. This is amazing—we are doing things that we have never done before. Because all of today’s training was in Japanese, she heard more non-stop Japanese today than she has in her entire life, cumulative! Thankfully, Elder Shaw translated for her. I encouraged her to write today’s experiences for our journal/e-mail, but she almost fell asleep looking at me while we discussed it! We are still waking up at 4:00 a.m. as our biological clock is a bit upside down. Maybe tomorrow.

Gary