January 1, 2013

¡Hola Mom! It was great to see you guys Christmas morning, it’s still weird to me to think that next year I’ll be home! The turkey dinner that we did that night was a success. The turkey was super good and moist with the wine we injected into it and there was a ton of food for everybody. The other 2 elders came: the family that we live with and a couple of other members. They asked me to carve the turkey, it made me feel old I thought that the dad of the family always did it! Nobody else knew how to do it so I just pretended that I did and kind of learned as I went. On the mission you have to be ready for anything! The day after Christmas the family that we live with asked us if we could give a blessing to their grandpa who lives there as well. He’s 83 years old and has smoked for his whole life and because of that has had lots of problems with his lungs. He’s not a member but has always been really nice to us. When I gave him the blessing I had a feeling that I couldn’t heal him and that we wasn’t going to be living much longer. I actually said in the blessing that his Heavenly Father was waiting for him. Unfortunately the feeling I had was right and he passed away yesterday morning. The family has been really sad but they also understand that they’ll see him again because they know of the plan of salvation. They were also really grateful to us because we did the Christmas dinner for them and that was the last really big meal that their grandpa had with them. It’s also hard to lose a loved one but I know that their is a plan for every one of us and that if we live the gospel we’ll be able to live in the Celestial kingdom as a family FOREVER. I had training meeting this week with Presidente Morales and he told us that as trainers we have to work especially hard to do even the littlest things right, because we want the new missionaries to learn right off the bat that that’s how we should be as missionaries. It’ll be a fun experience to train somebody new and I’m looking forward to it. We talked in church on Sunday and I talked about setting goals for the new year and that we should always be trying to be better and improve our weaknesses (Ether 12: 27). In Luke 2:52 it talks about how Jesus crew in wisdom, stature, and in favor with God and men. We can apply that to us, wisdom is like the mental and educational side; stature is like physically, favor with God is spiritual, and favor with men is like the social aspect of our lives. Everything has gone really well for us this new years, last night we ate dinner with a family and celebrated New Years with them. A tradition here is that at midnight everybody eats 12 grapes and they represent 12 desires that you want to accomplish that year. Well I hope you guys had a great new year and a grand 2013. I love you, thanks so much for everything! Elder Johnson

Preparing the turkey!

Cutting and eating the turkey!

The dinner was a success!