21 October 2013

Waiting for transfer calls last night was really annoying.

It all started at the Mission President's Fireside (MPF). We were asked to translate but all the receivers were out of batteries so we drove to the mission office to get some more.

On the way there I found out I had been "red lighted," meaning my driving privileges have been permanently revoked. 

Which is ridiculous since I haven't driven since I was put on the temporary suspension. There's something wrong with the system and I'll get to the bottom of this! There was a bug when I got yellow lighted and there's no doubt a bug since I got red lighted really and truly and honestly for doing nothing since I haven't driven for two weeks.

Buuuut anyway.

Translating was fun. I always leave with a headache and confused about what the person spoke on since I'm not really listening, just listening, if you know what I mean.

So after the MPF ended we headed home. Transfer calls, for leadership, come usually between 9-10 and the Assistants call the Zone Leaders between 10-10:30 to say which zone members are going then the Zone Leaders call the District Leaders who call their stewardship and spread the news.

From 9-9:15 we planned, 9:30-10 we did zone stats. Still hadn't heard anything.

We sat and waited.

At 10:45 we still hadn't heard anything.

At 11:15 we still hadn't heard anything.

At 11:30 we still hadn't heard anything.

At 11:45 pm they finally called. I've never waited so long! 

So the news? I'm staying. This'll be the longest I've ever stayed in a single area. I was in Yuma for six months but covered different "areas" or wards or parts of a ward. In 6 weeks I'll have been in these wards for 4.5 months. I'm ok with that, they're both doing really well right now. 

One of the cool things we did this past week was meeting some Jehovah's Witnesses. We taught them a lesson (they probably think they taught us too now that I think about it) and set up a return appointment. We prepared for that return appointment carefully knowing that if their attitude and our attitude wasn't just right it would clash.

I started it off with, "We are different, we all know that, so lets focus on what we agree on for this time!" 

That lasted for ten minutes until we talked about priesthood authority and then the response you here every time it goes in the direction they don't want it to go, "So, do you know God's name?"

The lesson went downhill from there. We accepted a copy of the watchtower but he refused to take a Book of Mormon. He would not pray with us either. To this date I've only ever gotten one Jehovah's Witness to pray for/with me.

I think I shocked him with how much of their doctrine I knew. I learned a lot (about and from them) in Queen Creek. 

Revelation of the week: Apostate and apostrophe are very similar words.

Mesa is getting decorated for halloween. I guess I've never really thought about Halloween before. There are a couple of apartments nearby that went all out. We're talking decapitated heads, knives, corpses, body parts all over the place. It's disgusting. I realized that Halloween can get way out of hand really quickly. I like the candy side of it though.

We are still waiting for the mission policy for what to do on Halloween. Last Halloween we sat inside a church for 9 hours and read from the New Testament. It was pretty fun. 

We had THE funniest dinner this past week. 

Oh, to preface all of that, we moved this week. Our new address is 949 S Longmore St #177, Mesa AZ 85202. It is down the street from the last one.

Our new apartment isn't 10 years old and is a lot smaller. We sleep in bunk beds in the living room and use the two bedrooms between the four of us to study in.

The day after we moved (which took until 1pm...) Elder Gaspar got sick. At Sister Toone's request he stayed inside and slept. We worked until lunch time. I took spanish study on my own and then realized I couldn't do "internet proselyting hour" since he wasn't able to watch my screen. Then I realized our area book was in the car and that I couldn't leave to get it alone. So I went to work cleaning up from the move. 

Mom, I know what it was like to have to have dealt with me growing up. I'm always the one cleaning dishes and picking up trash.

So I unpacked everything into the kitchen. Set up the bathrooms and beds. Cleaned our room of the trash from moving, put things on the walls, and set up my desk. I had everything nicely organized. Eventually our roommates showed up and I sent them to the car to get the area book. For the next two or so hours I entered the teaching records into the iPad to "digitize" that information. 

