Fall is coming...

 Fall is coming...Kobe is still hanging out in the 90 degrees so we were super excited when we saw some maple trees turning fall colors in the mountains.

The drive up the mountain was super steep with sharp, winding curves.  Believe or not, we saw several cyclist riding up those mountains. Unbelievable! The weren't even pushing their bikes. 😂   We stopped at an overlook sight. One of the bicyclist stopped too. I told him he was a rockstar. I couldn't believe he could ride up those mountains.  He said he was very tired. He was from Kobe and spoke English surprisingly well.  

We found a Buddhist/Shinto temple nestled in those mountains. It was fun to climb up many stairs to discover all the lanterns, statues, and buildings.  We think there was also a monastery on the property.

Saturday, our mission had a mission conference with Elder David A. Bednar from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. It was an amazing opportunity.  He spoke to our mission (72 missionaries) for three hours.  Our missionaries have been reading the Book of Mormon challenge over the past 8 weeks.  I finished reading it just before the conference.  They also studied 5 talks that Elder Bednar has given.  The missionaries were spiritually prepared and the meeting was powerful. Instead of teaching by lecture, he taught by questions and answers. He would ask the questions and the missionaries would give answers. We were told to bring questions to ask the apostle. I wrote my question down but was unable to ask the question. The amazing thing is my question was answered during the conference by what was said and by the power of the Holy Ghost speaking to my heart.

One of the principles he taught us was about prayer.  Prayer shouldn't be a laundry list of every thing we need.  Instead we need to be asking the Lord what he would have us do.  It would be okay to express gratitude to God as well.  We need to stop thinking of prayer as what God needs to do for us. He taught us that we need to ask the Lord what we can do for Him. 🙏