Week Ending 3/17/2014

• Sams letter to the family
• Zone training
• Super missionary family the Gatlins
• Tracked out Gary Collins
• Getting car fixed
• Biked to the boonies and rained on
• Ice cream social

Whoa this week was really crazy it seemed like! Saturday was like our only normal day. We had a lot of success and some disappointments, but that is missionary work and that is what makes it interesting :) We had a lot of fun though! We always do :) At least I always do and I hope my companions always do :)

We had our first zone training in the new alliance zone on Tuesday. That was good. I really like our zone leaders :) Every missionary meeting we have had for like the last 5 months has been on working with the members so it's pretty important to us and it should be important to you too!

We had a pretty cool member missionary experience this week :) One family we have been working with to do missionary work is the Gatlins. They decided on a family they wanted to work with, but nothing really came of it, but since we have been working with them they have had multiple missionary opportunities come into their lives! The Lord is answering their prayers even if it is in a different way than they expected. Brother Gatlin had a co worker come up to him and ask him about the church and he was able to give her a Book of Mormon and invite her to take the missionary discussions and she accepted it and said she would talk to her husband.

Then we tracted into a man named Gary Collins and he knows Brother Gatlin very well and has a ton of respect for him. Gary is probably one of the most prepared people I have encountered on my mission so far! We are very excited for him! He has already read through second Nephi in only a week! He came to church yesterday and Brother Gatlin took him under his wing and took him to all of his classes and answered all of his questions it was awesome! He really enjoyed it and told us we would see him there again. We are teaching going to start teaching him, and hopefully his family, at the Gatlins home.

So we see that if members are willing and praying for missionary opportunities and trying to initiate missionary experiences the Lord blesses them with them! I love it!!

Wednesday was pretty weird this week. So we got a call from Elder Winters in the mission office and he said the insurance company accepted the estimate on our car and we could take it in to get it fixed so we drove all the way to Euless to drop it off. But the guy inside was confused as to why we were dropping off our car so we told him what Elder Winters told us and that really made him confused. He said he hadn't even written the estimate yet so there was no way they could have accepted it. So he called elder winters and they checked and sure enough they accepted an estimate on a car with our cars v.i.n number. He said that was impossible and he couldn't fix it until they got things figured out. So the whole trip was for nothing! We decided to bike for a couple of days to save some miles. That has been super fun :)

On Saturday we had this novel idea to bike out to a place we call the boonies. It is like 8 miles on a dirt road to get there. Everything was going good until we were almost there and it started pouring rain!! We got so drenched I could have jumped in a swimming pool and been more dry! Then on the ride back in the pouring rain we got so muddy, it was nuts! It was pretty fun though :) We will make sure there are zero clouds next time we decide to bike out there!

We had our ice cream social on Thursday! We had a bunch of people there and a few investigators it was awesome! Everyone had a great time! The best part was as I went around talking to everyone pretty much every person invited a non member to come! Unfortunately none were able to come, but at least the members were showing their faith and opening their mouths! I know the Lord will bless them for it!!

Elder Sprague and I are having a great time :) I like him a lot :) He is going to put on so much weight here in Roanoke hahaha I keep warning him, but he's not changing his eating habits :) Oh well :)

Wow this email got pretty long! Well I encourage all of you to continue looking for and praying for missionary opportunities! And if you haven't been doing that repent and start! You guys are awesome and you WILL be blessed for it!! Have a wonderful week and st patricks day :)

Love,
Elder Johnson