Welcome Home Elder!

 Last Mission leadership conference.

Returning missionaries with Pres. and Sister Sekiguchi.

 Elder Wilson, Elder Mitchell, Sister Pound, Elder Pound, 

Elder Bown, Elder Hubner

 Elder Mitchell with President and Sister Sekiguchi 

in front of the mission home. 

The Elders at the train station in Sendai.

They took the bullet train to Tokyo.

one last photo with Sister Sekiguchi.

After living through roughly 40 hours of January 4, 2019, Elder Mitchell 

arrived at SEA-TAC airport safe and sound! His family (and some close friends) 

were waiting anxiously at the airport for his arrival.

 Mom gets the first hug.

 Dad gets the second one. 

 First stop on the way home. . .Subway!

 Mom's delicious cinnamon rolls for dessert.

 Celebrating Christmas with the family.

Ben got Go-Karting gift cards from PGP in his stocking.

 So off they went the next day after family pictures!

 Family pictures at Point Defiance Park courtesy of Rick Huff.

Ben brought home a brick of curry to introduce the family to Japanese curry.  

It was really good! After two whirlwind days at home, Ben headed off to BYU 

Provo to start the next chapter. . .

Week 106

Hello everyone,

This is my last day to send emails as a missionary. My feelings are a little bit mixed as I look back on the last two years. I'm really excited to see my family again, give them all hugs, and go go-karting with my little brother. I'm glad that I will be able to go to BYU with my little sister and one of our cousins. I will not miss having all of my meal times restricted to 30 or 60 minutes. I look forward to being able to afford fresh fruit other than bananas. I will appreciate being able to easily understand the talks and lessons that happen at church. And I will really enjoy being able to listen to whatever kind of music suits my fancy.

There are things that I will miss too. I will miss having time gauranteed during the day to exercise and study the gospel. I will miss having the opportunity to teach people about Jesus Christ and how his church has been restored to the earth. I will miss testifying about living prophets and God's plan of happiness. There are several friends that I've made here in Japan that I hope to have the opportunity to meet at some point after the mission. I will also miss having a day of the week set aside to go shopping and communicate with my family. But I don't plan to feel to bad about all the things that I miss. I know that I can't progress as a missionary forever.

There are other things that I need to learn and do after the mission and I'm excited to focus on those. I'm really looking forward to starting a family and teaching my children to live the way that Jesus did. I've felt God's influence more times than I've cared to count as a missionary and I know that we are all his children. He has plans for all of us and wants us all to be happy. He gave us a way to find joy in this life and in the life to come. I encourage everyone to learn all they can about Jesus Christ and his role as our Savior. His true church is here on the earth. And it's led by a living prophet as it was in Bible and Book of Mormon times. I testify that these things are true.

Lots of love,
Elder Mitchell

P.S. This gif is of the last training I gave at district meeting. It was about death. I thought it was pretty good. :)

Week 105

Merry Christmas!!!!!

Today was pretty busy with a video call to my family and district pday. We played ping-pong in the morning and went to the senior couples' apartment for a Christmas lunch in the afternoon. Then we played games (some of which will be very good for dating in a couple weeks :)) and went grocery shopping. I love my family so much. I haven't seen them in so long and I can't wait to see them in real life in a week and a half.

I love the Christmas season. I love that we still celebrate the birth of our Savior 2000 years after he lived on the earth. He and our Heavenly Father love us so much that Jesus came to the earth to give us the opportunity to follow him and receive eternal life. Some people get a little side-tracked on presents and stuff like that, but please remember the reason for Christmas and serve someone.

Merry Christmas!!!!!
Elder Mitchell

Week 104

Hello everyone,

I'm basically dead. I have two more weeks as a missionary. The time has really gone fast and I'm working hard to make the rest of my time count. If any of you have forgotten what the life of a missionary entails, it goes something like this: wake up at 6:30 and try to exercise for a little bit. After that it's time to eat breakfast and get ready for the day. We study and plan until 10:00am and then go fulfill any appointments we had for the morning and introduce ourselves to as many people as we can. The hope with the introductions is that we'll find people willing to listen to our church's unique message and have interest in learning more. Then we have lunch and study for another couple hours. Then we go back out into the world to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with everyone. If we don't have any appointments then we're searching for new people to teach. And then we come back for dinner. Lately dinner has been at eight because people don't really like it too much when we knock on their doors after that. Curfew is at nine. And lights out is at ten thirty. There's sometimes a little bit of other drama. We have district meetings once a week and zone conference every six weeks. Sometimes we decide that it's a good idea to go to another area and work with other missionaries so that we can learn from each other. We also have interviews with our mission president every other transfer, and sometimes we have mission conferences like we did for Christmas a couple weeks ago. I think that's about it. I guess we have church every Sunday. We're supposed to go to that... :)

Some thoughts that I have: A mission is exactly two years. Sometimes people have reasons to go home early, and in rare cases missionaries can stay for an extra transfer or two, but it's a very well defined period of time. And time waits for no one. Some similar activities are school, careers, going on a run, and eating a pizza. It doesn't matter how much effort you spend on making them last, how much you try to enjoy it, or how much you try to do other things at the same time, they will come to an end. And at that point all you can do is move forward. We have to make the most of the time we have now. I'm not sure if that's sad but it's definitely true.

Here's a short miracle that my companion and I saw this week! We had a goal of finding three new people who we could visit again and teach about the church and we were stuck at one all the way until Sunday night with a few hours left. We knew that we needed to find two more people so we found a huge line of apartments inhabited mostly by graduate students at a nearby college and started knocking on their doors. For some reason we had several contacts that were very high quality, but none of them would let us come back and talk again. We got down to the last hour and had a 40 minute walk back to the apartment in the snow. We thought about leaving and just trying to talk to people on the street, but we decided to stay and do one last building. One of the first doors was a super nice college kid that we taught about the restoration and got a preferred return visit time! About five doors later we talked to a college girl that also had interest in hearing more! We ended up being late because of how long we spent talking to people in that apartment building and made our goal for the week!! We said a prayer of thanks to Heavenly Father and then walked home.

Lots of love!
Elder Mitchell

P.S. I got bullied into dressing up like Santa Claus.