BEN'S MAILING INFO FOR CHRISTMAS!!

Ben's Street Address for Letters and Cards is:

Elder Benjamin Johnson

125 67th Street, Apt. #1

West New York, NJ 07093 

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Ben's Address for packages is:

Elder Benjamin Johnson

Morristown New Jersey Mission

1719 Route 10 Suite #309

Parsippany, New Jersey 07054

December 14th, 2009
Hello again everyone,

  This week was super busy with zone meeting, a mission conference, a Christmas brunch at the mission home and a Christmas fireside (the 2nd of 2). It was a sweet week though. For the Christmas brunch we had to all make orniments for President and Sister Bahr to put up on their tree that was something unique to the area or comapnionship. We bent a hanger to say WNY and had a red piece of paper say 60-70 behind it. It's kinda hard to explain but i swear it was pretty nifty.... And "the work may be tough, but we're hangin in there" is the catch phrase for the orniment =D Ya if you couldn't tell a cheesy comment such as that was definitely from the mind of yours truly lol.

Mission conference was awesome, so spiritually powerful. We left so ready to go and preach to the world....Zone meeting had basically the same effect as well. It was a really cool pump up week. Maybe it was due to being carried by the motivating meetings but we did an awesome job of finding new investigators this week....well they fell into our laps rather. 6 new investigators in 5 days. It is a personal record for me....not that numbers matter but its just great to see a new flow of people to teach in the area, cuz a lot of the old fogies just need to either get baptized or we need to drop em. So the 6 new investigators are much needed :)

One cool investigator is Julio, the miracle from last week. We taught him again just yesterday. It seems as if we'll be able to go by every sunday at 4 :) ...But we took Hno Escobar who is from El Salvador as well and we had a nice little lesson about the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The only problem with Julio is that he is quiet and not too keen on asking questions from what I can tell....I'll just have to do some work on having him break out of his shell. Which would be like clockwork in english but I'm still a little limited with my spanish skills. I guess we'll see how it ends up working out.

Speaking of spanish skills though.... Elders Taylor and Westover (the Zone Leaders that we live with). Had a baptism on sunday, well 2...it was sweet. But the ward mission leader, who was going to conduct, couldn't make it. So I did. But I had never conducted a meeting before....let alone in a foreign language. It was a bit of an adventure, but i think I pulled it off decently lol. It's kinda crazy to think that I was simply able to do so in spanish when months ago I hardly knew anything at all.

So random lil tid bit, I got this cool granola recipie and i've been experimenting with that lately....its actually way good. I hardly follow the one I was given (it was like candy cuz it had so much sugar, brown sugar, maple syrup and honey) but I'm really likin some of the stuff I've been able to come up with =D

There were a couple of Returned Sister Missionaries that came to visit this week....It was kinda weird to see the one I kinda knew in normal clothes first off lol....but also seems like so much fun to visit your old friends from old areas. It is for sure something i'd love to do with my parents when the time finally comes. We had a nice little party at a members house while they were in town :) ....food is always a winner.

It's crazy to think that Christmas is just right around the corner. It is especially crazy because it's not exactly like we're going into stores everyday hearing Christmas music playing and seeing all the decorations. I swear it still feels like its mid summer and i just left. Time is just slipping right on by though.

Sadly nothing too crazy happened this week....its been nice and cold. Like 20-30's with a nasty wind. My face just like freezes, goes numb and then walking around isn't too bad lol.

Anyways love you all and hope your having a great holiday season!

Love,
Elder Johnson