Taking Things Slowly and Steadily

Hello,

I'm doing better this week. I've been taking care of myself. And I'm
making good strides forward, psychologically speaking. The doctor and
I found the source of my mental troubles, and it is that I have based
most of my self worth on what others think, and it's what I make my
expectations and plans for myself on, so when I don't live up to
those, then I get really really disappointed. But I'm doing better
now. My assignment this week is to write the next chapter of my life,
and to find the new Elder Mueller. It's fun. I've been doing new
things this week that I haven't really considered doing until now. I'm even
rethinking what I want to pursue as my future career. I don't have
lots of access to information, since I'm in the mission field, but I
think I should do something different than I've planned on doing
before.

I am making sure I take things slowly and to make sure I do not "run
faster than I have strength". And I think it's helping. I tend to push
myself too hard and then end up disappointing myself when my performance
doesn't rise to my own expectations.

My investigator's name is M...sawa. He's a really great investigator,
but he got really sick this week. So we haven't been able to meet him
since the music night a while ago. But I really think he will get
baptized. Even if it isn't while I'm here.

We got iPads this week. That's definitely a new experience. I like the
access I have to all the church manuals and things. I have a lot of
reading material. We're still in the primary stages of implementing
them, so there's still a lot of stuff that we aren't using yet, like
Facebook, and stuff like that. We're taking things slowly as a mission
regarding these things.

My companion is the best. Elder T...naka is hilarious. He's also really
patient with me and helps me out when I'm not feeling very good. We're
having a good time together. I'm also helping him a lot with English,
so we talk a lot about language. Other than the gospel, I think
language is the thing that I've talked the most about here in Japan.

Toyohashi is awesome. Although it has many strange things, like the
lingerie store 50 meters away from our apartment. The weather is
pretty good here. It's starting to get kind of hot. Although the wind
is pretty strong a lot, so in the evenings it still can be kind of
cold. It hasn't rained as much this week which is nice. There are lots
of parks here, so we go tracting there a lot. I am a fan of parks.
There's a lot of green here. 

It's been a good week. I'm doing okay.

With love,

Alex

 Softball!

Me and Elder T!