Week 87

San Jacinto Week 3

March 10, 2014

This week has been pretty good. I've gotten used to the neighbors. Teaching is really good.  We had twice the number of lessons this week that we averaged in my last area. Things are popping. 7 new investigators last week, one of whom is a sure thing.

Jason, is basically a child of record but he is 10 years old and has downs. He wants to be baptized, however, so technically he is a convert.
We also picked up a new investigator named Shannon Lucas. She's taken the lessons before and her husband is a less-active member. We also picked up 4 big black college guys, Raymond, Dante, Reggie, and Kalim, and left a blessing on their home. They are pretty cool.

I am putting a strong effort into my final months. Everything is coming together to make this time probably the most effective so far. I'm in the top 5 as far as experience goes in the mission, so yeah. Elder Snider is easy to work with willing to learn.

We've had some pretty spiritual lessons this week as well. Several with Tommy.
I'd invite everyone to read the "Parable of the Pounds" and compare and contrast it with the "Parable of the Talents" It's pretty interesting.

Unfortunately, I've got to go. Love you all thank you so much!

Elder Johns

Week 86

San Jacinto week 2

March 3, 2014

The new area is pretty cool. Here's a picture of our house and my companion. Our neighbors are all black, smoke a lot of weed, and listen to very loud music all night.

This weekend the region's prayers for rain were finally answered. It poured Friday and Saturday. The whole town flooded. Whole lanes were swallowed up to the curb with water. So that was fun to drive in. Luckily we didn't stall the car.

So the names of our investigators. Tommy (who I talked about last week)
Micah (he's nine. His family is less active, and he is tentatively on date for the end of the month.)
Taylor (another 9 year old. She's on date for the 5th of April)
Mike and Denise, They've been investigating for a Loooooong time, they need to get married before they can get baptized but they don't want to.


There's a really cool recent convert family here, Trent and Heather Emmich. They got baptized the week before I got here.  Trent has two sons Davian 10 and Dylan 11 from different women. The boys want to get baptized but need their mom's permission. They are super cool.

Aside from that, I don't have a whole lot to report on. We are mostly focused on finding people to teach.

Church yesterday was really good. As was ward council. It was really refreshing to hear nearly all of the testimonies born were focused on the Savior, and that the ward leadership are very pro-active and willing to do things especially with regards to missionary work.
Overall I'm pretty excited about this area, things are looking good here.

My companion's name is Elder Snider. He's really used to having insane amounts of work going on in the area (and it's his first one so he doesn't know any different) so our expectations for what makes a "good" week or day are very different. It's pretty funny.
I'm also Elder Blackburn's (my former companion) district leader. So I give him grief at every opportunity.

So yeah, Thank you for your prayers, I look forward to your letters.

Week 85

San Jacinto Week 1

February 25, 2014

Here is the hight difference between me and Elder Wilkinson... He's a tall dude.

Sorry about not emailing yesterday. I was able to read your emails but then the internet died in the family history center here(Where we email) so we couldn't respond. 

So as you can see from the subject line. I got transferred. Elder Wilkinson got transferred too. I was pretty surprised. He went to be the Assistant to the President and I'm down here in Hemet/San Jacinto. My term as zone leader was up.  

Hemet has the reputation for being the (ghettoish) home of the "newly wed and the nearly dead" and also being a great for missionary work. I think that President Smart took pity on me and gave me a great area, a good companion, and a car (W00T!) to (most likely) finish my mission. 

My new companion is named Elder Snider. He just got finished being trained so in mission Parlance I'm his "Step daddy", or second companion.  (the photo is from yesterday before the internet quit). He's from Grantsville Utah (in the Tooele area). He's really cool, we're going to work well together. He wants to be obedient and work hard and we have some common interests. My goal is to make this transfer the most effective one in my mission so far. I have been out long enough that I know how to plan, teach, find, study etc. We're in a solid, established area and we are on the same page so we're going to do some serious work here, I'm excited. 

It seems to me that as soon as you get in the groove in an area, (you teach well with your companion, you have a solid pool of promising investigators, you know the ward well, you don't have to use a map to get everywhere anymore etc.) The Lord's like "well, you're done here. Go somewhere else." At least that's how it seems to me throughout my mission. 

