The Spirit > Chuck Norris with a Cheese Grater

 This week I've developed a deep appreciation for the power of going to bed on time.

When you use up all of your energy during the day you really need all 8 hours of sleep at night in order to keep giving every day everything you've got without getting cranky or depressed hahaaa!

This week, Elder Farnsworth and I really kicked up our pace and I think did our best to give 100% of our focus and energy to our missionary work between 6:30am and 9pm. We weren't perfect, a few appointments canceled and despite our efforts to plan effectively we still wound up with some gaps in our schedule, but let me TELL ya – miracles, they done be HAPPENIN' here in Nampa Idaho. We had so many referrals this week from members and people calling us out of the blue wanting to have us over that really didn't come directly from our efforts to contact, but which I'm convinced only happened because of two things:

1) The members referring their friends to us had been praying for opportunities to share the gospel in normal and natural ways.

2) God saw that Elder Johnson and Elder Farnsworth were working really hard in their little assigned portion of the Earth so he knew he could trust them with more work.

Besides the regular missionary grind, I've been working on some pretty cool videos this week. Check out our Facebook page, and check out the facebook page for YOUR local missionaries too because missionary content all over the world is getting better as we learn from each other.

My companion and I got permission to leave our area so we could go rock climbing and it was a BLAST! Holy cow my whole body was so sore afterwards, it's been a hot minute since I've cuddled with a man-made sheer face of death and it sure showed.

I got serenaded by our mission president for my birthday (last week, just forgot to mention it). That was easily one of my favorite top 3 once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

I taught a lady from the Bible purely in Spanish and actually did pretty okay considering the circumstances because my companion still doesn't know a whole lot of the language so I was totally on my own if I didn't know how to say something. But it worked out! It's really do or die now I guess which has been the best thing for my language development since Basho and friend's ABC song.

I felt like talking about my companion here for a second, because he's awesome and I learn a lot from him. Elder Farnsworth might be one of the best speakers I have ever met. He did well in debate tournament stuff in highschool and asserts himself in the same way as some of my university professors. He has a knack for absorbing information from books and lectures like a sponge, and then pouring it out to the people he talks to in a very well-spoken way. I swear, sometimes in lessons he'll open his mouth and I'm not sure if it's him or James E. Talmage doing the talking.

Point being, this guy has a gift for intellectual discourse. Every day I learn something new from him, his logical and scholarly approach to the gospel has helped support and build my own testimony in a lot of ways I didn't know it could be strengthened before. And you know what's totally insane? Some people we teach still aren't convinced to believe in Christ or change their lives despite all the charm and intelligence of Elder Farnsworth.

Don't get me wrong, this guy can win any argument. I've seen for myself, he's like Chuck Norris with an electric cheese grater when it comes to tearing down logical and Doctrinal fallacies. But at the end of the conversation, it's still up to the individual to decide whether or not to take in the message we leave with them. People still have the power to choose, and some individuals just choose not to reexamine their convictions and act on our invitation to find out for themselves if what we tell them is true.

So this message is pretty much what I have to say to all those people who still have a vice grip on doubts and this idea that Christ has to come down and convince you that His message for you is true, or that us missionaries have to convince you to believe that God actually spoke to a guy named Joseph Smith a couple hundred years ago and restored Christ's original church and all the power and authority with it including prophets, apostles and the priesthood:

Unless you choose to put down your rhetorical battle-axe and set aside the telescope you've been using to scrutinize and condemn the church and its members from afar, you will never understand us. You can listen to us answer all your hardest questions and still never be satisfied and compare anti literature with their response essays all day long without reaching a consensus. You will lose your faith if you leave it up to somebody else to figure out for you.

Unless you continually give the message of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ an honest chance to work in your life, exactly in the way Christ asks you to, it doesn't matter how much anybody else reasons with you because this isn't something you can be talked or bought into. There are no hat tricks, no rhetoric, just the Spirit.

Gaining your own experiences with the Spirit of God is the only way to be converted to Christ, and it is the only way by which you can gain any kind of witness of God your Heavenly Father or whether or not the Gospel as understood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints comes from the mouths of prophets or super good salesmen trying to get your tithing money.

I teach people about the spirit and include this in my email because now that I know how essential the Spirit is, I want to make sure YOU know what it can do for YOU! I have friends back home, maybe you're one of them, who struggled in their faith because they either weren't having or didn't know how to recognize having those spiritual experiences.

