This has been an eventful week. It is definitely moving past the awkard "i don't know where I am" phase of a new area. I have everything plugged into my gps which is always highly useful. I don't know if I told you all that I got a gps. I got like a year ago and it has proved to be amazing. What I do is I plug everybody's address in the ward list into the favorites. And then I take all the former investigators, potential investigators, and current investigators and plug them in as favorites. So that way whenever all your plans and your back up plans fall through you can just pull up the list on my gps and tells you who is close to your current position. I don't know if that makes ANY since at all, but it sufficeth me to say, it rocks.
Anyways we made a lot of progress with our investigators this week. First I'll tell you about Serina. So last couple weeks Serina has been off the map because she suffers from extreme anxiety especially around large groups of people she doesn't know. So you can imagine that it would be pretty tough to go to church for her. Well we tried to stop by the other day and Serina's mom just happened to come by at that same time. Now Serina's mom happens to be of a different faith and is incredibly anti mormon. The first thing she said to us is, "I wish you guys would stop coming by. My daughter doesn't want to be part of a cult." When she said the word cult, her she crinkled her nose in disgust. We then proceeded to get into the best "bible bash" of my mission. I don't normally like bible bashing but I have now grown to love it. haha ok not really. Really what we were doing was testifying. She would feed us anti and we would testify boldly against it. She brought up some really crazy stuff like how she heard we behead people when they get excommunicated. We were like ?????? Anyways we were kinda sad because we were pretty sure that Serina had heard us "testifying" and we thought that she might not want to meet with us anymore because her mom is so anti. We were very pleasantly surprised however the next time we came over because she let us right in and she appologized for her mother's sake. Her mother probably won't change any time soon but the fact that she is anti mormon actually had the opposite effect on Serina. Now she is extremely interested in learning about the gospel. We invited her to come to church with us and she could sit in the back with us. She accepted. Yesterday she came with her 4 kids and they loved it! We are really really excited as we see them continue to grow and progress.
With the Smith's they decided that they all want to be baptized together so the date for Brandon and colin is off. but we are still making progress on helping meagan come around.
So the other we tracted into this older couple. The guy his name was Jess said come on in. So we came in. The wife named Silvia saw us and said oh I thought you guys were the guys from the mortuary. Elder Charleson just looked utterly disgusted and said, we have a lot happier message than that. Apparently these guys think they are about to die....which may or may not be true. They are in their 80's. Anyways we taught them about the Book of Mormon and they liked it and we invited them to have a tour of the chapel. They accepted. So Saturday we showed them the church. I accidently forgot the keys to the church so when we got there we had to call the Bishop to open it for us, which ended up being perfect because now they have met the Bishop. Then we showed them the church and they loved it. We ended in the Chapel. We sat down and talked about how the sacrament renews your promise when you were baptized. Jess then said, "Some people say you should be baptized. I've never been baptized before. Do you guys think we should be baptized?" We said yes. We then invited them to be baptized on July 7th. He said what do I have to wear. We said we'd take care of that and they said, ok. It was great. They weren't able to come to church this week because they were in Klamath Falls but they said next week would work.
Well thats a good chunk of what happened this week but not nearly enough to truly convey how amazing it was. But I guess thats about how every week is. But I really do love y'all and would thank you for your continued support.
Love Elder Johnson
