14 Months

This week had its ups and downs. Here are some significant events:

ZONE TRAINING! I ended up not instructing on Elder/Sister relationships, (Thank Goodness) and instructed on finding investigators to teach. We're all new ZL's/Sister Training Leaders, so it was the first zone training for most of us. Despite being new, we all did pretty good. I had the most instructing experience (after teaching like 20 District Meetings) and have really come to enjoy instructing, just as much as teaching investigators. Where else in the world can you find 18-21 year olds discussing and training each other in the gospel out of their own free will? Haha missionaries are probably soooo strange in the world's eyes.

Things have been hard this week. Super slow, and super frustrating. We've slowly been getting help from the ward, but not much success. All of our investigators but Brian have been dropped, and Brian is making slow progress to recover from his 35 years of heavy alcohol drinking.

We taught English class again this week, and I'm always astonished at the students we have. Currently, all of our students are from China. They ask us about our mission service that we give to God, and they just can't comprehend it. They've never heard of service before.

I described to a student a while ago, that we spend two years of our lives serving God. He responded, "Are you going to school?" ... "No." ... "Do you have a job?" ... "No." ... and his face was priceless. He was absolutely astonished. Never before had he heard of this kind of service... and I don't think he had ever met someone that cared more about family/God/service than intelligence or career. It's amazing to teach these students. Most of them are here for a year or so for school and to learn English. It's cool that we get to give them at least a little taste of the Gospel before they go back to China.

BTW, I received a package from the YOUNG WOMEN of the IRON MOUNTAIN ward. THANK YOU for the package... it's always nice to hear from the ward back home. I appreciate it.

One more story, and then I need to go.

This week we got a call from a former investigator Greg (The one we passed off to YSA). I answered the phone, and asked how he was doing. He responded... "I'm okay... I need to ask y'all a favor". I responded, "Sure, what can we do for ya?". He timidly answered, "Well... I need something kinda strange... do you have a mirror that you could give me?". I asked what he needed it for, and after a bit of prying he finally admitted, "People are watching me. I just need the mirror.". At this point it was obvious that he was a little distressed, so we didn't ask any more questions and brought a good sized mirror that we had found in our apartment over to his house.

We met him outside, greeted him, and then (after standing there quietly for a moment) he asked, "So... are you going to show me how to use it?" We responded, confused and a little sketched out, "What do you want us to do with it?" After a little more prying and talking with Greg, he explained that he had been messing with some weird witchcraft stuff. He confessed that he thought that he had been seeing people watching him through his mirror in his room, so we wanted us to use our priesthood power to talk to the spirits in the mirror, and tell them to leave! We explained that we can't do that, but we did offer him a blessing for him and his home. He refused, so we just left with a prayer. We sent the YSA Elders over there again, so they're taking good care of him now, and have since given him a blessing. We were pretty sketched out the rest of the night... and we didn't dare hang the mirror back up in our apartment, so we shattered it and threw it in the dumpster! Crazy stuff.

Thank you for your emails! I appreciate the love and support!

Love, Elder Johnson