Week 7 ~ June 24, 2013

Sooooo its been a long hard week and im glad its over with!! Even though it was hard physically I dont think i have ever been this excited to be a missionary!!!! ITS A GREAT TIME TO BE A MISSIONARY!!!! I love serving the lord and i really do love it more and more each day!! it is such an honor to be out here preaching HIS gospel! even though it is really hard i know that i will be blessed soon! I was able to watch the broadcast last night and well... i got to watching it on a members iphone for the first half and then an ipad the second half. they had some technical difficulties but i will tell you what, whenever they said that we will be using internet and technology i was so excited!! they said with in the year the missions will all have the stuff and guess what... i still have 16 months left so this girl will be a technology using missionary. its going to move the work along so much more i know it!! tracting has a 0% affectiveness. trust me. i know i have been doing it for 3 days straight! but i am so greatful for the broadcast cause i feel like it will help the members work harder. the missionaries are literally nothing without the members we have no success!! So everyone, you better step up your a game cause the lord isnt hastening his work for no reason! everyone needs to hear the gospel. EVERYONE and its YOUR job to find people for the missionaries to teach. not our job to find them. so step up to the plate. i am giggling inside right now cause Jake is going home in a transfer and he will be missing out on all the fun!! HA! thats what he gets for rubbing the new boat thing in my face for the past month haha. so you guys dont have to worry... he will get a heart felt letter from me telling him how much he will wish he was a missionary still while he is on the boat cause this work is incredible!! And thats the truth!! The area is a little slow though. the sisters before i got here had found zero new investigators for weeks and so we have one person to teach and she is like basically baptized already so its like lame!! we are working hard thoguh so we will figure something out. members will just have to help us find people to teach :) that makes me so excited. we have an amazing ward mission leader too. and good members!! its going to be great. last week we were going around meeting a lot of the families too and we have been trying to get them thinking of what they can do to help the work move forward. its so amazing i just want to have an ipad already :) i hope we get those cause with the college kids we would go to the institute and show mormon messages with them and they loved them!! now we can just whip them out whenever we want. i hope im not dreaming too big when it comes to the whole ipad thing. i know in washington dc mission they have them already. lucky ducks!! that would be awesome! but its hard work out here. but good work, the LORDS work. i learned that i am nothing without my savior! literally nothing. i cant do anything without him right by my side.

My comp has been a little difficult. way harder than my last one. she doesnt make any decisions and she doesnt know and of her ward. like literally no one. and i am getting mad cause she has been here 6 weeks longer than i have, how could she not know anyone!! it makes me mad and she is a terribel driver. i am scared every time i get in the car. its a little ridiculous. we can switch drivers soon though we just have to call the mission office. umm idk we met a less active family this week and we talked about the restoration a little bit and about the priesthood and how important it is to go to church. they are a super nice family and they are really like cool people i wish the gospel was stronger in their lives though. cause really everyone needs it. this is Gods church, not ours. and so i bore testimony of the priesthood how it can raise people from the dead. and stuff like that. i have seen its miracles in my life. I love the priesthood so much. and even though only the men can hold it, we have just as much access to it as the men. so they are no way better than us. but anyway. im excited to be  a missionary but i do wish i had more people to teach. heavenly father is making me work really hard and learn lots of patience. but i love you all!! Take care!

Love, Sister Tori Johnson

Note from Tabitha:

I asked Tori to send us pictures...I told her that we are all DYING to see more pictures from her.  

This was her response:

i cant send pictures anymore cause well i lost my cord to my camera moving.. and my charger and my camera case but i do have my camera still :) but i guess i do need new one of those!!! by battery is a Cannon NB-8L 3.6V idk if that makes sense but thats what it says hahaha i love yoou so much!

Note from Tabitha:

I will get it all sent out to her so that we can see her!!!  And...I'm not surprised one bit!!

Week 6 ~ June 17, 2013

So 6 weeks is now said and done!!! kinda weird i know! haha as much as that drug on while it was happening, it seemed like i just got to the field last week!!!

