January 26, 2016

Elder Johnson comes home tomorrow.  His letters have gotten a lot shorter as he is super busy finishing things up in the mission.  We are so excited to see him tomorrow at 4:54 pm!! We love him so much and are so proud of him for his service to the Lord and the people in the Texas McAllen Mission.  He has love every minute of serving over the last two years. He has come to love many people in Texas and it will be hard for him to leave them.  Heavenly Father is so proud of him and I know he will bless him for being a faithful servant.  Thank you to everyone who loved Elder Johnson and fed him and celebrated his birthdays and Christmas's and listened to the message he had to teach.  We love you and will be forever grateful for everything you have done for our son. 

Here are a few pictures of some "good bye's" over the last few days:

This beautiful scarf is a gift from Bely.  She and her family were so good to Elder Johnson.  Below are the scriptures Elder Johnson received for his own baptism.  He gave them to a very special girl named Allison before he came home.

The last email:
What??? NO... The ladies don’t like little beat up Toyota Corollas! Hey just so you know, on Friday night I have a date. Manny Lattanzio, one of my companions last transfer set up a date for me because he knew that it was something President commits us to do so he set it up for me I guess. I am going to be going with him and Boyer (my comp in Brownsville) and also Cruz so three of my old companions and I will all be going on a group date. 
So, Monday we will have dinner at Pres house, then also Tuesday morning we will eat breakfast there with the Greenies both times, then Tues night we will eat with all those that go home and again we will eat breakfast there on Wed morning before going to the airport. 

Well yeah I am going to follow his advice!! His advice is actually 2, but I am going to count our date as one of them:) Pres is by far the most intelligent man I have ever met and I am going to follow all of his counsel, I just had my exit interview with him and he went over some things in my Patriarchal Blessing and he talked to me a lot about how the Lord has very high expectations for me, so I have to find a wife that has the same expectations also so that I stay at a high level. So he said to do that, I am going to have to go on lots of different dates with lots of girls to be able to find the one. :/ What do you think about that?

January 9, 2016

Well here is a little of what happened this last week, sorry, but to be honest I just have no drive to write emails since I am going to see y’all soon! I am starting to go a little crazy here, because it hasn't hit me the slightest bit that I am going home.. but at the same time I know that I will be home in two weeks so it is kinda weird! This whole last week we had a meeting starting at 8 am till 6pm every single day. President is doing interviews with all the missionaries so we travel around and while he pulls each missionary into an interview, me and my comp give training for like 10 hrs! It is super fun but very tiring! We did that every day this week and we will be doing it again every day this upcoming week but we will be traveling to Laredo and Corpus this next week! Last night after the meeting, we went to get a few things done in our area, but when we pulled up to our appointment, we both fell asleep before we could leave the truck, and we ended up sleeping for 45 min!! Then we pulled up to the next and the same thing happened again! So we just hurried and visited a couple people then went home because we honestly couldn’t keep our eyes open and I was struggling keeping my eyes open while driving so we went home and we ended up falling asleep for like an hour in the truck in our driveway of our house!! haha It was quite the struggle!! We are going to keep going hard though!! I want to get as much as I possibly can done before I go home! Things here are going great, crazy week coming up too!! We will be in Laredo Mon, Tues. then on Wed we will be in Harlingen then on Thursday in Sinton (next to Corpus) then Friday we will be in Corpus Christi! Then after all that flies by, I will be on the last week!! I honestly can’t believe it.. But I am just going to enjoy the ride!! I hope you guys have a great week! I love you!

January 1, 2015

I honestly don’t have a whole lot to say, so I am just going to send some a bunch of pictures and tell you about the week a little. SO on New Years Eve, it is the one day that President lets us watch a movie all year and he chooses the movie we can watch. So this week I got to watch the Polar Express! It was a lot of fun, we went to a Chapel with like 30 other missionaries and we put it up on our projector and just watched it in the primary room. Before that we were up in Corpus Christi from Monday till Wednesday then came home, and when we were up in Corpus, we saw tons of snow geese!!! There isn’t anything really at all the gets me the slightest bit trunky except for seeing those snow geese, that did get me a little;) There were thousands of them the kept flying over us, so that was pretty cool! Here are some pictures of the baptisms we had this last week. The little kids are of a family that we just reactivated and they are such a great family. The kids are so awesome, and during the baptism my Companion, Elder Ivey, played the song "I know when I am baptized" on his guitar and the little girl in the white dress(Valeria) sang it and that is the first thing on my entire mission that has got me to cry.. it was so so dang cute and so sweet. She sang it so confidently and pretty much everyone in that room was crying after. Her mom lost it in the middle of the song, the kids mom was a really active member for a long time, but then got in a divorce and fell away from the church for the last 3 years, but we found them about two months ago and we have been working with them a lot and they are super strong now. The two guys we baptized are super cool also, they just crossed the border 4 weeks ago and we found them just a couple days after they crossed. The cool part about the baptism is that our recent convert (Anuer) baptized one of the guys! It was super cool to see him use his priesthood that he got just two weeks ago! That is pretty much it about the week though! Things here are going great, we are about to start a super crazy couple weeks, we have a meeting with all the leaders this next week here in McAllen, then after that we will be going around and having a meeting with all the zones where President will be interviewing every missionary individually while my comp and I give training to keep all the missionaries in the mean time. We will be doing training for like 6 or 7 hours at each zone so it will be pretty crazy these next few weeks!! I hope you have a great week! I love you guys!