December 17, 2008 to Family

hello family!
thank you mom and dad for the letters! sounds like everything is going quite well. Glad to hear you made it home safe mom. It sounds like you had a good efektif time in utah with the coontz fam. so elder kartchner has been in singapore since monday for his visa run. so i have been on exchanges with elder wall from the petaling jaya area for the last 2 days because his comp. got transfered. so to be honest these last few days have been nice haha. its good to get a small break from companions every once and a while haha. but he's coming back around 3:00 today so i will be seeing him later. but about the mtc bill thing i thought i had mentioned it but i was fairly sick about a week before we left. i had an ear infection for i think the first time so they gave me antibiotics. but all is well. speaking of which, i am now feeling better. i had the cold for about a week but im getting over it now.

Speaking of starting something when i go back i know i will change something, i will make sure wherever i am that the elders know where i am and that i want to help because i now know how important members are to missionary work. having someone come along that is not dressed up in a tie and testifies of the same things is so valuable to helping investigators grow. i dont know mom, if you or dad have got the opportuinity to or if the elders there ask for help, but if you have the chance i know that helping the missionaries helps them sooo much, as well as being super important to the investigators as well as being rewarding spiritually. So as of right now, thats kind of all im thinking about changing when i return haha. but people saying goodmorning back would be good too haha. (saying good morning back when we say it in church).

But ya right now we have 7 people on date for baptism so i hope for the best. they are all neat people and i love them so much. there is one guy in particular from bangladesh that is so cool. if we have an appointment on friday i look forward to teaching him all week haha. its kinda weird though because of the limited language usage i think whenever i call him he answers, " hello jesus! how are you?" haha. i guess he just assimilated me with jesus...its really werid because he calls me johnson in person. sadly though both gun and dinesh have been uncontacted for about 5 days and weve been trying hard to find them so... i hope we can find them soon. im pretty sure its just that our schedules aren't matching up well. and it doesn't help that nepalese people don't have phones personally. usually one person in a room has one (usually in a room of about 12-18 people which is ment for 4 or 5 people max). so hopefully we can get a hold of them soon.

But one story that breaks my heart but is so good at the same time is about a nepalese investigator that has a baptisimal date named Hem. so the other day we met with him and taught him a few commandments but had not taught the word of wisdom yet. so at the end he started talking about tea and about how he had bought some really good green tea that is supposed to do wonders for your body and he offered us some. so we proceeded to teach him the w.o.w. turns out someone skamed him into buying 500 ringets worth of this tea...which is a months salary if not more for him. so it was so sad because i wished we had taught him the wow before he bought it. but we figured it would be a good test of his faith to see what is more important. So he said he would stop drinking it.a few days later we saw him walking outside and we asked him how tea was doing and in his limited malay he said " o, te tutup" which means closed haha. it made me so happy. Hem is so cool. enough about that though.

One thing i realized though. you know how for alot of missionaries their mission makes them much more fluid and seem like they are great speakers...well its the opposite for me haha. My broken english is getting awesome. im starting to speak like a caveman haha. like when i was teaching elder beir my district leader for training and instead of saying the celestial kingdom is compared to the glory of the sun, i said without thinking any different. this place like bright of sun...all spaced out and slow hahaha. and i was just supposed to be like teaching another missionary not an investigator haha.

But that story about the nepalese people, sounds pretty accurate. it sounds like there are probably primarily woman in nepal just because all the men get married and go other places for work. For example, i have only met 2 nepalese women since being here versus like 500 nepalese men if not more. so they will do what it takes to survive because apparently you can't in nepal... :( but anyways, i hope that package does arrive so i will know later this afternoon when elder kartchner gets here.

So word is that we get phone cards for calling home so i will do that ok. so i will be calling you at 8:00 in the A.m. here on christmas eve the 24th, which means that i will be calling you at around 4:oo pm your time on the 23rd. so i will not exactly be calling on christmas but thats when i have to do it so im not calling you at 3 in the morning, so i hope you can all be there then!

So batu caves were pretty awesome. i took so many pictures. mostly of monkeys. there were monkeys eeeeeveyrwhere haha.like monkeys within 3 feet of my face in some instances haha. i am going to go and try to make a cd with pictures and send it home today hopefuly so we shall see.sounds like dad is quite the bag piper these days. sounds like alot of fun to be honest. and i think you should be doing that more than work dad! after all you are working for free haha.thats good about the beckster. glad to hear shes feeling better.

Shannon quit her job hu? well i dont know much about why or the details and what not but im sure it was for good reasons and was well thought out...shannon's calculating like that...hahah.

OK parents and rest of the fam i hope your all doing well and hope you know i love you! ok i will talk to you next week! until then merry christmas! and have a great week!

love,
elder johnson