April 2, 2012

My beloved family, How has your week been going along? I am sure that it is quite busy as usual. Thank you sooooooooooooooo much for the recipe of Apple Pie!! I sure hope that I will be able to make it. If all goes as planned we will make it in two weeks from now. Or, if no-one changes this transfer, we might be able to make it this coming week. In any case, I am super excited. This could quite possibly be better than Christmas! Ha ha Well, this week has been "chalk full" of experiences. I will just let you know about a few of them. First off, I don´t know what it is about Mazatlan, but I don´t think that I have yet had a normal Sunday here. So I will tell you about it. In the morning my companion and I were not able to watch the conference, because we were looking for investigators to come with us... bummer. But, when it came time for the afternoon session (<---p.s. I just spent like three minutes trying to figure out how to spell that word. ¡arg!) we decided to go to the church and see who would arrive. Well, guess what! No one showed up! Well, we were pretty bummed out, but we decided to go out and look for people. That is when we met Herman in the bathroom of the chapel. He had seen the open doors, and decided to enter and see what was happening. He found the bathrooms, and was in the process of brushing his teeth when we came upon him. We invited him to come and enter with us. He accepted our invitation, and gratefully entered. We got to see about the last hour and a half of the session. It was great! Then afterwards, we gave him a quick update on how the Gospel had been restored and that the people that he had just listened to were living prophets. He told us that he felt it, and that he believed us. To make a long story a little less long, he told us that he is from the city of Guadalajara, and that he had come up to Mazatlan in hope of starting of a new life. He only had the clothes on his back and some materials in his backpack. Talk about faith. Well, we than accompanied him for four hours in his search for a homeless shelter where he could stay until he got his life in order. It was crazy! In four hours we covered the whole city of Mazatlan going from Catholic Boys-Homes to Alcoholics Anonymous, and nobody would let him in. It was incredible, but during the course of these four hours, we got to know and love this man. Something that I learned from that whole experience is that there are people all around us, and each and every one of them have problems. It is our job as missionaries to open our mouths, and invite them to hear the Gospel. If they are prepared they will not harden their hearts. I hope that one day I may cross paths with Herman, and see how his life has changed, hopefully for the better. Well, as for Maribel, that has been a whole different story this past week. Wow. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for the example the Dad has put for me. It sufficeth me to say that the Hermana Maribel is on the brink of divorce, and had to file something with a lawyer because her husband had hit her. Maribel is SOOOOOOO cool. We went over to her house right after the incident, and she told us that she had put the terms real simple with her husband. Or they were getting a divorce, or he was going to go with her to the church! How cool is she? She came with us to the afternoon session of Saturday conference, and the talk given by Elder David S. Baxter about the single parents really hit home with her. She told us that she had prayed and asked Heavenly Father many things that she needed answers too, and that the majority of them were answered in Conference! The only sad part is that we were planning on baptizing her this up-coming Saturday, but she is going out of town for the holidays. She will come back next week. Well, I loved conference. The parts that I was able to see lifted my soul greatly. I felt a theme along the lines of how the family is super important, and that we must do all we can to bring the family together. I love you guys. I am so glad that you put up with all of my quirky behaviours. I guess that is what families are for, to really get to know the people, their good and bad sides, and then love them all the same. Love Elder Johnson