Friday, May 1, 2015

Transfer week, I am staying in Santo

So what another week! GUESS WHAT??? I am staying in Santo antao one more transfer baby!! Didnt i tell you i would basically stay here all my mission?? I am hoping for one more to be honest. I hope i spend half my mission here. It is the best island. And the hottest too.... It is getting SUPER hot here. Like i touch my skin and it is like a stove top its so hot. You can imagine it is pretty uncomfortable but  as long as we have lessons and people offer their house to us out of the shade maybe it will be fine. Maybe we can use it as an excuse too... look SUPER hot and exhausted and then they will just have to let us in :)

Haha so anyway yes... not much happened with transfers. Just 2 elders from our district went home... and then one of the girls in our house is training miss Megan Eliason in Monte Sossego, Mindelo. So i will get to see her for zone conference and i am sooooo pumped! She is going to be great :) And then the other sister in our house is getting a mini missionary. So we will see how this goes. Probably will be in a triple for a little bit. haha 

So this week i finally finished the Book of Mormon in PT... it was a blessing :) I know it took me forever but i didnt start until like halfway through the second transfer... but i finished and it love it even more in Portuguese... 

So next cool thing that happened this week is that we found 3 new families!!! Families are SOOO hard to find here. Nobody wants to learn as a family... its like ... " if my sons wants to talk to you he can, but we wont." Or... " my wife can but i wont." So yeah... but this week we got a family that has been antigo investigator for like ever. The mom is Irene... (they arent married, but no one is so no surprise.) And her boyfriend for 35 or so years... Sergio! Irene is amazing. She always wants to go to church and she has the BIGGEST desire to be baptized but she cant because she isnt living the law of chasity and her boyfreind doesnt want to get married. So we have kinda just told her to keep coming to church and we love her but she isnt progressing so we havent taught her. So we decided to try and teach her husband but he is super flaky and never showed up to our lessons. So they got dropped. The thing is... All their kids except like 2 are members as well. But only the sweet young women, elga, is active. So we passed by this week and found another one of thier kids, Elvis! He is a menos ativo... so we started talking to him and he seemed pretty solid. So during the lesson guess who walks in... SERGIO! We tell him to sit down. he is a little drunk, not completely, but we could smell alcohol. But we end up having a great lesson about marriage! They want a big party... well sergio does... irene just wants to get married. But we made the suggestion that they can get married super cheap with some close friends and not much there and then they can do a party when they have the money. He seemed like that was a good idea. So we just bore our testimonies and marked another day to talk and invited them to church. Well Turns out... SERGIO came to church also!!! It was great. and he even stayed all 3 hours. And then after church we had marked with him and he actually showed up... completely sober this time. He is really changing. 

So that was a great thing to see. He says we are just like the other missionaries trying to get them married, but we told him it is because it is something he has to do and he knows it. He really does know it. And he is starting to admit that they need to make plans. So we gave them a calander and told them to start saving up so that they can start the papers. little by little. But the best thing about all of this is seeing ireneºs face during the lessons. She is beaming. She was about ready to leave him so that she could get baptized, but she is so happy to see he is actually thinking about it. We told them they need to start praying together and reading together too. Irene doesnt read so it will be great if sergio starts reading the BOM with her. We have high hopes for this family! They are great. And i can see changes. The next step is getting sergio to stop drinking. But that is going to happen too!

So the next family is someone who came to church last week. And they just showed up. So we started teaching the whole family. We walked up to the door two nights ago to see how thye were doing because we were in the area and we heard one of the sons say "BATISMO" in a loud voice... and then they started talking about how they were going to church the next day. haha we couldnt knock on the door after that. so we waiting about 5 minutes until we stopped giggling with joy! I love seeing our investigators excited. haha 

The next family is awesome too... but the wife has fears of marriage because her parents marriage was not good. But she knows its a commandment so we will get there :) Focus on the doctrine.

I know this church is true and is changing lives. And i know when we make inspired goals in our lives the lord is going to help us. WE all can make goals and see the effects. We need to counsel with the lord as we make these goals for our lives as well :)

So yeah.. i think that is all i have. Oh wait... One more thing not so great about this week but that will show how the lord works in amazing ways. Last week as i read emails i skimmed over a bunch but remember reading about a verse in my Dads email. 1 Nephi 15:27. I didnt think much of it until during this week we had a lot of disappointments. Here in Cabo Verde there are ALOT of menos ativos... less atives. And on our way to church i remember passing by 5 of them... each of which had no desire to show up to church. some of them even lied to us by saying they were coming late. Well that hurt my heart a lot. And then all of our appointments fell through the next day. And for the first time in my misison i didnt feel like talking to anyway. No one. I didnt even have the desire to say hi in the street. Because i just felt like everyone is so wicked and they wont listen anyway... i dont know... it was rough. But then the next day during studies i had the feeling to look up that scirpture and remember my dads letter. In that scirpture we see that Lehi focused on the tree and the fruit, jesus and his atonement and not on the bad filthliness. This was perfect for me at this time. I had been focusing on the bad things, the filthiness and forgetting all the good. There really is so much good as we find it. Good in every day if we look for it. So i made the decision to look for the good. I know that Christ lives. HE is here. Ele esta aqui. And he loves us. I know as i focus on him all will be better and my mission will be full of more joy.

Love
Sister Johnson

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