Gomen-nasai ("I'm Sorry")

Hello beloved family! We have had a great week and are getting ready for an even better one that will have the grand finale of a baptism on Saturday! It is going to be an incredibly exciting week!

This past week I have learned about the miracle of forgiveness. I grew up being taught to always forgive (in my case I guess I was more often told to apologize) those that did me wrong. We are commanded by Christ himself to forgive everyone, but I have never really noticed just how hard that really is! Nor have I realized just how important forgiveness is for the eternal progression of the agent and the recipient. Repentance causes one to leave behind the old self in an effort to become someone new and better. Every week we take the sacrament that we may be enabled to do just that, constantly. Being forgiven is being allowed by those around you to change! Can you imagine trying to repent for something you did, but those around you never forgive you and let it go? Imagine the frustration and the barrier that that becomes to you as you try to improve yourself! I think that every single one of us experiences this to a certain degree as we go through life! Everyone has been the one repenting and the one not forgiving! I have felt that recently. I have been out on a mission for more than 20 months now, and have changed a lot. Yet there are still people at home that can see me only as the 19 year old dude I was almost two years ago! There are some missionaries in my mission that I have never met, just hear rumors and stories about. No matter what I do those stories affect the way I see and interact with them in the future. I especially have a tendency to hang on to that for a long time and never fully let it go.

I am sorry for the barrier that I may have become for others and hope that they will forgive me and I am grateful for the wonderful examples I have in my life, of those who forgive freely. I am so grateful for every individual experience in which I have been forgiven and released. I love you! Have a great week :)

Elder Siebach

We got a German-to-Japanese dictionary from one of our investigators. It is useless to us since we don't really speak either of those languages (haha!!), but he thinks it is cool that my companion and I have a bit of German in us!