I HAVE A NEW COMPANION!
Her name is Abe Shimai. She is Japanese, 20
years old, and from Akita-Ken (way up north). She is probably the cutest and
happiest person I have ever met, and I am just ever-so lucky to be her trainer.
She makes missionary work 10x more fun!
This week has been pretty much just getting her unpacked, settled in, and
ready to go for the rest of our time together (we have a total
of 12 weeks
together, granted we don't transfer, so now we are going on week 2). We've begun
training, which is really good review for me. I've told her that I'm not perfect
and I want to improve as a missionary, so she has my back on that. She's just so
energetic and ready to go! Or at least she was at first. Yesterday after our
nightly planning (9:30pm-ish) she completely passed out with her planner in her
hand. It was the cutest thing. I just remember planning with her and she
muttered something about being so tired, so we wrapped it up and said a prayer.
I started to clean a couple of things off my desk and then turned around to go
do a load of laundry and she was OUT. I called her name a couple times, turned
on music, took some pictures, but she was just OUT. I ended up being able to
wake her up enough for her to get ready for bed and crawl into her futon. She's
so funny, I absolutely love her.
She is Japanese, which means that we only speak Japanese. There is one hour
a day that I get to speak English to her, and that's during language study, when
I should be studying Japanese haha. I just figured that my whole day is language
study, so I may as well get one hour study break. I like teaching her English,
it's way fun. Yesterday I came up with some tongue twisters for her to work on
pronunciation. We like to play around with them;
"How is your companionship relationship?"
"Did you sincerely seek some lovely revelation from the Lord?"
"I threw my liver in the river" - (this one is not original, but it's fun
anyways)
These phrases are hard for the Japanese to pronounce, so we say them over
and over again. They make her laugh. I make her laugh. She makes me laugh. We
just laugh.
I cannot believe I am now a senior companion. I thought God knew I would
never be ready. But maybe that's His logic - I'll never be ready, so I need
experience to grow. Leave it to Him to have it all figured out. For now, "we're
following the leader, the leader, the leader. We're following the leader
wherever [she] may go... We're following the [young] leader, the [inexperienced]
leader, the [doesn't-know-what-she's-doing] leader. We're following the leader
because [He] told us so".
I have no idea why, but He apparently told us so.
