A Day in the Life

Well, here it is, I finally found a good time to write about what a typical day in the life of me as a missionary is.

At 6:30 in the morning, the alarm goes off and I wake up, flip over and pray. It's usually cold, so getting out from under the blanket of the futon is a little hard, but somehow I manage. Most mornings, some kind of garbage needs to be taken out -- they seperate the garbage in Japan into plastics and burnables; other things need to go out on one of two special garbage days that happen each month --  so Elder G and I go outside and around the apartment to where the garbage pickup place is and hurry back inside so that we don't get too cold.

After that, I take a shower and brush my teeth and shave, or wait for Elder G to do those things if it's his turn to go first. And then I pour myself a bowl of cereal then eat during Personal Study which starts at about 8:00. Personal Study is one of my favorite times of the day. Lately I've been reading the Old Testemant and I just finished the Book of Judges. I love just reading the scriptures.

After Personal Study, we have Companionship study. That involves singing, praying, reading three pages from the White Handbook (The Missionary Rules), talking about what we learned in Personal Study and talking about the lessons that we are going to teach during the rest of the day, and if needs be, doing a Mogi (a roleplay) so that I can practice what I'm going to say in Japanese so that Elder G can be sure to let me help with the lesson. Because sometimes, if he's not careful, he just says everything for a lesson since he can just handle it by himself, and since I'm still not very good at Japanese.

After this, every day differs. Sometimes we will have a lesson at 10:30, so we go straight to that, or we will leave the apartment to go find some former investigators. There are were a lot of former investigators in our Area Book when Elder G got to the area, and so we've been working on contacting all of them to see if any of them have interest now or if they even live in the place that is on our records anymore.

Often these people that we visit live kind of far away, so we spend a lot of time on our bikes. And often the two of us will have a good conversation while we bike. We talk about a lot of things, like video games, or I will have a question about Japanese, or he will tell me about his old companions, or we will talk about our investigators or about the ward. Lots and lots of things. It's nice to have someone to talk to.

Teaching in Japanese is kind of hard, as you might expect, but people tell me my Japanese is pretty good, especially for a bean, and I try hard so I think God is happy with me for that.

Sometime after that, we have lunch and then usually do some language study. For that, I read the Book of Mormon in Japanese, and lately I've also been working on learning Kanji, which are the Chinese Characters. I'm making these really great flashcards so I can learn them.

After that, we go out and visit people again for a few hours, or try to do some housing if we don't have any appointments, and we go home and have some dinner. And then at 9:00 we plan for the next day. Then there is just a little time to read or draw or listen to music and get ready for bed before it's 10:30 which is when we pray and go to sleep. Which is a time I get excited for every day, because I'm really tired all the time, and falling asleep is a good relief.

Well, I hope everyone is well. Thank you for all the Valentine's things, they are great. They made our apartment look much more happy and your card was very nice. I hope you had a nice birthday as well.

I love you all,

-Elder Mueller