HELLO.

HEY FAMILY!

So Hawaii this week huh?? That's so gnarly!!  I'm excited to hear that Dillon went on his first real dive, I still remember my first real dive.....I was pretty nervous, but STOKED! haha.  That's way crazy that you saw a couple of sharks....I still have yet to see a shark while diving!  I almost forgot that our family can just fly wherever almost whenever we want....that's a pretty awesome perk!  haha.  But anyway, I'm glad to hear that everyone had such a good time and that everyone is safe! 

I can't believe that Mac leaves this week to the MTC in Guatemala!  Everything is happening so fast it's unbelievable.  I swear, these past couple weeks have felt like just 1 day!  Elder Parkinson keeps asking me if the mission really goes as fast as everyone says....and I always tell him thats it's WAY faster than people say! haha.  It's so much fun training a new American missionary....honestly, it's WAY different than training a Guatemalan missionary!  But I'm enjoying it a ton and I'm excited for the weeks that come!  It actually reminds me a lot of when I was starting the mission with Elder Ball and he always had to have so much patience with me.....I didn't realize just how much patience he had to have until I trained an American missionary!  hahaha.  No, Elder Parkinson is AWESOME, but one really does have to have some patience sometimes, but I'm learing a TON right now!  It's really not too easy being BP and training an American at the same time, because there is always some kind of problem in the branch that I have to deal with, but at the same time, I have to make sure that Elder Parkinson is getting enough time to teach investigators and it just gets a little stressful sometimes, but I'm LOVING it! 

So this week was way cool because we had a super cool experience that really helped to strengthen my testimony of prayer!  So we have been teaching Arturo and Armando for about a week now and they are super awesome, they are sons of a sister that has just recently reactivated herself in the church and they are doing really well.  Anyway, we have been really wanting to find the dad so we can talk to him also so that we can teach him or at least get permission from him to teach his kids.  So we were finishing planning one day and as we kneeled down to pray I said to Elder Parkinson that we were going to say a specific prayer and I asked him what we should ask Father in Heaven for....and we both came to the conclusion that we were going to ask that when we went with Aturo and Armando that we would be able to find the dad and talk to him and get his persmission to teach them.....so that was our prayer, simple, but specific!  So we went to the appointment and we taught them the restoration and had an awesome lesson, felt the spirit really strong and then we started to talk about baptism with them and in that very moment.....Arturo, the dad comes through the door!  We invited him to talk to us and he told us that he was just going to change from his work clothes and then he came back and sat down with us and began to listen!  Then we talked to him about the baptism and his kids and he was actually SUPER stoked that we were teaching them and he said that he was totally in agreeance with the idea of them being baptized and so we put a baptismal date for March 2nd!!  We, them, the dad, the mom are all STOKED!!!  It was cool seeing that the Lord came through and answered our specific prayer exactly how we asked him too!  This is the Lords work and He will always back us up if we are doing the right things and asking for good things that are going to help His work progress!  WHOOOO!

I love you all, I can't believe that I will only be writing you 5 more times before I will see you all face to face!  Time. Goes. Really. Fast!!  I love my family!!

Elder Johnson