17 October 2011

Querida Family, (Dear family),

10/17/11

Que tal! Espero que se encuentren MUY bien y que estan dandose cuenta de las bendiciones que estan recibiendo.

[How are you! I hope that you find yourselves very well and that you are realizing the blessings that you are receiving.]

This week I got a pretty intense cold, and now that I’m finally getting over it, my companion’s got it. But that’s how it is I guess when you are with someone 24/7.

The transfers are next week but I don’t anticipate a change as the new direction is that we will be in the areas for 6 to 9 months in general, and I’m about to finish 4.5, but we shall see.

The other day we passed an investigator who was outside his farm wall. We saw him from afar shooting up a tree with his slingshot. When we got there a bird fell out of the tree and he picked up the stunned hawk. He said it was a Cernicalo (that’s Spanish and I have no idea how to write it so I think it sounds the same in English.. so, well, there it is.) It was a very pretty bird, and apparently it had swooped in and taken one of his chicklets up to the tree for a little snack. I dunno what he did with the stunned bird, but he was very amused that he could catch it. Haha.

I laughed, as they say, out loud, when I read that Dad finally got to go scuba diving and to take a dance class. Sounds like it was fun. Did the brothers get to scuba too?? I would love to someday.

Thank you all for writing, I just got 9 Dear Elder letters. Eric is making BANK! Shakespeare is still cool. It seems like everyone and their dog is on vacation to Europe, South American countries. Pretty amazing. I very much enjoyed reading the stories. I think I commented about this last week, but I’m slowly progressing on a letter that I shall send home all at once.

Well, so here we are. We passed another interesting week. We did compañion interchanges with Brother Valdez from Arequipa and his companion Elder Davey. It went very well and here in Porvenir, we found a bunch of people to teach and I was very happy to hear that Brother Valdez commented at the end of the day: "Wow, so many people! They are so interested! This is AWESOME!" haha. It was a pretty great day.

I mentioned that we have these card things. They contain the key doctrines of each point in Preach my Gospel, along with some good questions, some words to define, some other stuff, and on the back, it has a section that has a self-evaluation which has questions like: Do the investigatores [investigators] understand their relation with God, and the trinity, and do the Investigatores [investigators] understand the role of the family in the earth, and eternity. Some of these things are special for our mission since we have a characteristic set of traditions and beliefs that have arisen since the Great Apostasy. (That’s a book I also want to read, but after the Miracle of Forgiveness)

They are pretty sweet.

Love Elder Johnson