Dear Family and Friends,
Greetings from Tokyo, Japan on Christmas Day.
We pause today to express our gratitude to each of you for your love and support. While we are grateful to have the rare opportunity this Christmas to represent our Savior Jesus Christ and serve Him, we also realize we are blessed by your prayers and support in our behalf. Thank you.
Today is a special P-day in our mission and will be a quiet day after a month of hectic, crazy fun.
Food
Like last December, this month has been our busiest of the year. What makes it busy is cooking. We have cooked a lot of meals for our Young Single Adult loved ones.
The week after our huge Thanksgiving dinner, Elder Christopher Kim from the First Quorum of the Seventy visited our branch for Sunday meetings and spent the afternoon with us all. So of course, we prepared a lunch. We’re sure Elder and Sister Kim loved the sight of over 70 of our YSA kids eating and talking and laughing together. Pure joy.
The next Sunday after that was our monthly Third Sunday Dinner, where we had YSA visitors join us from all over Tokyo and the rest of Japan. We fed 120 hungry people a dinner of curry rice and salad. It was devoured.
That next Friday was the last Institute class of the semester, so to celebrate we made a huge pot of beef stew and rice and fed a few dozen Institute students. It was the perfect fit for a cold Friday night. The Institute kids were so fun.
Then this past Sunday was our annual YSA branch “Big Christmas Dinner.” Elder Low cooked two turkeys and Sister Low made homemade rolls for about 120 kids. Plus, 30 pounds of mashed potatoes, along with gravy, stuffing, a big pot of chicken tortilla soup, and lots more. That one was a lot of work. Elder Low stayed up all night Saturday night cooking turkeys because regulations in Japan only allow an oven to run for an hour and a half. Then it turns off. Gotta conserve energy. So he stayed up all night nursing the oven and making sure the turkeys got cooked. The small 100v oven turns out a great turkey and they were gobbled up.
In addition to all that, we cooked the usual weekly meals for Family Home Evening every Monday night. Then of course, we also cook a P-day pancake breakfast for our missionaries every P-day. So, we spent a lot of time in the kitchen this month.
This last Monday was our special Christmas Family Home Evening. We had about 40 show up for games, fun, and a hot bowl of turkey udon noodle soup with Elder Low’s homemade udon noodles. We spent time together remembering our Savior on the night before Christmas Eve. There were lots of hugs, a few tears, some new friends, and an empty pot of soup at the end. We walked home smiling and grateful.
You may think that all this cooking wears us out, but it doesn’t. We love it. It’s so fun. The reward is the look on the kids faces when we serve up the food. And they are always so kind and grateful. That said, after the Big Christmas Dinner on Sunday afternoon, Elder Low had to lay down and take a nap.
Caroling
Sister Low has been searching high and low around Shibuya, trying to find places where our missionaries can provide service. She’s contacted retirement homes, care centers, and the welfare services office at city hall, but until recently hadn’t been successful in finding a place that would allow us to come and help. Then a few days ago she found an office at the Shibuya City Cultural Center called “Connections.” They have a staff that focuses on helping organizations make connections, provide service, and help in the community. She spent an hour with them, and they were so excited to visit with her.
One thing she asked for was a place to go caroling. The Connections folks recommended a youth center that might be good and helped us make an appointment to go caroling there. So, two Sundays ago after church, a bunch from the branch, along with some of our missionaries headed over to the youth center wearing Santa hats. When we arrived, there was only two children there. Hmmm. Small crowd. But no matter. We sang to them anyway. We actually turned and faced the busy street and sang to all who passed by. Everyone sang beautifully. Many passers by stopped and paused.
For Elder and Sister Low, it was a magical moment. Our YSA kids had spent a lot of time practicing for this and they clearly expressed love as they sang. These are the kids we have spent our whole mission with. We love them and watching things like this makes us love them more.
Sister Low will be going back to the Connections office and setting up more opportunities.
Day Job
In addition to all the Christmas excitement this month, we still had our “day job” to do. We sent home another bunch of amazing missionaries last week, including some sisters who we welcomed to the mission right after we arrived here ourselves. That was a strange feeling – bittersweet. We love them as if they were our own and will miss them. Then we welcomed a new batch of missionaries to replace them. This time, because of missionaries coming from so many different countries at different times, President Tueller asked Elder and Sister Low to drive to the airport and pickup an elder arriving from Brazil while he and Sister Tueller were off to greet a different flight. Then after that there was the day spent doing orientation and training, followed by Sister Low spending days processing paperwork at two different city halls on behalf of the arriving and departing missionaries.
But we actually spent most of our time teaching institute classes to our YSA kids, doing language training for missionaries, and serving in the temple. Not a bad day job.
This week we finished up our two institute classes for the semester. This round we taught an Eternal Family class and a Book of Mormon class. As we wound up our Book of Mormon studies for the year, we studied Moroni and his “just one more thing” teachings he wrote specifically to us at the end of his life.
“Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.”
-Moroni 10:32
We send you all the same invitation. If you haven’t yet, we invite you to come unto Christ. His grace is sufficient for you.
We now look back at a year spent in full time service to the Lord. We have spent the year working our hardest, teaching what we know, trying our best to serve. We have seen many amazing miracles. We have seen lives change. We have witnessed the power of the Redemption in others. We have witnessed things that cannot be explained except to say it was the power of God.
We are so incredibly grateful for this amazing opportunity. We “remember how merciful the Lord hath been” to us (Moroni 10:3). We still cannot believe we get to be here and do this. It’s just . . . incredible. We are blessed. We are also very tired.
Now the New Year is coming. We continue to send up prayers on your behalf every day. We miss you all, especially at Christmas. We ask the Lord to bless you all with whatever you need.
See – that’s the idea. Our original hope was that while we serve, you will be blessed in our absence. We continue to pray for that. We have faith that blessings will come to us all.
So we send you our greetings for a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May God bless us, everyone.
Love,
Elder and Sister Low
Elder & Sister Low 