Luke with his district going to the Wildlife World Zoo in his area!!
Luke's companion from Tonga gave him a Lava Lava for his birthday!!
Feeding the Giraffe!!
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
No transfer, but he is getting his 15th and final companion (hopefully!)
So this week was really good! It is getting to the end of school
here and so I think that it will be a bit easier to meet with people.
An awesome experience this week was that we were able to contact an
investigator that we started teaching when I first got here, her name is
Danielle and we have kind of lost contact for about a month or so and
we knew that she lived in Verrado somewhere and so we have been praying
to know where she lived. So this last week we were visiting a member
and realized that she had said that she knew her and so I felt prompted
to ask her about Danielle and asked if she knew where she lived. She
gave us the street and what house it was and so we decided to just knock
that street and we noticed her in the park. So we talked with here
and found out that she was just super busy and we had a good talk with
her and it seemed to help her a bit. She has been really overwhelmed
with stuff so we talked about the atonement and was able to say a prayer
with her in the park and then we left and hopefully after school we
will be able to talk to her a bit more.
We were also able to actually set something up with a
potential in Verrado for this next Sunday that has been really hard to
meet with. We were in Verrado and we felt prompted to go check on Jen
and see if we couldn't set something up with her. So we talked and she
was giving us the usual of needing to check with her husband and so we
talked and taught about prayer and invited her to pray right there on the
spot and she did and really felt of the spirit! Then right as we were
about to leave her husband pulls up and we set something up to teach the
whole family! So that is really amazing! I am way excited for that!
Some good stuff is happening here and I am excited to
continue to see things happen more over these next 6 weeks and work with
this new companion of mine.
The weather here is about 105 and it continues to get higher and
higher! I really really grateful that I am going to be in a car for my
last 6 weeks! haha :)
Love,
Elder Johnson
Monday, May 13, 2013
Pictures!!!
The lizards and turtles are huge in ARIZONA!! Nice parking job! He is getting spoiled with a nice car too!
Monday, May 6, 2013
April 29th Letter. Busy Week and I forgot to post!
So this week has been a really spiritually filled one! It seems
like I say that pretty much every week, but that is because it always
is! Which is a good thing! So we went on exchanges this week
on Tuesday with the Zone leaders and I was in the Zone leader's area and
my companion stayed here and they went to this apartment complex
over by Luke Air Force base ( oh yeah did I mention that we have and Air
force base in our area? haha just like home with jets flying
everywhere!) and they were contacting some people over there and ran
into the guy named xxxx. He opened up a ton to them and they taught
him the first lesson right there. Then on Thursday my companion and
I went and taught him. We had planned to talk about the Plan of
Salvation, but as soon as we started it felt wrong, so we started
talking about the Book of Mormon and the Restoration a bit and gave him a
Book of Mormon and when we gave it to him we testified of its truthfulness and he said that I believe in it from the things that we
have said and he treated it like we had just given him the Gold plates
themselves!! It was a super spiritual lesson! Then just as the lesson
was about to be over I felt a very strong impression from the spirit to
invite him to seen a baptism that was happening in one of the other
wards on Saturday, which I like never do with an investigator that we
just met two days ago, but I knew that it was from God and that he
wanted him to be there. So I extended the invite and he said he
would love to. Then on Saturday he came to the baptism and he came
about 30 minutes early so we used that time and gave him a church tour
and then the whole baptism service he was writing down notes and broke
down in tears because he felt the spirit so strong. I happened to
glance over at something that he wrote down and it said " Catholics
method of baptism, FALSE!" So that was an awesome thing to see the
spirit tell him that! Then after the baptism we talked with him and he
said that after seeing and hearing the things today I know that my
Catholic baptism was false! We were speechless! He later said that
he will be coming to church quite a bit now and that he really likes
what he sees and feels at this church! So next lesson that we have with
him on Wednesday will be about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and inviting
him to baptism. The spirit is so awesome!! I have learned a ton about
how to follow the spirit share the knowledge that I have learned from
the spirit to others. There is no greater feeling to teach someone and
to have them have and "Aha!" moment! It is the best!
We weren't able to teach xxx this week which was a bummer, but hopefully we will be able to this week.