I know it has helped me personally to feel the spirit more after learning about how it works and a little about the different ways the spirit can be felt. It might interest you to watch this 3 part video series on the Spirit by one of our modern day Apostles:

https://media2.ldscdn.org/assets/mormon-channel/mormon-messages-2012/2012-01-012-patterns-of-light-spirit-of-revelation-720p-eng.mp4

I love you! You are awesome. Keep doing good stuff.

Mucho amor,

Elder Johnson

1) Serenading the horses

2) Broke the milk crate stacking record of the food bank at 12 crates

3) These expensive climbing glasses I clowned around and talked in funny voices with much to the chagrin of the professionals there

4) Caught this guy stealing my tots at a move

5) Farnsworth and mwah at the climbing gym

Love is Awesome and You Are Too

 Yeah it's been a minute since I've typed one of these so a lot has happened and it's kind of overwhelming for me to try and put it all into this email so I'll just send you videos and pictures this time. Have fun figuring out the stories behind them.

Actually I'll write a little bit.

First of all, wow thank you so much everyone for the kind birthday letters and emails! I do not deserve to have anyone remember my birthday since I rarely remember or send anything for anyone else's. The emails and cards made me feel really good though. It feels good to feel loved and remembered.

SO, my very good friend reading this, I am sorry for sucking at hyping you up properly on your past birthdays.

Transfers happened this week, so my trainer Elder Cattani left and now my new companion is Elder Farnsworth. He's a homie but I miss Cattani and now I'm the only one who knows what's going on in our area so I have to fill my new companion in on everything oh and also teach him spanish.

Which is crazy. Because I still don't feel like I really speak Spanish. I mostly grunt in Spanish, teaching the gospel sounding like Donald Trump because I still don't have a huge selection of adjectives yet. "The gospel is very, very good. Read the scriptures very, very much." But I know God's only giving me this opportunity to work my spanish muscles even harder and grow in the language faster, so I'm very very grateful for it.

Easter was awesome! We watched general conference with Rosa and she gave us bunny ears to wear while we cooked breakfast and dyed eggs so that was cool.

Read this talk from general conference. It's awesome:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2021/04/25renlund?lang=eng

I met LOTS of truly incredible families these past few weeks, I mean seriously they had some of the most inspiring stories I've ever heard about overcoming challenges and living their best lives despite having all the odds stacked against them... Somebody should come out here and make a Netflix series about the nature of happiness and overcoming challenges and stuff or something like that but idk just throwing that out there.

I successfully accidentally drove from our apartment to the church with the rear door wide open and the car was packed with garbage bags of canned goods. It was only a few blocks away, but my heart still jumped into my throat when I heard the crashing sound of stuff rolling out the back and realized what I'd done. Farnsworth and I retrieved the bags from the road without getting killed and we finished delivering the food safely.

Thinking about love now. We love being loved. Everyone craves feeling appreciated and wanted, but unfortunately feeling genuine and complete love from another person can be really hard for a lot of people to find. This can be for a number of different reasons, the first of which I think is because these people haven't yet figured out how to give and receive perfect love.

There's a lot to sincerely love about everyone, turns out. It doesn't matter how different you might be in age or interest or opinion or if they treated you rude at first, anybody can genuinely love anyone if they get to know them right. If they know how to feel perfect love. 

I talk to all kinds of people every day. I get to make videos of them now, which is cool because it gives me an opportunity to hear them open up about themselves through stories and stuff.

One thing I've found is that there are plenty of conclusions you could draw about anybody from a first look or conversation, but behind the skin of every human being there's a whole universe of a soul that's been amassing hundreds of millions of seconds and moments and memories which are entirely their own. That's just INSANE. Like an intricate machine or symphony or painting, who else but their creator can fully appreciate every detail of the creation?

Paul, an apostle who wrote lots of good stuff in the Bible, said that the greatest gift anyone could have is charity. (1 Corinthians 15)

Moroni in the Book of Mormon defined charity as "everlasting" and "perfect" (8:17), "charity is the pure love of Christ" (7:47).

In other words, Charity is the purest form of love because it is the love of Christ, the love of our creator.

And the coolest part is we can have that love. The ability to love anybody perfectly, including yourself, is a gift which can be given to us by God.

So freaking follow God! Look for Christ's teachings from his own mouth in the scriptures and the mouths of his prophets ancient and modern and do what He asks you to do. There is no greater feeling in the world than looking into somebody else's eyes and feeling your insides get all warm because you feel real, complete love for them for no other apparent reason than they're just a child of God and gosh dangit they're awesome.

You are awesome. I love you. God loves you. :)

- Elder Johnson