Then I played spanish Jenga all by myself. That wasn't fun.

Then I wrote in my journal.

Then I cleaned some more. 

Then our roomamtes came back and offered to send me to the dinner appointment with one of them while the other prepared to pack and go home.

I jumped on that invitation and finally was able tog et out of that apartment. Dinner was in a retirement community. The average age must have been at least 80. Everyone wore name tags because everyone forgot each others names.

As we sat outside of the cafe we saw dozens and dozens of elderly people walk in and out. We sat in a tabled area and a bunch of women in their late 80s came over and started gossiping about George Clooney and other people. I felt very out of place. We sat and listened and I was dying of laughter inside. It was the most cliche thing in the world.

Finally we got inside for our dinner. The food was nice. As we sat down with the woman who invited us, someone else, a less active member of the church in her late 80s, joined us. Her daughter was serving a mission in Tennessee. The missionary I was on the exchange with was in his first six weeks. So naturally I offered for him to write her. She got so excited, got up, and ran to her apartment to bring back some pictures for him. Turns out she was Miss Utah at some point and she got so excited about the idea of him writing her. 

So basically I'm a matchmaker. 

It turned out to be one of the funnier dinners of my mission.

This week I learned one of my friends at BYU was in the same stake and is close friends with one of the sister missionaries in the Mesa zone. Small world!

The highlight of this past week was being able to go back to Gilbert zone for a baptism of someone I taught in the Ray 5th ward. 

This was one of the most special baptisms of my mission. Why? This is why:

When I got transferred out of Queen Creek I was told I was going to train. So I picked up my companion, Elder Diaz from Argentina, and we got straight to work. We saw many miracles and I think he taught me more than I taught him. 

We "whitewashed" in, meaning we were both new to the area. We spent many hours that first week reading in the area book about the names of people the missionaries before had taught. One name in particular stuck out to me. I felt very strongly that we needed to visit her. I pulled the record out and wrote myself a note to visit her.

Turns out this person had been taught by Elder Myler, my MTC companion and close friend, in his first weeks in the mission field. Cool!

Soon after we were told we were moving. In the move both the record and the note were misplaced. Four weeks later it showed up and we went to visit her.

She was awesome. The teaching experience with her was one that has helped me and one that I continually look back on for what we as missionaries can do to help find and solve concerns. 

When I was transferred out of Gilbert she was on date to get baptized. Due to some unforseen problems that didn't happen.

However last week I heard the news that she was back on date to get baptized. I made arrangements to get there and called and told Elder Myler. He went as well. 

This picture has all the missionaries that taught her in it. It was an awesome day. There were over 14 missionaries there to support her and like always the Ray 5th ward showed up in huge numbers. It was so awesome to see all those members again. I really connected with them and love them all.

There was a very special spirit at that baptismal service and it was one of the moments I hope I look back on forever. The seed of faith was planted and harvested. It may have taken over a year and an 8 month "break" but it happened!

This past week was the culmination of much coordination and effort for some people I'm teaching on Facebook! Someone I'm teaching in London AND Pakistan were able to go to church and make contact with the local missionaries! They LOVED church! 

Elder Gaspar and I are also on special assignment to literally teach an entire congregation in Mexico that wants to get baptized. Another set of missionaries here helped a woman there meet with missionaries and get baptized into the local congregation in Mexico. She has been helping many many people prepare for baptism. Last night President Toone extended to us the assignment to teach and help them prepare for baptism.

Pressure.

MIRACLES! 

We set personal records for number of people at church yesterday. We had 13 people  between our two wards and three at church overseas. So cool.

MIRACLES!

Another really cool experience I had this past week was during my personal studies. I was sitting there thinking about what we could do to help the wards missionary efforts be more focused as well as the stakes. The idea came to help the stake create a stake mission plan. Then I thought about the power that would exist if wards organized their ward mission plans along the keys of the stake president and the stake mission plan. And then if the families used the ward mission plans to make family mission plans! 

