January 28, 2013

¡Hola Mom! Wow I can’t believe it is still freezing and snowing in Utah! I definitely prefer the weather here! I got the Christmas card last Monday night with the memory card in it, and I watched the videos last night. It was great to see everybody and my companion and I laughed a bunch at all of Dad’s sarcastic remarks. This week was really good. We had the movie night and quite a few investigators came and we watched the other side of heaven on the church’s projector. The members and investigators really liked it. The ward here is awesome and helps us out a lot here. That’s why there are 6 missionaries in our ward! On Saturday Concepcion and her daughter Elva got baptized. Concepcion is blind and can’t walk due to complications with diabetes. Her family told her that it wasn’t a good idea for her to get baptized because its hard for her to even leave the house, let alone get in water, but she told them that she would do whatever the Lord wanted her to do and had received an answer that this was what she needed to do. My companion and I wanted the members of the ward to baptize our investigators to get them excited for missionary work. The bishop baptized Concepcion and Elva, but we realized that it was really hard to get Concepcion into the baptismal font so my companion and I took our shoes off and rolled up our pants so that we could help carry Concepcion into the water. The Spirit was so strong there and their baptismal service was really special for them and their family. Yesterday Inès and her daughter Natalia got baptized as well. Our ward mission leader baptized them and we had their baptismal service with 2 other people that got baptized by another companionship in our ward. There were lots of people there and the service was really neat as well. The only problem was that Natalia is super scared of water and thought she was going to drown in the font, so we had to coax her and help her a ton so she would finally let the brother baptize her. Poor girl, it’s because there aren’t swimming pools or lakes here and we aren’t close to the coast or anything like that so the people are totally unfamiliar with water. I gave her one of the HLJ (CTR) rings after for being so brave. Today we haven’t really done anything at all. We got up this morning and cleaned the house and studied and then after that we took a nap because we’ve been so incredibly tired this whole week. We’ve been working harder and being more obedient than we’ve ever been and we’ve been seeing the fruits of our labors. I know that Heavenly Father always blesses us according to our desires and that if we do our part, He always does His. I’m jealous you guys got to go to George Strait this week, I miss country music a ton! Let me know who wins the super bowl this week, know that I’ll be rooting for the 49ers. Remember when I blessed the super bowl in church? Ha ha I hope you have a great week in the freezing cold! It’s about 70 in Mexico today! Thanks for everything I love you! Elder Johnson A white weekend in Xochitenco!!

Baptism of Ines & her daughter Natalia

Baptism of Concepcion and her daughter Elva