DIA DE AMOR Y AMISTAD!

HEY HEY HEY! 

I would definitely agree with you mom, time is going by sooo fast it's unbelievable!  Weeks feel like days now, and months feel like weeks!  I can't believe that so many of my friends are coming home right now, and it's even harder to believe that they are hanging out with Courtney!!!  haha.  No but that's way cool, I'm super stoked to hear all the good news and that everything is going well!  It's also really funny to hear about the new missionaries that are in the ward...I try to imagine my mission serving in Mesa or a place like it and I just can't do it, it's so hard for me to imagine something like that!  haha.  But it's good to hear how many people are going to church and how much missionary work is going on there!  Treat them well, and always support the missionaries as much as you can! 

This week was a good week for us.....and just so you know, I have new and big news!!  I have a new companion.....again! haha.  Right now I am training a new missionary from Idaho, his name is Elder Parkinson!  He is way cool, just got out of the MTC and he is already speaking spanish pretty dang well!  I am super excited to be with him and to teach all that I can....he is most likely going to be my last companion in the mission so I am going to try and make the best of it and teach him everything!  It's wierd to think that he is the last companion that I will have, I feel like I have had so many and now I'm down to the last one!  Time is going super fast. 

We had some super cool experiences this week that I was way excited about.  So we have been looking for some new people to teach, because some of the people that we were teaching, just don't want to progress anymore, so we left them to some future missionaries who are going to baptize them when they are ready to progress and decided that we were going to find people that are ready now!  We were having a pretty long day and nobody seemed to be home and we were kind of running out of options, but we didn't give up, we were determined to find new people....and then someone came to my mind, someone that we had tried to find about a month ago, but was on vacation and I had totally forgot about him until that moment his name popped into my mind....so we decided to go and try to find him again!  Well, we found him and his name is Horacio Palacios and he is a stud!  He is around 22 years old and has been living here in Sinaloa for a while now on his own...his parents are from a state named Chiapas here in Mexico.  So we started to talk to him about his beliefs and his basic religious background and he was explaining to us that his dad is way into reading books from different religions and stuff like that, but that he didn't have a super set belief in who is God....and because of that, he wasn't really sure where he was going in life, he just knew that he was studying and wanted to work, but a real perspective about life, he wasn't really sure.....so we shared the scripture in Genesis 1: 26-27 so that he could recieve his own revelation about who God really is, and then he understood, it was super clear to him in that moment that God in real and that He is literally our Father in Heaven....after that small but impacting experience, his perspective changed along with his attitude, he realized that we had an important message to share and that we were literally sent from God to teach him!  Well, we taught him a little more about the restoration of the Gospel and he accpeted to be baptized!  But I realized after that experience how simple the Gospel is, yet how absolutely important it is in our lives!  How does my knowledge of who God really is affect my daily decisions...and how will that continue to affect my actions in the future??  Horacio is way cool and has a ton a potential!  We hope that he reads in the Book of Mormon and prays to know if it is true so that he will continue to recieve revelation and continue to progress until his baptism and then to the temple! whooo! 

The branch is continuing to progress, which I am SUPER happy about!  There are a few members that were inactive, that are active now, and quite a few investigators that are progressing a bunch right now!  We are hoping that this progress continues and that this branch will be strong and will never have to look back!  I'm tired, but I'm soo happy and ready to keep working!

I love my family.  Thank you for everything you do for me! stay. stoked.

Elder Johnson

p.s. I haven't taken pics in a little while, I keep forgetting.....but I'll try to take more to send to you guys.  By the way, my memory, which has the pics of most of my mission....has a virus and I cant see my pics!!! I hope that I can recover them....