Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Did You Think To Pray??

Hi. K, I will start the letter now,

This last week we had what's called a mission tour. Every year, each mission is visited by a general authority. This year, for our mission
tour, we had Elder Snow from the Seventy visit us. There was two meetings, one for upstate missionaries and one for the city missionaries (Manhattan, Bronx, Harlem). The night before President Morgan told us each to write a 5 minute talk. When we got there Elder Snow was like, "I am going to call 4 missionaries to come up and give a talk and then afterwards we will all critique them." I am usually fine with speaking in public but I was praying I wouldn't get picked. Luckily I wasn't picked and I was able to sit and enjoy the other talks.

We had stake conference this last week. Since President Taylor (stake president of the Westchester stake) is leaving, we received a new stake president, which means that Elder Snow was there. All of us missionaries in the Bronx are a part of the Westchester stake which is half city and half upstate. The meeting was upstate a little bit so all the missionaries and most of the members without cars loaded up on buses and went to stake conference. It was magical seeing buses taking loads of people to attend stake conference.

Elder Schneider aka Schneiderman and I a few weeks ago contacted a man outside of his apartment building. He said he would love to have us come by sometime so we got his information and told him we would come back. Unfortunately, we lost the card with his information on it so we had no way of calling him or no way of knowing his apartment number. This man was legit and we couldn't let him slip through our fingers so we decided to go back to that apartment and knock on every single door until we found him. We got outside of the apartment and there was a locked gate that we couldn't get passed, along with a locked front door. We decided to pray because 1. We couldn't get in.  2. We had no clue what his apartment number was and we really didn't want to knock 100 doors. 3. Why not pray? We prayed and a little less than 2 minutes later a guy walked out and we were able to sneak in behind him and get inside the gate. We were now past the gate but needed to get in last that main door. Turns out the guy "forgot something" so he turned back and opened the main door so we were in suckas!! Schneiderman and I both looked at each other and said at almost the same time, "Let's try 4F". We went up and tried apartment 4F and, sure enough, his cousin answered and said that he lived there. Now we have his info so his baptism date is TBD. Was this a coincidence that we were able to get in both locked doors and the first door we tried was his apartment? I think not!!! #IBelieveInMiracles

We met with an investigator that hasn't been able to come to church in months for health reasons. We taught her a lesson and offered to give her a blessing. She wanted the blessing so just as Elder Schneider and I stood up to give her a blessing she reaches on to her head and pulls off her hair!!!! She has had a wig this whole time. We laid our hands on her naked head and gave her a blessing. We love her and it doesn't matter to us that she wears a wig... we just..... thought she had hair all this time.

Last night we were at the church doing the sports night with youth,  like we do every Tuesday. After it ended and we were locking up the chapel with Bishop Merkley, we went into the gym and shot a few hoops. Bishop Merkley made a wager that if we (Schneider, Kia, Griffiths, and I) made a full court shot before he did, he would buy us dinner sometime. After about 10 minutes of taking turns shooting full court shots I finally made it! Bishop Merkley now owes us dinner, but even more than that, he is a fun guy. What a champ.

It is incredible being able to see miracles out here every day. I encourage each of you to look for the miracles in your life. They're there, I promise.

-Elder Tyler "The Snack That Smiles Back" Johanson

"The world is our toilet"-Every Male 

 On the bus for stake conference. #skkkrttt

There are pretty dangerous gangs of 9 year olds. Watch out for "The Boys."

No comments:

Post a Comment