On Nov 22, 2010 Elder Johnson wrote:
Well, I must say that this week was quite the busy week. We had leadership training meetings in morristown for a good chunk of the week, but its all good cuz those trainings lead to miracles. I would love to explain like everything that happened over this last week, but sadly time will not allow everything...so I will basically sum it all up with how crazy yesterday was for us here in Elizabeth. Prolly one of the craziest sundays ever lol.Well it started off fairly normal.... well totally normal actually, just studies and what-not in the morning. And then at 9:30 we were meeting with Adela (a less active from Mexico with 3 lil family members that we're teaching) to walk with her to church... She tried last week and it didn't exactly work out lol...so we made the trip with her. And on our way Hna. Gonzalez drove past us and invited em into her car to drive them the rest of the way. It was super nice, cuz it was fairly cold and it just showed the love and support of the ward, which is perfect for adela right now.
Then we get to church and we're greeting people walking into sacrament meeting, like normal, and everything was fine and dandy. But then a visiting high councilman showed up, which really is no big deal. He actually reminded me of the time in this ward when I was called to speak in sacrament, but then a high councilman showed up and i got the shaft lol... but when I thought of that i was reminded of tuesday. See, on tuesday right after district meeting a member of the bishopric called us and asked if one of the missionaries could give a talk about missionary work in church. We were all reluctant to just jump out and be like "here am I pick me". But once I mentioned that i was going to give a talk before and still had it all written out all the other elders in the ward were like, "Elder Johnson will do it" ...*shrug* what can you do right. The only problem was that i had completely forgotten about the talk until just minutes before sacrament meeting started. I still had the talk that i wrote before, but that was on receiving personal revelation...which isn't exactly missionary work last time I checked =/ ...so I was kinda freakin out on the inside. Then sacrament started... during which I was like literally praying for help lol. I felt bad for having forgotten completely so i repented for that and asked for help. And help i got... I had scriptures come to my mind and ideas just flow and found how to take some of what I had written down and change its application to the ward/missionary work. When the sacrament was finished I was the first speaker and went on up. And according to what i hear it actually went pretty well. And one of the best parts is that I was super able to speak spanish...like sometimes i'll trip over words and just not feel like i can express what i am trying to say very well, but it just all flowed. my companion even said, it seemed very well organized and thought out. ...pretty sweet right... thanks to grace it wasn't a total fail. maybe I should totally forget about talks more often ;P lol
So on top of that we ended up having 6 investigators at church... which i am pretty much positive is a record for me during my whole mission. It was great and they all seemed to really like it. On top of that we had some members who we have been trying to get to come for a while come. One of whom was Marta Rivera's 16 year old daughter Sandra...who is super awesome, but is going through a tough time right now. And i just felt so full of gratitude for the ward members and how they treated her... simply with love and encouragement. It really seemed like it hit the spot with her. She seemed happy and said that she is going to come again next week :) ...it was just the right medicine.After church the madness did not end... a random inactive member down the street made some cheese pastry thing and brought it to us right after church. It was pretty good.... Then it was followed by some crazy lessons...one being with a member who is worried about the father of her children coming back and abusing them all physically. she was near tears explaining the situation and her fear... he has keys and is super violent apparently. So that was super intense to say the least. That followed by teaching a huge family that are all on different religious levels about the Plan of Happiness...which, understandably led to a lot of very good questions. they are super nice too...and gave us some peruvian cake...which in all seriousness neither of us wanted but out of kindness accepted. which was then followed by another lesson that ended with a giant glass of milk, and more pastry/cake stuff (yeah we felt pretty nasty afterwards). then the cherry on top was the Hna. Tepoz who was bent on us having a giant bowl of pig feet...but we explained to her how we had already been fed 2x that day and felt kinda sick. She still didn't let us leave without food and sent us away with apples and oranges.
Just kinda madness the whole day. so many different things going on, but it was all way good! I hope that whole ramble makes sense...I'm short on time so i kinda just took a big breath and started punching keys lol.
Anyways, hope everyone is doing great! Happy Thanksgiving :)
Elder Johnson
