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!!

November 23, 2015

So this is the Ramirez family, we just baptized them this last Sunday and they are so amazing!! They love the gospel so much, we walked in Sunday night to have dinner with them and Amabeli, the mom, is in cooking with her phone playing the Book of Mormon! They feed us all the time, and they are so willing to help us with anything and do anything to help out the members of the ward. Anuer (the dad) has been trying to get his working Visa so that he can stay here in the US and work, since he is from Mexico. So he had been trying to get that for the last 3 months or so and the day after he got baptized it showed up! THEN the very next day all of the sudden he received his residency in the mail and he wasn’t expecting that at all which means he is basically now a US citizen! It is so hard for people to get that down here because there are so many illegals and we know that since he was baptized and did what God wanted him to do that he was blessed! Then yesterday he got a call saying he could go down to Mexico to visit his other 2 daughters that he hasn’t been able to visit for the last 3 months! The little girl, Alyson and the little boy, Luis are just adorable! It is so cool to see how much the gospel blesses families when they live it! I am excited to get to go with them to the temple to be sealed a year from now!!

November 18, 2015

This Is elder Gilliam, he just went home a couple days ago, he left mid transfer because he served in Mexico before he served here so his time was up , but he is a really good friend, he lives up in northern Idaho and is going to take me Wolf hunting when I get back. I had to take him to the airport at 3am then my comp and I ran a meeting for all the sisters in the whole mission for the whole rest of the day so it was quite the day!! The other pic is from Brownsville, yesterday afternoon we got back from Brownsville. We went down there for an exchange and we saw this leaving the parking lot, so we had to get a picture on it!!

Hi Mommy what are you doing?? I was wanting to chat with you but you must be busy, so that's okay! That is crazy about what happened at work this week! I cant believe Bryant did that! Sounds like he just has a lot of stress and is having a hard time controlling it all.. That is cool that you got a bunch of job offers right after all that! Blessings!! You will have to let me know what you end up deciding to do.. Just choose what makes you the most happy! That is what matters at this point!! Also, you will have to send me a picture of that cousin of Nick’s if you ever find one, so that I can see if she has a chance or not;) Yeah dad told me he bought a lease at the club, he also told me he is going to buy me one also:) That is awesome that Brock made the basketball team, that makes me super happy to hear!! The family that we have been teaching is getting baptized tomorrow, the mom's name is Amabeli and she has been trying to add me on Facebook so if you see her name add her please! She really wants to talk to you! She said she wanted to tell you some things and she wanted to meet you! She is so excited for the gospel, it has been so cool to see how fast they changed and how ready they were to hear the gospel when we showed up!! This week we just went down to Brownsville for a couple days to help them make some things happen, then first thing in the morning we will be going down to Brownsville again to baptize a kid then we will be coming back to baptize the family!! It is also Alisons birthday today, so I bought her a journal so that she has something to write in to remember the day of her baptism. I will send you some pics on Monday if I have time so you can see them in white! Things here are going good though, this next week we have the 3 day meeting, starting Monday night going till Thursday and we will have every leader in the mission here with us for those 4 days and it is going to be nuts! My comp and I have many hours ahead of us of planning where everyone is going to sleep and where they will work for those 4 days, then after the meeting on Thursday, we will be heading up to Laredo for the rest of the week! Also, on Monday night we are going to have an FHE with the family we are baptizing at the mission presidents house, so that will be awesome!! Little nervous.. but it should be super neat! They are going to teach them more about missionary work and about temples so it should be amazing. But things are going great, and a crazy week is coming up!! Write me back mommy, I want to hear from you!

