Idea

Hello everyone!
I know that Grandma and Grandpa are coming home on Friday, but I was thinking that we should still have a family blog to let each other know what's up. Just a thought for you.
Love,
Racquel

The Last Post of Marvelous Work in Japan

We're racing though a series of lasts as we end our mission and like the rice harvest that you see in progress here, we to are trying to put everything in place preparatory to leaving.

We've told Kayo san, our tutor, goodby--are completing our last transfer this week, and have held our last gospel discussion with Br. Uchiyama with a promise from him to come to church next Sunday.

We've seen the sites of Sendai, with these two pictures being of the burial site of Date Matsamune, his son, and grandson located in a quite grove of trees just below his castle site

This past week we've experience Typhoon Melor but because we're in the northern part of Japan it was mostly heavy rain and gusty winds of about 40 miles per hour. We helped the elders in Joetsu move in the middle of it, so we wore rain suits and hurried through the rain to keep the apartment furnishings as dry as possible.

We have enjoyed the many tunnels of northern Japan as we've crisscrossed the mountains. As you can see here they are sometimes so close that you leave one tunnel only to enter another.

The Sudweeks arrived last night and we will spend the next few days helping them get started before we board the plane heading back to Utah.

We can truly say that this has been a marvelous work for us. We just hope that it has been of some value to members here and to the missionary effort. It has reduced our age as we have associated with so many wonderful missionaries and local people who are so much younger than we are. We've increased our spirituality as we have constantly tried to be of service in addition to spending more time studying the gospel. We have made many wonderful friends through this experience. It will be hard to leave. We have come to enjoy the politeness of the Japanses people, the safety that we feel when we have a pocket full of money or make trips alone after dark, and we have felt the love of the Nagamachi ward. In spite of being illiterate in the Japanese language, we've been able to communicate and create wonderful bonds of friendship. We hope you are all doing well and we'll see you soon.