Read with Caution

Friends and Family:

This week was SUPER successful! The branch recently had a fast for missionary work, and it yielded TONS of blessings! We have around 26 investigators we try to work with on a weekly basis and are doing what we can to also squeeze in at least 10 hours of service. It's been CRAZY! 

Some of our service activities this week included:

Killing and Skinning Rabbits:

     We helped our Branch President dress some of his rabbits. He breeds them, and sells the ones with nice fur to a pet store... but whenever he has some he doesn't need, he calls us and we go help him 'get rid of them'. We first break their neck on a metal nob, and hold them by the skin on their back until their muscles stop spazzing. Next, we hang them by their legs upside down and pull the skin off... it was disgusting. He feeds certain organs to his cats, and then bags up the body and sends us home to cook it. 

Washing A Poodle:

     This wasn't any poodle... This poodle hadn't been washed in over two years. It's furred was all matted and disgusting. We found long strips of wire, hundreds of burs, and plenty of sticks stuck in his fur. We did all we could in an hour, but we're going to have to go back this week and just shave it. Poor Doggie. It's going to be so ugly :D

Parachute FUN!

     We went to the local nursing home, and played a parachute game with them. We had a huge parachute, and each of us grabbed a part of it until it was strung out across the room... we then put a beach ball in the middle and flung the parachute up and down to make the ball bounce and roll around. The old folks loved it. 

Bonfire:

     We helped a new investigator, Brother Gentry, clean up a new property he moved to. It's a few acres, and full of garbage. He told us to move it all into a pile, and once we did he set it all on fire... it was the biggest fire I've ever seen. The people who lived there before were heave drinkers, and also raised fighting roosters... It was a huge mess... After the service we taught him, for the second time, and committed him to be baptized! He told us that he had never felt the spirit so strong, and that he will begin a study on the book of mormon. I'll give more of a biography on him next week if we're still teaching him. 

With all of these lessons we've been teaching, we tend to just train wreck our time. We can't ever keep our lessons to the short 30-45 minutes we want them to be... it's been tough to get everything in that we want to. Something we'll work on this week... 

Earl Buchanan (Our recent Convert) has been doing super good! We've been teaching him the new member lessons, and he's loving it. He even went home teaching with the Branch President and is super nervous about it. 

Spiritual Thought: We got to view a broadcast from Salt Lake for all of the missionaries. They spoke about getting back to the basics and preaching repentance and baptizing converts. Ever since that conference I've been thinking about and studying about repentance a ton. When we were washing that dog, I thought about how much it's like repentance. It took that dog over two years to get that dirty and disgusting.... and it's going to be a while to get rid of all that matted and disgusting fur. My companion accidentally cut the poor dog with scissors while trying to get some of the matted fur off, and so it is with repentance. It's hard, and painful, and a process. 

Things are good here! #WhileDaringGreatly

Talk to you next week.

Love, Elder Johnson