With His Wee, Beady Eyes

May 12, 2014

With His Wee, Beady Eyes

Well, I'm sure you're all sick of hearing from me by now, but I have nothing else to do right now, so buckle up.

I would just like to explain that if it seemed like I was getting emotional [during the Mothers Day Skype], that was, believe it or not, actually just the overwhelming fish smell that sometimes comes out of nowhere here.  

Something I was trying to explain yesterday, though it may not have come out right, is that in spite of the living-together problem here, we are praying as a mission every single morning at 8 am to find a married family.  The result has been very quiet, but surprising.  We are slowly finding more and more married families to teach, and not necessarily by extraordinary ways.  We seem to be finding them by: (1) Trying to talk to every single family we find—kind of a panning for gold thing, and (2)  A higher discernment for knowing who is married.  It's not like they have it stamped on their heads or anything, but we can now oftentimes tell.  There is a certain respectful way to dress and act, a certain way they walk with their spouse and children that just shows that they care enough to really prove that they are in it for the long run.  The fun part about that is the striking difference in their comprehension of the eternal families concept.  They inherently understand the importance of authority in order to have a valid family, and understand the sadness in the phrase "til death do you part."  There's a light that enters their eyes when you explain to them the eternal family concept that I simply never remember seeing with other couples. So that's fun.

We talked to Jorge right after the Skype call.  He says that he's still willing to get baptized on Saturday if he gets his answer, but he just hasn't asked on his own.

Carlitos Mejia got baptized on Saturday.  His family is now active in the church and has had an interview with the bishop to set a temple goal.  Woohoo!

The world cup is coming up, so we are going to go to town on finding some more people.  Let's go!  Also, I will just say right now how grateful I am that Peru didn’t make it in.

Anyway, my companion is probably going to have the worst day of his life today.  He needs to get a wisdom tooth pulled, and it will only cost him 50 soles.  Yes, that is less than 20 dollars.  But, talking to some members, we found out that it's not totally uncommon to have that cost 20 soles, which is, according to my calculations, enough money to tie your wisdom tooth to a string which is then in turn tied to a door.  Just kidding.  He'll be all right, and as a bonus, I will get to catch up on Jesus the Christ.

Love you all.  Make good choices.

Elder Johnson

PS - Whoops.  The title didn't make sense without a picture of Hermano Rojas.  So there's a picture of him and a picture of the baptism on Saturday.