So this past week has been a long one! Lots of ups and downs. Tuesday stands out more because we were having a good day lesson wise and we were able to see a lot of success, but the whole day I was down and wasn't really having a good day. So 6:00 came around and Sister Judd was feeling the same way I was too I guess cause I looked at here and said, "I want a blessing" she said that she had been thinking the same thing and was trying to think of who could give us a blessing. I said a man in our wards name and she said yes. We called him up and he was completely willing to give us one. (hes the sweetest thing!!) so we met at the members house  and he gave the most simple sweetest blessing I have ever gotten. He just said that although times are hard you will make it through and what really had been bothering me he nailed it!! He said, "Your friends and family at home love and care about you, and the people here do to." I knew that I had people that cared about me, its just nice to hear it from God. That's the best feeling. God telling us things through blessings. I love the priesthood with all my heart. The priesthood power is the exact same power Jesus had when he was raising people from the dead and helping the blind see and healing the sick. I always knew that too but it just kind of hit me and put it into a better perspective for me. I love this gospel.

So that was the beginning of the week. The most recent drama happened last night.... TRANSFER CALLS!!!!!!! Sister Judd has been on pins and needles this whole week and so when our district leader called he was not gentle about the information at all!! He was like sister Judd your staying in cheney and training, sister johnson your going to colbert and your going to be co senior companion with sister Macdonald. She came out the same week as i did so we are going to be training each other. its a little weird and different but they have to do it because there are so many sisters coming out right now! Its amazing how many people are answering to the call to serve!! the Lord is hastening his work so much!! Its a wonderful time to be a missionary!!! So i will be getting a new address its:

16904 N Day Mt. Spokane Rd

Meed, WA 99021

so i will be living in a members basement with two other sisters. 4 girls in one house. its going to be fun.... NOT!!! haha they said the houses with four missionaries are harder because they are a lot more rowdy but it will be fun. i hate the sun in the mornings so im glad we are in a basement. haha heavenly father loves me so much! 

I'm most sad to be leaving our investigators..... I loved them so much and they were progressing so nicely i am so sad that i have to leave them and they are all out of town so i cant even say good bye to them!!!! its devastating!! I would sent you guys pictures from last week but my camera and the computer dont like each other. the camera is not being recognized so sorry!! i want to send pictures so bad!! but that is just how it goes i guess. 

So funny story today hahaha we had to go do "fear busting" with the brand new missionaries. thats just where they go tracting for the first time and well as most of you know i dont have the best memory in the world.. and so we got to the place where we were all meeting which is 30 minutes away from our house and i look down. NO NAMETAG!!!! im terrible at remembering it!!! i always forget it so a sister had an extra one in her back pack of her name so she let me use it so right now i am sister Guyer hahaha  but i am so mad i forgot my nametag i dont know how that even happens but such is life haha

 anyway i love all of you and i hope your week is going great!!Love, Sister Tori Guyer ;)

Week 5 ~ June 10, 2013

So this week was definitely a humbling week. Full of cancelled appointments and no shows. yesterday was the worst though. my companion was preaching about "miracle monday" which is the monday where its suppose to be pday but you make it not pday because your goingto the temple the next day instead. anyway we had like 6 appointments planned which is a ton so we were so excited cause they were all going to be really good lessons and then all of them cancelled except for one! and the one we had wasnt even a very good one! it was a long day yesterday. but the temple this morning was really good. it was a much needed spiritual filled monday! but it threw off the rest of our day cause we had barely any time to go shopping and we are crunching time for emails too. at the end of the day. but it is alright. i think we got everything done that we needed to. umm the two boys that we had the first lesson with last week are progessing slowly but its good! they are from some pretty rough back grounds and it would take a whole lot of changing on their parts but i know how much it could truely bless their lives. it would be so worth the hard changes!!

well idk this week was pretty slow so i dont really have much to say about it but thanks for all the letters. i love the letters throughout the week! be safe and i love you!