October 31, 2015

Wow, Brockles is on his first date??? That is so crazy to me... he seems like he should still be asking mommy if he can go play with his friends! haha You will have to send me some pics of him when you can! Yeah tonight we have to be home by 6pm for the rest of the night and we will be having 4 missionaries with us that go home this next week because they have their final interview with pres today then they will stay with us till they fly out. Each day we will be getting a few more and by Monday night we will have 17 missionaries with us that will be flying home Wednesday morning! We will probably get some trick or treaters since we live in a house in a decent neighborhood!  I don’t need any candy right now! I am trying to get huge of course and lose all of my fatty yucky weight! I get plenty of bad food when we eat with members, so I am trying to eat decent when I can! I have a goal of being at a solid 200 when I get home, right now I am at 192 and I have gotten rid of most of the fat I have gained here on the mish! We go to the gym almost every day from 5-7 even when we have to travel because my comp is trying to lose a lot of weight before he goes home. All the missionaries will sleep at our house, that is the main reason we live in a house, we have a bunch of bunk beds in there so they will all of a bed to sleep in. Yes, Monday we have to go to the airport to pick up all the new missionaries and on Wednesday we go to drop them all off at the airport. This next week is pretty crazy with everything that happens at transfers! Of course Brock thinks he is pretty bad, he is probably on cloud 9 right now! haha
These are some pics of the family that we are teaching, the little girl (Alison) she is the cutest little thing and the mom and dad are wonderful. The have a date to be baptized on the 15th of November and they will be my pride and joy of my mission when they get baptized here in a couple weeks. Amabeli, the mom, calls us her angels, she always says, "mis angeles tengo una pregunta..." They  are super cool and we are super excited for them. We have already talked about going to the temple after baptism and they thought that was super cool and is something they really want to do so I will be coming back down here to Texas when that happens! They have fed us dinner twice already the last two weeks and they are progressing really quickly! They have lots of questions because they are a very smart family and want to know everything about the church but they are wonderful!

October 24, 2015

Well here is a little of what went on this last week, Tuesday my comp and I had a meeting with President Maluenda for a few hours and he gave us about 200 things to do before Elder Dube arrived at 9 O'clock Tuesday night. So all day Tuesday we were running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to get everything done for President. Then Tuesday night Elder Dube (of the Seventy) arrived and then first thing Wednesday morning we had a meeting with Elder Dube, his wife, and President Maluenda and his wife. It was such a cool meeting, and it was really cool to see how much our mission president and Elder Dube trusted us because they asked us to be involved in a lot of things I never thought we would get to be involved in. We discussed the needs of the mission in that meeting and then planned out the rest of the week with those two and their wives. Then Wednesday afternoon we had meeting with all of the Zone Leaders in the mission along with President and Elder Dube. We then took the two couples around to a few different apartments and we then had a companionship study with President and Elder dube with a set of sister missionaries which was really cool. Thursday morning we had a meeting with all the missionaries here in the southern part of the mission which is about 100 missionaries and my companion and I conducted the meeting for Elder Dube and we got to work a lot with him and help him during all of his meetings which was a lot of fun, it made us nervous a lot but it was a very cool experience. So we had that meeting pretty much all day on Thursday, then Friday we drove up to Corpus with him and had the same meeting pretty much with him but for all of the missionaries in the northern part of the mission. Then during lunch on Friday, he asked us to take his wife to the airport for him, so I got to drive his wife to the airport about 30 min away so we had a pretty fun chat with her about their lives which was really neat being that they are both from Zimbabwe. Then we returned to the meeting in Corpus, and after the meeting got over just my comp and I got to have a cool little meeting with just Elder Dube where we just discussed things about the mission. He gave us counsel for our life and then after that we drove him to the airport. Sorry I skipped over all the little details because there was a lot that happened but it was a really fun, crazy week. I learned so much and I am super grateful that I got to work really closely with a general authority for a week. It was an experience I wont ever forget!! Elder Dube was so full of energy all the time and was so funny! I thought he was a big guy, but when he walked in to our office he was a pretty small little guy but was a big voice! He kept us laughing though and we had a great time with him!! Other than working with him, that is all we did all week! The days before that we just did a lot of preparation with him coming in to town! Things here are going great though, I have only taught one lesson all week with all the time we spent with the mission pres and Elder Dube, but we are teaching a family of four right now and they are amazing. It is a mom, dad, and two kids and when we stopped by Wednesday night, they had made dinner for us and they had already found the gospel library ap on their I pads and they were just sitting there waiting for us! We taught them about the book of Mormon and the dad asked us when we brought it up if it is a book that comes from the painting of Jesus coming to the Americas that he saw at church on Sunday and my comp and I just looked at each other and just said "SI!" and started laughing because we were so amazed that he had put it all together on his own. They are a wonderful family and we are super excited for them!! So things here are going great, I think I have slept a total of like 20 hours this week and put over 1000 miles on our truck but I am loving every minute of it! But this is just a little of what is going on down here!! I hope you all have a great week!!
Love, Elder Johnson