We are going to be delivering a copy of the ward mission plans to every dinner we attend.

The following day I was reading an Ensign from 2007 and stumbled upon an article addressing that very idea. It gave clarification to my idea and helped us to refine it so it could be presented. That was cool in and of itself. I had never heard of stake mission plans before and using it in wards and the ward plan  in families.

We met with the stake presidents in the two stakes that our zone covers and presented the ideas to them. They loved it. They got so excited. They have committed to using a "large majority of our stake council time" to forming and creating the plan.

The work is moving forward.

Anyway, thank you all for your support! Love you all! 

Elder Johnson

22 October 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

It's starting to cool down! It's only 70 degrees out right now - heavenly. 

Yuma is basically an active war zone. (They were landing helicopters in a field for some reason - blackhawks - and had tight tight tight security. For some reason they chose the field right outside and adjacent the "gentlemens club.") 

The Yuma stake was split for the first time ever two nights ago. There was a big meeting and for some reason they gave out maps of the new boundaries beforehand. Lots of people left early. There were many upset people but for the most part it was pretty good. We will be losing three investigators due to boundary changes in wards. We now will cover every ward in the 18th street building instead of 2 there and 1 i the 16th street building. 

I've been asked for more details on who we are teaching and their progress. I'm not supposed to give names for legal and safety reasons so I'll just say this: we are teaching four people right now and all four of them are on date to be baptized. One is being baptized this Thursday. He is an awesome guy who has read the entire Book of Mormon in 4 weeks. He will teach us some things, not necessarily new things, but he understands everything. He is pretty nervous about being baptized. This is the guy who laughs when I butcher words in Spanish which is most of the time. 

The other one is one we "OYM'd" into (spoke to random people on the street, Open Your Mouth). Usually these are less productive ways to find people. But he was excited and invited us over. His biggest struggle is doubting himself and quitting drinking. He had no problem with coffee and tea. He gets answers to his prayers evidenced to how excited he is after he prays and how he gets "goose bumps everywhere!" After this last prayer, he said, "guys, I'm so happy I want to tell you a joke! I almost prayed that God would help my Yankees but they got eliminated yesterday haha!"  He is a very genuine person. He was at church yesterday and the people started talking super deep doctrine. Gahhhhh. Last chapters of Gospel Principles aren't good for new investigators. 

The other is an English person we are teaching. She struggles with her addiction to smoking but has two very good friends in the Church who help her and motivate her. She has gone through more than anyone I've ever met. But she is excited and ready for the first week of November.

Last is one who can be baptized into the Young Single Adult branch/congregation. He is somewhat interested but we are hoping that picks up a bit.

Another is in a part member family. We teach him at his father/mother-in-laws house. When we teach, EVERYONE comes over. Everyone equals about 15 people. Those are the biggest lessons I think I'll teach for a awhile. It has been fun teaching them (we lose him due to the boundary changes) because the whole family joins in in the reading assignments. They all text each other to make sure they're doing it. Good family. 

I've also been asked how I am marking my scriptures. Hopefully the attached pictures make sense. Mom, this would be a good place to insert those pictures, in this area so my "captions" will explain. 

 The topics you see (five sections) are the five lessons in Preach my Gospel. Each other thing is a subsection. I drew lines down the top and bottom of my scriptures in which place I put little stickers, folded over the top. This allows me to find scriptures really quickly. Lets say I'm looking for a scripture about the Book of Mormon. I'll open to that first page of my quad, see my legend, follow the line of "Book of Mormon" topic and end up in whatever scripture I want that prophesies about it. Hopefully that makes sense...kind of hard to explain.

I'll send some district pictures in a minute. It has everyone but Elder Proskine who went home that morning. He was so trunky haha. The pictures are pretty bad since we put everyone's camera on a chair with a timer and ran to get in front... maybe you can crop them a bit.

I think night time crop dusting is my favorite thing to watch. Crop dusting pilots during the day are already awesome but seeing them fly around at night is insane. They get very low in fields surrounded by telephone wires. I can't stop looking at them.