Last week we had some cool experiences in Corona. 

We got a really good member referral. The member told us to come by and teach his friend David. So we did. Two weeks ago David was literally a Satanist, and had been for years. He's a pretty scary looking dude, he has tattoos (some pretty gruesome ones too) everywhere and gauge loops (sans the actual gauges though) But he had been doing some soul searching and realized that that wasn't working out for him. The main tenant of his belief was that he was the center of his universe and everything he did needed to directly help him. He realized that he was choosing to be miserable living that way and so he started looking into other religions. He talked to his friend Dev, who is a member and they started talking about church. He looked more into it and downloaded the gospel library app on his phone and began reading. 

On splits, I went over to teach him on Tuesday. He had already read to 1 Nephi 3, and had prayed about it, and learned it was true. He kept saying over and over, "looking at all the religions, this is the one that feels right to follow, I feel light when I read". He had also quit smoking, drinking, drugs, coffee, and threw away all his adult material and occult stuff before we even met. The lesson went great and he readily accepted the invitation to baptism. We saw him on the street the next day and he said, "even walking home from the lesson in the dark, everything seemed lighter." 

We went back on Thursday and taught the Plan of Salvation. He had read all the way through to 2 Nephi 2 and had retained everything. He shared how he really liked 2 Ne 2 about why there was a fall and how there needs to be darkness so we can understand the light. He said "that rang true to me, as one who was in the darkness for so long, now I am readily seeking the light and I can really appreciate it." The lesson went super well. And then we got doubled out. So hopefully I should be going back to his baptism next month. He wants it so bad and is willing to do anything to get there. 

Yesterday in San Jacinto we had a lesson with an investigator, Tommy,  who wants to get baptized but is waiting on first presidency approval. He's an older guy who used to be a gang member. He has been investigating for  a few months and has a super strong testimony. He also talked about how he knew the darkness, how he chose it and shrugged off all the promptings he had not to choose that life. But now he realized the grave error of his ways. The whole time we were over there I was thinking of king Lamoni, his father, and all the anti-nephi-lehi's. That's him!

he said something that really struck me. 

"What's the word? Truth.

That's what I never knew. All my homies, they didn't know it. We'd say 'what's the word?' 'uh... beer drinking' so that's what we'd do all that week. 'what's the word?' 'Uh... weed' So that's what we'd do that week. They never got it. I never got it, until I sought it."

Then looking at me into the eyes, he said in words and with a force that struck me to the core 

 "What's the word? Truth, learn it, live it, share it."

He talked about how he wanted to share it with everyone, how they should have a plane with a banner fly around telling people about the gospel. It was a great experience. 

I have also been studying the beatitudes recently and I just finished 3 Ne 12:5 "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth." I have been studying what meekness is for the last few weeks and this is what I came up with: Meekness is the voluntary surrender of one's own will to the will of God. Typified and epitomized by the phrase "Thy will not mine be done, o Lord." 

One who is truly meek: is patient through trial, obedient in all things, continually seeks the will of God through: Fervent prayer and diligent scripture study and receives revelation from the Holy Ghost on how to do so. 

Got to go now. Love you guys, Thanks for everything!

Love Elder Bryce Johns

Week 84

Corona Round 2 Week 6

February 18, 2014

Well first off, Elder Wood who took this photograph is fired lol. Cerila isn't even looking. <facepalm> haha

So Juan and his mom, Cerila, got baptized this Sunday!
I don't remember how much I've said about Juan so far so I'll just tell the whole story.
Three months ago Elder Wilkinson and I were doubled into the area. We looked through the old records in the area book and found a record for Juan. So we swung by. Juan wasn't home but his mom was. However, Cerila only speaks Spanish. So she and I had a VERY broken conversation in spanglish where she said she was interested in having the Spanish missionaries over. However Juan worked weird hours so it was going to be hard to reach him. We sent the referral to the spanish elders, and they never went...

