2023年9月22日
Greetings from Shibuya in Tokyo. It’s time to write another update to our family and friends who we love.
We are starting to get settled and figure out our routine. We finally got internet installed in our apartment this week and that has made a big difference in our ability to get things done. Getting internet installed takes a lot of time and paperwork here. Now we can be in Zoom meetings, get documents filled out, plan lessons, and work according to a schedule.
Last week was a “mission tour” by a general authority. Elder McCune of the seventy and member of the area presidency spent the week with our mission and missionaries. We know Elder McCune’s wife Debbie quite well because she was one of our students when we worked as service missionaries at BYU Pathway last year. We did all that on Zoom, so it was really great to meet her in person for the first time. It felt like a reunion with an old friend, but for the first time. Sister McCune continues her studies at BYU Pathway today.
Elder McCune was pretty awesome. We ate lunch together last week and discovered that both Elder McCune and Elder Low served missions in Japan at the exact same time. Last Friday he and Sister McCune met with our zone at the new Azabu building next door to the temple. He told the missionaries that the Lord didn’t call them to Japan “just to build your testimonies.” He called them here so they could learn Japanese and teach people who are ready to be taught the gospel in that language. He focused on how faith is the predecessor of miracles.
After the meeting, the Relief Society sisters prepared an amazing lunch for all the missionaries. It must have taken them days to put together. Of course, the young missionaries were like a hoard of locusts. They inhaled it all in minutes. We are continually amazed and grateful for the kindness of our Japanese brothers and sisters here. They quietly serve so well and so graciously.
Our Schedule
So here’s where we are now:
Mondays
We decided to start having Young Single Adult Family Home Evening on Monday nights. We ran the idea past the branch president and stake presidency and they were thrilled with the idea. The YSA branch hasn’t been having FHE to date. We hurriedly announced that we’re starting Monday night FHE last Sunday evening, not expecting many to come. But on Monday night a really nice crowd showed up. We played games, laughed a lot, studied Come Follow Me together, and ate chocolate cake. We expect this activity to grow over time.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays
We had a meeting with President Node this week and went over our concern of a lack of temple activities here in the YSA branch. There are no temple nights or anything like that. So we’d like to start having a standing branch temple night every Wednesday night for anybody who wants to attend. The temple is only ten minutes away from here – two stops on the subway. It funny, we now live closer to the temple than when we were home. President loved the idea and called the temple president about it. It looks like we’ll be called as ordinance workers next week – mainly so they can have enough staff to manage the extra time we plan to take in the temple. We’re excited about this. Sister Low plans to use some of the Monday FHE time to help the members do Family Search and prepare names to take with them Wednesday nights.
It appears we’ll also be working in the temple on Tuesdays too. Tuesday is the day the missionaries in our mission go to the temple and the president wants us to be there for them.
Thursdays
We have started teaching our institute class on Thursday nights. We’ve done it twice now. We have about 25 students from all over the Asia North Area that we teach on Zoom. This week we taught Lehi’s dream in 1 Nephi. We were amazed at the deep thoughtfulness of the student’s questions.
Fridays
On Friday nights we go to institute class in the Shibuya building. Tonight there were forty young people in attendance. The room was packed and some had to stand because there was nowhere to sit. Some had come from far away. We had visitors from Hokkaido, Hiroshima, Nagoya and Ehime on Shikoku. We’ve learned they come to Tokyo by themselves to attend the temple, then come to institute here and meet people their own age.
Tonight they studied about when Joseph Smith was in the Liberty Jail and how we got sections 121 and 122. They all studied those scriptures carefully then broke into groups and discussed the deep meaning of the revelations and how they can apply them into their personal lives. Every single one of them studied seriously and contributed to the discussion.
After class every Friday, we have a “gathering time” where they can hang out, play games, and chat. We also feed them snacks. Tonight during the gathering, we had one sister who is leaving on a mission next week and so the entire group stood in a circle and sang to her. Holy cow, that moment really caught us off guard. We didn’t expect the powerful spirit we felt as they sang. Both of us were in tears. Yet these young people acted as if it was a normal thing to them.
Mornings
So that makes every weeknight now booked up for us. But what about the mornings and afternoons? Well . . .
We also had a long talk with President about our helping the missionaries with their Japanese studies. He is concerned, since most have been here for only a few months and need to come up to speed on the language quickly. On Thursday the APs invited us to an all-mission Zoom meeting where we were asked to speak about the importance of language study and discuss ways to study and learn Japanese better. Then we offered ourselves to provide one on one coaching sessions via Zoom for any missionary who would like help studying Japanese. When we published the signup sheet, it filled up for the week in five minutes. We spent 6 hours yesterday teaching Japanese to missionaries in 30 minute increments. It was great and it looks like we’ll be doing that during the week in the mornings from now on. Hopefully we can do some good.
The Young Single Adults
We continue to be amazed by these young people over here. Last week we attended a missionary prep class one night. There were over 30 young men and women there – all getting ready to go. At the beginning of the meeting, they all stood and recited D&C Section 4 from memory in Japanese. Elder Low listened to them and thought about how amazing the situation was. Did Joseph realize when he recorded that revelation in 1829 on a tiny farm in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania that this would be happening? In Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan? In Japanese? When Elder Low was a young missionary in Japan, he couldn’t imagine this situation. But here we are, surrounded by these strong, faithful young people who have internalized that revelation into their lives. And it’s not just a few of them. Truly amazing.
Attendance at the YSA branch is also amazing. Last Sunday we nearly ran out of seats. The chapel was pretty full. Even though it’s a branch, President Node told us we probably have more attendees than most wards in Tokyo.
Many, probably most, of these young people were raised in the church by their parents. We’ve met two so far who are fourth generation members – their great grandparents joined the church shortly after the war. This is an amazing, marvelous thing to us. We can’t begin to imagine how much work and faith it would have taken to raise four generations with valiant testimonies here in Japan.
The Missionaries
This morning Sister Low got up early and baked chocolate chip cookies for our district meeting with the young missionaries. The missionaries went crazy. Last Monday morning she cooked pancakes for them on P-day. Looks like she’ll be cooking pancake breakfast for them every P-day from now on. The missionaries loved it.
We really love the young missionaries around us and want to support them any way we can.
Tomorrow is transfer day and we’re getting some new missionaries coming in. President Node has asked us to come into the mission home so we can meet each one of them, evaluate their Japanese skills, and start them on a study plan. All of them have been waiting for a visa for months and have been temporarily assigned somewhere in the US, which means the language studies they learned in the MTC months ago have retrograded to some degree. We’re excited to meet them and be there. Sister Low will bake cookies again.
This Sunday we have an activity planned after church. We’ll be cooking curry rice for the whole branch – about 70 servings. Elder Low is nervous about this, but Sister Low is not afraid at all. She’s very confident we can pull this off. How can you go bad with curry rice?
And how are we doing? We are loving it so far. It’s really nice to be together every day. We’re both still a little glazed over in awe at what we see and the places we go every day. It’s really kind of unbelievable. We are so grateful for this opportunity to serve and we pray every day that we will be able to do some kind of good here.
We love you all. We pray for all of our children and grandchildren every day. We continue to hope that our service will bless you. Please don’t forget to pray for us.
Love,
Elder and Sister Low
ロウ長老姉妹
Elder & Sister Low 