For some reason all the Mexican families did a vegan week this week. Usually we got a lot of meat for dinners but this week was all vegetables. A couple of the families' fathers were complaining about the lack of meat. From what I understand, the healthclasses were offering extra credit for people to try a vegan diet for a week. 

We didn't do habaneros last week. The Sisters got "sick" from that heavenly spaghetti dinner. We're doing it today with the whole zone. It's a BYOH - bring your own habanero. Next week we're doing the Buffalo hot wings challenge. I'm going to regret all of this. 

Is has also been kind of entertaining to watch the tension between Spanish missionaries and English missionaries. The two "groups" tend to not get along. Not entirely sure why other than pride but it's a good laugh. Our zone leaders are actually a "zebra companionship" which means one of them is English and one is called Spanish. Finding people is very different between English and Spanish missionaries. English missionaries tend to get a lot of help from members so they don't spend much time tracting. Generally, Spanish missionaries get lots of food from members but that's about it . The two are trying to figure out a way to find common ground. We'll see how things go.

We run into a problem down here that I wouldn't really expect to find anywhere else. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone goes to Mexico for the weekend. As such, we'll teach a really good investigator and then he'll just disappear to Mexico for three days. You would think they would just live there... We have one investigator who goes to Church down there and lives here that we have been teaching. Apparently the missionaries in San Luis Mexico have been trying to baptize him and steal him from us. We called President Howes to ask what we should do. He said that since he lives here, his Branch President has the keys for the area (geographical) and that he should be baptized here and try to make it to Church here at least once a month and the other 3x in Mexico. He said that the San Luis Mexico missionaries were practicing, "bad form." It was pretty hilarious. There is a lot of rivalry between the Mexican missionaries and us here in Yuma over who gets to baptize who. There shouldn't be but there is. "Poaching" (teaching people outside our boundaries) is just hilarious as whole. Apparently the Mesa and Phoenix missionaries have been found driving 1 mile into our mission. You are never supposed to leave mission boundaries.

Our Spanish branch does a missionary activity once a month where less active members and investigators come to learn. They asked us (Sisters and us) to put on a skit this week for them lasting about 20 mins. We spent probably 3-4 hours planning it before we realized how much time we were doing. So we scrapped the skit and thought we would save a lot of time by doing a sort of choose-your-own-adventure thing to demonstrate how little decisions make big impacts at the end of the day. Naturally, we decided to scrap the skit the day before we were supposed to do it. We ran  out of time to work on it with the Sisters so Sawyer and I said we would put it together ourselves. We didn't think it would take a lot of time. Little did we know.... At 8:30 that night we decided to go out to a gas station and pick up something to help us stay awake. 5 hours later at 2 we were done. The next day was horrriiibbbbllleeeee. The activity went pretty well though. A staggering four people showed up other than us - all active members. Yeah, we're not doing that again.

We went on base this week to pick up someone. It's called "MCAS" standing for, if I remember, Marine Corp Air Station. They have a lot of Ospreys, T-38s, Harriers, Blackhawks, Cobras etc. I got a pretty poor picture of a harrier landing as we were driving up. I was telling Sawyer that I would be perfectly ok if we just spent all day taking pictures. But alas, that's not why we're here...

I've got a sick watch tan. Puts everyone else's to shame.

I heard Mark got glasses? Haha, I can't wait to see pictures of that.

We had a really cool experience at a lesson this week. One of our investigators has been struggling to make that commitment towards baptism so we planned what we thought would be a great lesson to address all his concerns. As we sat down with him and gave the opening prayer, I felt as if we should teach on temples and eternal families instead. We did. At the end of the lesson, he had accepted a baptismal date and was excited. It is always great to have experiences like these where the spirit directs the lesson in a totally different way than you planned or even wanted. That lesson was also greatly helped by a letter I received earlier that day. I won't say who it was from except in the response to it later today, but sharing your story honestly was exactly what he needed to hear too. After the story (I didn't read it, just paraphrased), he said, "I can totally relate to that. It sounds like me." I hope it was ok that I did that but I think it wasn't just luck that your letter got here literally 10 minutes before we went to the lesson. Thank you.