Sometime a few weeks later we were on the same street visiting people when an old mexican guy sitting in his garage told us to come back and have some food in an hour. They were having a barbeque. So we swung by an hour later and walked up to the door and a lady came out waving her arms and yelling "no, no, he's not here. Leave." So we dejectedly walked back to our bikes and rolled down the street where we saw Juan walking his mom out to his car. We said hi, and asked him if he was serious about the gospel. He said he was and my companion said "will you get baptized on February 16th? (This was early January sometime). To our surprise Juan said yes.

It took another week or so to get back in with him. I have already written about swapping the JW stuff for mormon stuff. But the teaching process was pretty simple, he had already gone through the lessons, and he was super willing to learn and live the things we were teaching. His mom said that she wanted to learn too. We were surprised that the spanish missionaries hadn't come by since we had already asked them too. So we called them up and said "what are you doing right now?" and had them go  over and see Cerila.

She wanted to get baptized too. However, they both needed to go to church. Juan's problem before was that he worked on sunday so he couldn't get baptized. (Another funny thing about Juan is that half the time we were on exchanges or splits when we were teaching him so I wasn't there very much.) But my companion went over there on exchanges and had a very solid lesson, and so Juan called in and said that he couldn't work that sunday. And they went to the Spanish ward. The following week we asked what he was going to do about the next sunday and he said that his boss had talked to him and said that he could work the night shift on sunday so he could do stuff during the day. So he was able to permanently come to church.

A big answer for him came when seven unboxed/unwrapped spanish Book of mormons showed up in front of him on the conveyor belt at Fedex where he works. I think I've already written something about that.

He's been coming and doing well, with relatively little effort on our part. He was going to get baptized the week before last but he and his mom were visiting his brother in jail and got home too late to make it.

The baptism went well. It was all in Spanish, so I caught one out of every 10 words or so (bautismo, espirito santo, padre celestial etc.) The only thing of note was that Cerila had to be dunked four times! Since she is so small and old the Spanish Elder Baptizing her decided (inexplicably) to lower the water so she would be sitting on the ground and baptize her with my companion's help (he baptized Juan). But her knees and toes kept poking up. So it took 4 times for them to get it right.

It was cool though to see how fast the process went. Also, Juan's original baptism date (on the old teaching record) was for february 17 2013. So he was baptized a year after his original date. The lord had been preparing him the whole time. While I am a little bummed that we had to send them over to the spanish ward, I am glad of the role we were able to play in their conversion.

Our Investigator Arianna is doing great as well. If she lived here in So Cal she could be baptized this weekend. However she will be returning to Rhode Island in a couple weeks where she lives with her boyfriend. She is willing to move out and perhaps join the church out there (at least continue investigating) but she wants to have a face-to-face conversation with her boyfriend about her decisions. So that's bittersweet.

We are still working with Nicole and Azod. They are basically mormon already in their beliefs but just need to get a few key things down. (Joseph Smith, Book of Mormon. You know, the simple stuff... haha). Our other active investigators are Frank and his son Mark.

It's funny to think that you guys had so much snow and rain. It's still in the mid 70s and sunny here.

Love,
Elder Bryce Johns

Week 83

Corona round 2 almost done with transfer 2 or something.

Feb 12, 2014

Due to circumstances this is going to be a short letter. we weren't able to email on Monday (Lincoln's bday) and we wont be able to next Monday either (presidents day) and yesterday we were at the temple all day. (btw the new-new-video was really cool)

We should be having a baptism this weekend. It was supposed to happen last weekend. Have I told you guys about Juan? He's a former investigator that we picked back up no to long ago. He's really into it and wanted to be baptized. Before his holdup was that he worked on Sundays so he couldn't get baptized. But he prayed about it and asked his boss and his boss gave him the evening shift on Sundays.

Another cool miracle which came as an answer to his prayers. He works at Fedex in their warehouse, and then one day he was working and then seven un-boxed Spanish Book of Mormons showed up on the convener belt right in front of him. No box, no indication of where they came from, just seven Libro de Mormons. He knew that that wasn't a coincidence. He will be getting baptized into the spanish ward though because his mom who only speaks Spanish wants to get baptized too.

 

 

Well, I need to let my comp get on the computer for a little bit. I love you guys and hope your valentines day goes awesomely.

 

Love you lots Elder Bryce Johns