July 27, 2009

Subject: I stole it one piece at a time and it didn't cost me a dime

Hello. I'm sorry everyone is feeling poorly. That’s no fun. Half my ward over here currently has swine flu apparently so that should be fun. I've even doled out some blessings for swine flu but I figure you can’t get sick when you’re giving a blessing so I should be fine.

I keep meaning to make a list during the week of things I wanted to say to you but I never do. Then I forget what I was going to say when I sit here typing. First of all that’s absolutely hilarious that Caleb passed out. It makes sense, though, after all the years of dad calling parents on the way home from trips to tell them their child is in the hospital. It’s only fair that one of his kids actually did have a medical problem on a trip. So I'm sorry, Caleb, but you can pretty much blame your dad for that one.

I'm glad you guys actually have taken the boat out now. It looks really nice. Did mom reupholster (no idea how that’ spelled) more of the boat? The upper part of the back seat looks like it’s been done. Kasey definitely needs to get in the water and wakeboard. It's not scary and it doesn't hurt. See I know there was a lot more I wanted to say I just don't remember what it was.

We keep getting told how the mission is doing away with bikes and won't be paying for anything and the vehicle coordinator acts really surprised that we still use bikes. But there is absolutely no other way to get around here. It's a small town and doesn't have busses and it would take us half an hour to an hour to walk from appointment to appointment and we get yelled at if we don't have 9 effective hours in a day so basically we are out of luck.

Our bikes are barely hanging in there. Then at zone conference we got a talking to about how we need to keep mission cars clean and looking nice because that’s the first impression people have of us. I don't know what kind of a message my bike gives, but I can't imagine it's a good one. My pedal fell off the other day and we fixed it as best we could with what tools we have, but now my bike makes a sound of metal rubbing against metal and people can hear me coming from far away. It actually gives me a headache while we ride.

The work is still picking up in the area. We have 5 people scheduled now and have been able to do a lot more teaching so that’s been exciting. Although we did have an interesting experience this week. We got a bucket of water dumped on us from an upstairs window while knocking. Elder Berg got soaked. Only one of my arms got wet because I was on the porch. I didn't know things like that actually happened. I thought those were just stories people told.

Beverley is a town full of quite possibly the rudest people I've ever met in my life. But we’re still managing to find people to teach. We've been really blessed the last couple of weeks and it’s been exciting. The assistants came on splits with us the other week to show us what we were doing wrong and how to find more investigators. We did 6 hours of finding with them and found 1 new investigator who dropped us the next day so it made me feel a lot better about what we've been doing for the last couple of weeks and the assistants left pretty disappointed. We've got some challenges to overcome with our investigators, but I'm excited to actually be able to work with people again.

Thanks for all you guys do. Thank you so much for the last package you sent. The cookies were very good and I really appreciated it. Tell Sandra thank for the letter she sent. I really enjoyed it. Love you all. Thanks for all you do. The Church is true.

Elder Cody Scott Johnson