Monday, July 28, 2014

7/28/14- We ate armadillo

Welp we had changes.... I´m still in Jesus de Otoro but my companion left me. Elder Torres was a great companion and I got along so good with him. Seems like the companions I get along with the best leaves the fastest... probably just me.

My new companion is from Peru. (Yes 7 latino companions from 7 different country it´s a great streak) He´s 22, Has 4 years as a member, and is the only member of his family. He is very excited and animated to work. Always yelling and laughing and talking and talking with a side of talking. In the 5 days we´ve been together I think he´s only stopped to sleep... haha. But that's a good thing, I´m practicing Spanish on a new level.. haha 

Other cool thing today, this week I ate some great food. Armidillo which they say cozuco, and possum which the call tacuazin. I honestly liked the armidillo a lot better than the possum. The family who fed us are great people. They said they´re going to feed us iguana this week.

The area is super good, the district is even better, Right now we have a fecha with a family who the only thing impeding them to be baptized is a wedding, or in other word, money. Other than that they´re super cool. We have a youth, well I say youth because she´s younger than 25 but she won´t tell us how old she is, but she wants to get baptized. Her challenge is her family. She says they´re catholic and she depends on them still so she doesn´t want to make them mad.

I´ve been studying faith and obedience and the connection lately and my two presidents made some great comments
Faith is strengthened by obedience and exercised by sacrifice.  Other than that I like the scriptures :
 1 nefi 17:3, Alma 3:26-27, 5:41-42, Helam 14:27-31 Our attitude counts as we are obedient.

Well sorry guys I got to go, love ya all!! 
paz y amor

Monday, July 21, 2014

6-21-14- don't procrastinate!

Three words I want nothing to do with after this life. Words of chance, insecurity, and putting things off.

Lots of times I see these words that destroy so many opportunities of so many families. It isn´t very often a solid NO that does that,  and Yes, very few times destroys potential opportunities. Usually it´s an if, or an eeehhh tomorrow, and the word almost is like a sad conclusion.

Anyways returning to the mission. This week I was a bit sick and I´ve lost quite a bit of weight.  It´s a good thing cause I was starting to get fat.  We´ll continue working today so that we never need to say, eh lets work tomorrow.

Love you all, sorry that this email is super lame not a ton is happening these days.  We just keep going and we´ll soon start to recognize the miracles better.

Paz y amor
Elder Johnson

Monday, July 14, 2014

Dearest Mother

Sean sent this email to me today.  Talk about making me cry.  My kids love to do that.
 
Dearest mother,

Thank you so much for being my mom
thank you for being beautiful
Thank you for being Cheerful when i was not
Thank you for disciplining me and correcting my mistakes
Thank you for Always showing that i am important to you
Thank you for loving soccer 
Thank you for loving my 3 sisters and taking care of them
Thank you for driving me to countless practices and concerts, and games.
Thank you for indulging my humor, even if it is very teenager.
Thank you feeding me, I sure miss your cooking
Thank you for Teaching me 
Thank you for helping me with the homework, even when i didn{t want help
Thank you for allowing me to fall by my own decisions,
Thank you for helping to Stand back up.
Thank you for Teaching me the Gospel and Giving me it´s blessings
Thank you for sending me to work where work is needed
Thank you for Loving me even when love was a girly word
Thanks mom for being the best mom ever

It´s not mother´s day or anything but mom i´m sure grateful for you and i hope you know. 

Forever your son. Sean

This is a photo from Senior night for soccer.  I just had to post it!
 

7-14-14 Out one year, My goal is to trust in the Lord more

Dear family and Friends, 

I´m gonna start out talking about this past p-day, it was a blast. We went to the Esperanza to go check out some Waterfalls and natural wading pools, no we did not swim. Then after, we played some good soccer and some frisbee. It was super great and it feels good to sweat.. from excercize (I forgot how to spell it... excersize?)

Here in Otoro everything is pretty calm.  It rained again and our house flooded again but the good thing is while cleaning we found a sheet and decided to make a hammock out of it, so in the end it was definetly a blessing in disguise. The district is super good, everyone has baptized.  One family was baptized that is super strong in the church  right now. We´re all pretty pumped that the Lord is blessing us with baptisms and continue searching for other ways the Lord wants to give us success. Baptizing isn´t the only type of success in the mission.

Other than that I officially have a year in the mission.... that's super weird.  I still feel like I don't know what I´m doing which is probably a bad sign but it always makes it fun. An observation is that my whole life I´ve heard about the mission, countless stories of the mission, countless spiritual experiences taught to me, and countless dreams of leaving for the mission. I thought I had a pretty good idea how a mission would be... I was wrong. haha I feel like the theory of the mission I understood but the practice of it was something very different. It´s alot better and alot worse than I thought. Haha what helps is having a good comp, and ALWAYS doing your part. If something fails it won´t  be God, I've learned that here. One of my goals as a missionary is to not be that thing that fails, Yeah it's gonna happen sometimes but if it´s something that I can´t do anything about, it will do nothing more than help me to improve. After failing there is nothing better to do than keep going. segiur adelante. 
Don´t get me wrong, I don´t feel like a failure but I definitely have room to improve. So I´ll keep going.

I had the rare opprotunity to have interviews on the precise day that I fulfilled a year in the mission. I asked him what advice he has for me. He said, ¨trust in the lord more¨ So that's my main goal for this next year. I´m going to trust in the Lord more, and I expect that very good things are going to happen... Super excited for that :)

Other than that we´re working hard looking for young men who can help build a body of the church here. But it´s super fun. My companion and I decided that if someone shouts, ¨do you want coffee?¨ it means they want to talk to us so we´re going to talk with them, It´s pretty fun.

Well... I´m gonna sign off but thanks all for taking the time to read this, love ya all

Elder Johnson

p.s. If anyone doesn´t want to keep recieving this email let me know and I´ll stop filling your inbox. Thanks guys.

Paz y amor

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

7-7-14 Sometimes the Lord works through awkward situations

Entonces aqui estamos.
This week was super crazy because in my district of 4 half of us were sick. Las Hermanas (the sisters), but they powered through, and with quite a bit of help from the lord married and baptized a family. It was super cool. And there was a big party with hymns as the music setting and the couple was super happy.
Sean's caption - A tragic Accident.  J/k - it's a toy car.  Ya don't say.



 
A funny thing, we found a family of like 9 people and the first thing they do is invite us in, after that they offered us coffee.... hahaha they´ve never heard that mormons don't drink coffee, so that just let us jump right in teaching. It was super great.  I recognize that sometimes the lord words in awkward situations, and it´s super fun. haha

 
Other than that The Work of Salvation continues here, we are putting hometeachers in which we each have 4 different companions, and we are trying to find some priesthood power out there. We continue training our new quorum president and his counselors. Right now in the quorum we have like 9 men, 1 priest and 8 Elders ( here active means goes to church once a month). But there are 20 registered elders so we have to find them, with the terrible directions of Honduras, and activate them. Pray that they aren´t going to another church, and that they haven´t died.... haha kind of ominious but the truth.
I love this place Jesus de Otoro is a super rad pueblo and I´m loving the work. I love being in the mission. Even though I don´t know everything I know this Church is true. I know this is what God wants and requires of me, and am soo grateful for the opprotunity to serve.
the mountains of Barrio Nuevo


That´s it, sorry not much to say but have a good week all. Love ya.
Paz y amor, Elder Johnson