Hey,
Just a heads up, this was probably the most eventful week of my mission. I will have a lot of stories from it. This won't be super organized or edited because I'm short on time, but I want to fit it all in.
I'll just tell you about the little things first. We got a text today that we will have interviews with President and piso cleaning checks tomorrow morning. So that's stressful. I haven't seen anything in the mail yet. Should I watch for it here or at zone conference? I can't believe I'm already at 30%. It's basically 1% per week, that makes it seem so fast. All of the stuff that you think I don't care about, I generally love. I forget about a lot of things so it's nice to be reminded that the real world is still happening. I'm glad the talk went well in church. And don't worry, I will make sure to kill it with the island photos. I'll win that competition.
I don't know if you guys heard anything about the islands this week, but we had some massive storms. We got a call from the zone leaders Saturday and they told us we couldn't leave piso on Sunday (maybe more) and all church meetings were canceled. It was insane. So we had to go out and put together a 72 hour kit and prepare to be in piso for a few days. That sucked. I uploaded some videos to the drive. It was insane how much water came down. It was hard to keep busy, and even harder to keep focused being in piso that long. But it was quite the adventure.
Our ward had another baptism this week! It's a ton of fun being a part of this ward and seeing the progress. Jonathan, our recent convert, is in the Sunday school presidency now. He is really involved in all of the ward activities and his son is thinking about a mission. The investigator that was baptized on wednesday was only found by the hermanas a little over a month ago, but people thought she was a member already because she has been so involved in everything. It was a chaotic baptism though. It was supposed to be at 7, so we started filling the font around 4. But her 3 year old daughter pulled the plug about an hour before we started. By the time we noticed we only had about 15 minutes to fill it. We grabbed bowls and pots from the kitchen and started filling them up in the bathroom and dumping them in the font, then we grabbed the hose from outside and put it through the window into the font, and the hermanas boiled water to warm it up. It was crazy, but it worked. We were able to start on time, but the water was really really cold. Cold enough she screamed a little when she went under. But it was still nice and the spirit was strong. Baptisms are so inspiring.
That was our first day with the new district. I don't think things will slow down this transfer. Our district is still super young and motivated. So far we are keeping up the numbers and seeing the miracles. It's weird seeing everyone from the CCM. It brings back a lot of memories. We started something else that brings back memories this week. We are going to be playing soccer every Saturday now. We played for the first time this week and it was amazing. I miss it so much.
OK, so that was Saturday morning that we played soccer. But I wanted to tell you about a lesson we had later that afternoon. It was just amazing. It started out like most lessons. He believes in God, butchurches are evil and he's never changing. We didn't have any preparation for the lesson because it was kind of a surprise, so we were just very blunt with him. I just said "look, if that's how you feel that's fine. But if you really believe in God, you have to believe he loves you. And if that's the case how can he bless you without a church?" then elder Tiebing shared the first vision. And at that point the spirit was SO strong. It was amazing. So we had a few seconds of silence and then he just burst out bawling. Once he calmed down a little he explained a little about what was going on in his life. Let's just say it's not always easy. But the spirit always knows what we need, and it that lesson what he needed was love. I don't know that I was as loving or patient as I could have been, but the spirit hit him hard. He described it as all the love from his parents, grandparents, friends, us, all at the same time. It's something I knew before, but in that lesson I re-learned why I'm here and what I'm doing. I don't know if I described it well, it's always hard in these emails when I'm typing so fast. But that feeling is what it's all about. God really loves us, and he has given us so much. I love this gospel. I love being able to share it and experience these things. I just wanted to share that little story with you to close my email.
Love you guys,
Elder Johnson
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