Elder Cuff: Week 15 in Japan: Memoirs from Partyville

And another week is gone. It's weird to think that next month I will be approaching the 6-month mark. Time is moving too fast for my liking. This past week has been pretty productive, we've been finding quite a few people who want to listen to our message. It makes up for the fact that a lot of appointments have been falling through. Fujisawa is such a fun area, it's so pretty and the people here are so nice. Our apartment is an absolute mad house, it's a good thing my mother taught me how to clean or else this place would be so gross. It should be illegal to be having this much fun. It's becoming harder and harder to write emails because there's so much that happens every week.

While going door to door looking for people, we had a rather large man come to his door in a towel, except it was more of rag he was holding over his... Well, yea... But he was a nice guy who was cool with us dropping by again!

Also, it was totally serendipitous how it happened, but while street contacting I somehow ended up skating with a group of Japanese dudes while we talked about The Gospel. They ended up not having much interest in our message, but they were cool with meeting up to eat and hang out sometime!

One big thing I learned this week was the importance in not only serving, but also how you serve. In our apartment, I've found myself doing the mass amount of cleaning because, well, I hate living in a dirty apartment. I found myself getting more and more frustrated and really wanting to lash out at the other Elders in the apartment for not helping out. I then came to the realization that I live with my zone leaders and my companion is our district leader. Those prep times we have to get cleaned up and organized in the morning and at night are busy for them. They have trainings to prep and other missionaries to contact and check on. I realized how selfish it was for me to have those negative thoughts when what I was doing was taking a burden off their shoulders as they try to fulfill their calling. In that moment I gained a much more appreciative stance on the extra opportunity I had to serve. I think at times we expect appreciation from others for the mere acts of service we do, when in reality we should appreciate that there are opportunities for us to serve. When we help others, we should do it out of love, rather than for personal gain. Just a thought.

There's so much I'd love to tell you but we're off to go to the driving range cause the wind canceled our trip last week.