We
have notice that we have a ton of potential that we just need to make to
new investigators and so we have set that goal for this week. We also
have made it a goal to contact every ward member, to either see if
they have and friends to teach, or if they are less-active to bring them
back and maybe they have family who aren't members.
Being a district leader is so fun! We talked a lot
this week in district meeting about loving each of our investigators and
only caring about their salvation, and it seemed to really help every
one because they seem to be discouraged lately, so that seemed to
heighten their spirits! I have made it a goal to spend as much time
possible to always talk about those who we are teaching, because it
brings a spirit of love to all of us.
I would say that this week has been amazingly awesome!
Love,
Elder Luke Johnson
7 more emails and Luke is home! Really? Yes!
So the weather is starting to get really really nice again? I think that it is the last bit of nice before it peaks over 105! I just realized that 90 degrees feels nice to me now! What is
the weather like in Utah? I am sure that it is really nice! It is going
to be nice to only see a high of 105 again haha!!!
So this week has been really good for missionary work!
We are finding a lot of potential investigators, and some of our
current investigators who have been a little stagnate for a few weeks are
starting to go a little somewhere! I hope that a lot more of them will
go somewhere! We have found ourselves with a ton of potential that has
really gone anywhere in a few weeks and so we are going to put some
life into our teaching pool and hopefully revive it back to a
progressing teaching pool.
We didn't have the chance to meet with our current
investigators this week, but we did have one of them, her name is xxxx, come to a cottage meeting (it is a meeting where a member of the stake
presidency talks about a gospel principle and has some new members bare
there testimony) that the stake was having with out even us knowing
about it! She lives in xxxx and all of her neighbors are members and constantly invite her and her husband to stuff, so that was really
good. We unfortunately weren't able to go to it because we thought that
we wouldn't have anyone go, but some good things came from that. We
heard from the Zone Leaders who weren't there that there was also a couple
others who were there who live in the same city and so we are going to see who
that was and see if we can teach them. So that was really cool.
We also had a really awesome experience this week too!
So I was on exchanges with an Elder from my district, and we were going through the ward roster visiting a whole bunch of people in a part
of our area, mainly because me and my companion have set a goal
to meet everyone on the ward rosters, so we did and came across this
one address were a member was supposedly living and drove up to it and
saw a guy out front fixing his car. So we talked to him and was very
open to us from the beginning and told us that didn't really know
a whole bunch about who God was and what happens after this life and
really wanted to know what we believe. It was awesome because he was so
open to have us talk to him and we just talked with him and asked
inspired questions and hopefully we will be able to meet with him this
next week. It was awesome and the spirit was so strong!
We are starting set up a ton of appointments
with members in the ward to be able to start to help them be more
excited about missionary work! We just simply go into a members
house, if they have kids get to know them and help them with their
missionary prep, and then ask each of them something that we can pray
for and then testify ask for people who need a prayer in their life and
leave. I have seen this way work so many miracles! People start to
think of missionary work as member + the spirit+Elders, instead
of Elder+Elder.
There is a man in our ward who talked to us about the
importance of missionary work and how privileged and blessed it is to be
a member of the true church of Christ. He gave us a few statistics,
the first one was what percentage of members there are with the amount
of people there are on this earth and it was about close to about 4
million member to about 7 billion people on the earth. Then said out
of how many of those have been missionaries and it was about .0001
percent of those people. So if you were to look at it as a whole
99.999% of people have never or will never have the opportunity to be a
full-time representative of Christ! That was something that really
helped to understand just how important missionary work is, and also
member missionary work. If you think about it, if it were just the
full-time missionaries doing all the finding, that is about 2 to how ever
many people live within the ward boundaries, for us it is about 1000.
But if you were to put every member a missionary, so everyone who is
over the age of eight, that is about 200-400 people finding those who
want to know of this great gospel message. That is amazing! I learned
this early on in my mission and has been the focus of all the areas that
I have been in and will be a huge focus here. It is exciting! It is
amazing to think just what happens when everyone follows all the words
of the prophet and become a member missionary!!
Just thought I would add so cool stuff that I have thought about :) I like to call them spiritual twinkies! haha :)
Love,
Elder Luke Johnson