January 27, 2016

Elder Johnson (Connor now) is home.  It has been 2 wonderful years and we are so happy to have our family together again.  We are so grateful for all of the wonderful people of Texas who took Connor into their homes and loved him and fed him!  We will never forget their kindness and love.

Here are some pictures of his departure from Texas and his arrival in Utah.

 

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!

December 18, 2015

December 14, 2015

Well we just got out of a long meeting with President to finish up the transfers. We have pretty much everything and everyone figured out so far, the group that goes home Wednesday is the biggest group ever to go home and we are getting one of the largest groups ever of new missionaries so it will be interesting! There are tons of changes, and I also know who my new companion will be and he is great. He still doesn’t know, we are actually the only ones that know but he is wonderful. I am super excited to have him as a companion. Today we have to go run errands and make sure the transfer van, and our two trucks are super clean and ready to go pick up the new missionaries at 3. Pres is super big on presentation, so when we ever pick up a new missionary, everything has to be perfect. So we will pick up the greenies, then we bring them back here to the offices and we do like 3 different trainings with them then at like 6 we go to presidents house to eat dinner with all the greenies and president and his family. Then I will be making the rounds in the transfer van to drop off 13 different sisters because we have to spread them out with a bunch of different sisters here close by because they don’t go to their area till the next day when transfers happen. So they will spend the night with some other sister missionaries here then in the morning before they go to their areas, we have breakfast at presidents house so first things tomorrow morning I will be making the rounds again to pick them all up.  (Elder Cruz says hi) Then after the transfer meeting I will have the 27 dead missionaries with me that go home Wednesday morning. They have some meetings till 5 then we go and eat dinner at presidents house and then they have a dead party Tuesday night which is a lot of fun. Then Wednesday morning they have breakfast at pres house then I drop them all off at the airport! Crazy next few days.. Also I got to go to the temple Saturday which was super cool:) I will tell you more about that when I have time, but I have to go now, I love you!!

December 7, 2015

So I don’t think I ever explained this very well, but this last transfer I got a new companion, Elder Lattanzio and he comes with me when I travel around to other zones and work with the zone leaders, but at the same time I still have elder Cruz as my companion and we still travel together but now when us 3 travel together.  They will drop me off places to work with zone leaders for a couple days then they will come pick me up. So it is a little confusing but I have two different companions. One from Mexico and the other from Argentina, they both have lived here in the US for a while now though so they both speak English fine. But here is just a picture of us in front of our ranch;)

This was a pretty cool story that happen a little bit ago, this kid is a kid that Elder Cruz and I both taught in Brownsville and we went back there not to long ago. Elder Cruz did a baptismal interview with him and he finally said yes to being baptized! So last Sunday we drove back down to Brownsville and my comp baptized him which was super cool! I taught this kid when I was with Elder Boyer a couple transfers ago and Boyer is still down there so it was super cool to get to go back down there and see this kid get baptized after having us three teach him for so long!

Sister Bely teaching the Elders to make cheesecake!!