We had some really interesting food this week. Not weird, just interesting. The one that comes to mind now was potatoes wrapped in a tortilla, deep fried, drowned in Mexican dry cheese (worst cheese on earth) and who-knows-what-else. I've found that the trick to tricky food is to put lots of hot sauce on it. And since Mexicans put hot sauce on everything, finding it on the table isn't a challenge.

So I have these gummy vitamin things that I take in the mornings. I took two, one day this week and then Elder Sawyer did something to make me laugh. I did it too and felt my nose start to burn. Finding gummy bear vitamins in your nose isn't a pleasant feeling. He was dying of laughter, I was dying of pain. 

I found my favorite line in all of scripture. We were reading out of the Spanish Book of Mormon in Alma chapter 5 and we found this golden gem. In verse 26, it says, "Habeis sentido el deseo de cantar la cancion del amor." That basically means, 'have you felt the desire to sing the song of love?' I can't remember the context but we both just lost it. We told some of the young men to use it since it will for sure get them a second date.

I don't know if I've mentioned it or not, but polyester ties are HUGE in the tempe mission. They call them "proselyting polies" and use silks only for important meetings. Psh. Those ties went out of style for a reason. I'm one of two in Yuma that wears silks. Elders down here use polies since they can be washed. I just don't get my ties dirty... There are some absolutely hideous ties. Brands like platypus and lumberjack are big.

I had a realization this week. Well, one of a few. But we were walking around talking to people and I started to think of excuses not to talk to some sketchy people. A thought, or rather lyric of a hymn, popped into my head. "Who am I to judge another." I can't remember the rest of that line but it applies haha. It's something like don't judge others when I too am imperfect. 

We had a woman come up to us this week and say, "will you baptize my daughter?" That's any missionaries dream moment right there. We have been teaching her and getting her ready for baptism. The mother  likes to yell at her daughter during the lessons when she isn't paying 100% attention. Her daughters are 9 and 11. Super distracting. Anyway, it's an uphill battle every time the mother is there. We were going to push a baptismal date for the 2nd week of November but then due to the ward changes, we lost them to another set of elders. We are the only missionaries who lost investigators to the boundary changes...

We also had a woman say, "I'm dying soon so come by some time. I need to go sell some 'stuff' now though so probably next week." That was an interesting one. She was ~60 year old woman who you could tell was doing some strong drugs.

Our district is going to invest in some cheap hockey sticks this week to play during P-Days at the church. Hopefully I can find some space the budget to make it happen. Sawyer plays hockey as well.

Chil de Arbols are death. Death. Never again. I really do think the members here give us hot foods just because they enjoy watching me suffer haha. That's ok though, member trust, right? 

I've also started to pray differently for our investigators. Instead of asking for them to get an answer, we are now asking for them to be able to recognize the answer they get. Two very different things. Anyone can feel good but it is harder to recognize that as an answer to a prayer assuming that feeling comes in relation to a prayer. As soon as we started doing that, our investigators started progressing much quicker. It is intriguing to teach and then apply the principle to ask for specific things during prayers. It really does make a difference.

Alex, there is an Israeli here! I told her about you.

I've started to dream in spanish. You'd think that'sm a good thing, right? Well it's worrisome because I can't even understand what I am saying in my own dreams let alone those around me haha.

The Police department has started posting cop cars in our apartment complex 24/7 for the last couple of days. Something's going down!

How do helicopters fly upside down?

Thank you so much for the letters this week John, Mom, Eric, Annie, Doug, Katie and Sister Hines. They mean a lot! John, I'm writing you back at your work address (return address) so I hope that works.

Con amor,

Elder Johnson