2/20/2012

This week we have been doing a lot of walking and visiting members. Some interesting things have come up in are lessons though.

As I said earlier we have been doing some tracting, people here react a lot differently then what I expected. In the US if a person is not interested in hearing your message they will say it. For some reason that is still strange to me, some people will just lie, por ejemplo we were trying to visit a person we had given a lesson to before but had not seemed too interested. We came back and her husband was there and told us that he was there by himself waiting for a telephone call. Right after that his son came out of his room and came to the door to say hello. He got really stiff and nervous like we had just caught him doing something really bad. I don't understand, maybe there conscience gets pricked or something.
A excellent experience we had was with Ana Marie. We decided to teach her about temples and doing work for dead family members, this is normally a lesson that the ward missionaries teach. But we felt impressed to teach it. This was also my first time teaching this principle. First we asked if she had been reading and praying about the Book of Mormon and about Joseph Smith. She said yes and we asked if she had received an answer. She told us of how she felt a lot more calm and peace in her life since she has started to do these things and said that she took this to be a YES!. It was amazing feeling knowing that an investigator has demonstrated the faith and received an answer. Whats also amazing is that she started to express how she wanted to quit drinking coffee, this is even before we had taught her the Word of Wisdom. The lesson just got better from there. I was teaching her about how important it is to do family history work when I felt something tell that I should testify of the blessings my family has received from doing family history work. After I said that though I thought to myself "why did I say that?" After our lesson she said that when I testified she felt that doing family history work is important and is going to the classes to learn about how to start. Best lesson ever.

We also have a new investigator who came to church named Brenda her husband is a less active member and she asked and we gave her a blessing. She has a lot of questions so I look forward to teaching her again.

Love Elder Micah Johnson

Dad- Tell the Southwick's congrats! Keep giving me updates on them. I wont be able to see there fare wells but I will be there for there homecomings. Yo memrizo cuando Jose smith tiene vision con Dios y jesucristo. verses 16 and 17. sorry I don't know how to do the accent marks on this computer.

Grandma and Grandpa-thanks for your email! Sounds like snow was in short supply this year. People complain that its cold here but it feels pretty warm to me. Jazz need to rev up there game it sound like. I think about you guys too and am grateful for the emails

Thank you for all the prays and support everybody

Last Sunday we had a interesting experience. At church its really common for people to just come into the church walking off the street, this one guy we met named Israel just decided to come over and he had never even met the missionaries before. We sat with him and talked for a bit. His family had been taking lessons from the Jehovah Witnesses but he said he did not like their views about God and their other religious practices. We went and taught their family about the restoration. They were all listening very well. When talking about the great apostasy I talked about how they had in their house 3 different bibles with different wording and told of how people started to interpret it differently. We had to close pretty fast though because...Jehovah witness came and had an appointment with them. We invited them to read and pray about the book of Mormon. We scheduled a lesson for next Saturday and left. When they showed up though they did not look pleased to see us. oh well. We will see what happens. But I have high hopes for them.

Elder Mayo and his companion also baptized this week which was cool to see.

This week we have also received excellent references of people that want to be baptized. One named Kathy who is the daughter of a former bishop who is now inactive really wants to get baptized so we are going to have a lesson with her later.

A key indicator we have is lessons with members. For the most part having a member there can make the lesson 10 times better. But I learned this week that we need to be very careful in who you invite. One of our investigator is named Anna Maria, we brought her next door neighbor who was a member but she started going off on how other churches were bad and evil. She also kept cutting us off and binging up topics that we did not want to get into. I have to admit during the whole time I wanted to tell her to be quiet. Luckily by the end she had become silent and we were able to testify with the spirit.

Are other investigator Elvieta did not feel good enough to come to church, la gripe, the flu. I hope next week she feels better and will come to church.

Love Elder Johnson

This maybe a bit random but I find it interesting how when I tell some people I'm from Utah they say"oh so Mexico" I say "no Uta- ah yes Mexico". This Friday is a zone conference so I expect some letters then. Yeah I have gotten better with conjugating. Right now I just get frustrated with the boot verbs or the irregular. Tell me in the next email the Southwicks mission calls, okay? 

Lydia-we teach so many people that I am having trouble keeping track, my companion is really nice. He is very caring and is very cool. I love you too.

Me and Elder Guevara are keeping our apartment a lot cleaner now. It easier and helps us do the things we need to do. I feel better with the language, but I have some days were I am doing really good and other days were I don't do to good. With some people its easy for me to talk with them and understand them. If its somebody new I usually have problems. But I am always getting better each day. We mostly have done service by helping people move from different houses and little random acts of service by helping people who get their cars stuck. I'm very happy here

This week has been what I would call the Refiners Fire. Me and Elder Guevara feel like we got slapped. But in a good sort of "wake up!" sort of way. First the AP came, Elder Smith and Morales. It was a big surprise for me and my companion. They took a quick look around are apartment and chastised us about how the place was a mess and the spirit wasn't here. We went around for the next hour directing about what needed to be clean and where things needed to be. I´ll be honest 95% of the stuff around the house belonged to Elder Guevara but I could have helped clean up a lot more before by putting his stuff away. The APs also told me that I should help to organize his stuff and that I need to get a part in my hair. That specifically is not a rule the president requires but the old president did. But because they are my APs I'm going to start doing it. This has proven to be more difficult, my hair does not like to do the things I want :) but I will keep trying.

The next day we had an area conference with the president we did some practices, but the defining moment was when he showed us a graph of how our key indicators were all going down especially baptism for the past 6 months. Our district only baptized one and that was the Zone Leaders. We have received a new key indicator, contacts, we need to contact 15 people daily. Hopefully this will help

We also had exchanges that day. I was with the leader of our zone, Elder Wilkinson in my area. He came in our house too and was a bit annoyed at how messy the stuff was. He gave me some tips on how to learn the language better. Later that night I woke up to him talking in his sleep...in Spanish. cool.But what he told me I think he is a little crazy with the Spanish, he said he use to wake up at 4 to practice and study Spanish. So he only got 5 1/2 hours of sleep. When the president found out he quickly put a stop to that.
That same night however we had to go with the president to the hospital. He was surprised to see me, and I think he wished that Elder Guevara was there. Guevara was in the offices as a secretary so they are pretty close. Anyway the reason we went to the hospital was because his daughter had a weird growing lump which might be cancer, that's what it sounds like I could be wrong, they didn't explain it well. But I got to help out in giving her a priesthood blessing with the president and Elder Wilkinson which was very powerful, the spirit filled the room.

The next day we cleaned out our house and now it looks spotless. Me and Elder Guevara have a goal now to keep it clean. He is worried a lot lately about the lack of results and is now putting forth more effort to obey all the rules for which I am extremely grateful for.

This week none of are investigators came to church, this surprised me since the day before we had taught Yohida, Cindy and Guadalupe (family of 3) about the importance of attending church and did it with powerful testimony. Free agency.

Now with the new month approaching me and Elder Guevara have become regenerated and ready to get those baptisms.