Love sister Tori Johnson

Zone Conference ~ May 14-17, 2013

we had zone conference or something like that but its like christmas for missionaries cause its a day to take a break and just be filled with the spirit and they give us lessons on how to teach and stuff but anyway we listened to a talk (exclusive) for missionaries only ;) but it helped me realize the urgency we have to share the gospel with EVERYONE!!! everyone really needs the gospel and i love that i am here willing to serve!

Week 4 ~ June 3, 2013

So lets see. This week wow it seems like it has been a long week.

So I our third companion got a new companion and she is back in her area. she has what they call a mini missionary cause she isnt a real missionary she is just being a missionary for like 2 or 3 weeks. idk all i have to say is its a good thing i didnt do one of those cause i probably would have never made it here on the real field. haha this is tough work i will tell you what!! anyway we did exchanges with sister senger (the missionary that was with us for like a week) and so i went with her and the mini missionary went with sister Judd. im glad that it was like that. i was able to meet some pretty interesting people when it came to the family wards. haha i love meeting random people they always make me smile later on. But when i was teaching with sister senger without sister judd it was weird i could feel that our discussions were way more spiritually directed instead of being wrote and the same things over and over again so i was in such a good mood, but then when i got back to sister judd, she talks A LOT! like 90% of every lesson so its hard for me to get any words in. but anyway thats besides the point, we had a lesson with some random kid in the park and it was so wrote it was literally like every other lesson that we have so i was instantly in a bad mood. i was like this is not how our lessons were suppose to be. so we talked about it but it was hard for me to describe how i wanted our lessons to be like cause i didnt know exactly what we needed to change to get to where i wanted  us to be so i would just be like okay whatever you have been here way longer you know whats best. and i had done that like 3 times before but again i didnt know how to get to where i wanted us to be. BUT THEN, we had a lesson at like 8:30 last night and those are always the micacle lessons cause they happen right before you have to go home, and this girl had no believe in God she didnt know what role he played and it didnt even bother her that she didnt know. it was so weird but we kept talking to her and kept asking her questions that would get her thinking and so we figured out her needs that she likes simplicity. which is AWESOME cause the gospel is so simple and we showed her a video on lds.org Heavenly Father, Father or Father, Heavenly Father something like that and she really liked it!! so the college here does quarters and so the last quarter is about to end this is the last week before finals and she is leaving as soon as finals are done to go back home, BUT she said that we could send missionaries her way and that she would love to learn more! We walked away from that lesson like we were champs cause we could feel the spirit working through us. we know that thats exactly what she needed to hear. Those are the lessons i love. Heavenly Father was nice to me and sister Judd yesterday though cause on saturday, well we had knocked on someones door and some of these houses are really strange like they have one front door but two different apartment things with the one door and then so we were looking for the person in the right apartment but the guy in the left apartment came to the door (we had seen him before and he didnt like us AT ALL and we have no idea why) but when he opened the door we said HI! and he SLAMMED the door as hard as he could and we were like we werent even wanting to talk to you! we dont even know why he hates us so much!!! but that hurt our feelings pretty bad we were a little down after that so all day yesterday everyone was so nice!!! like most of them were not interested in what we had to say but they werent rude at all. Definitely a tender mercy from Heavenly Father. I dont really remember wednesday or thursday that was too long ago but oh wait on saturday evening we had a lesson with this boy named Corey and the elders had been teaching him but we didnt really know where he was  with anything so me and sister judd were like welp lets just see how this goes.... so we walk up to see him and it was really awkward. all his friends were there and they were all smoking and stuff but they all went in the back yard and we sat on his front porch and we were talking to him for a little bit but then his friend chris came up and just sat down with us (PERFECT!)  and the elders said that he would commit to coming to church but then wouldnt show up so started out by asking him if he really truely wanted to know if the church was true and he said yes, so then we asked him if he has prayed and he said no. so then we had the lesson on prayer. ALL spirit guided and honestly being a missionary doesnt get better than that. when you can feel the spirit telling you what to say... thats when you know your doing you job. well to get to the point, we now have two more investigators who are committed to baptism if they get an answer to know its true. we didnt even teach chris the restoration or anything! we committed him to baptism solely on reading the Book of Mormon and praying to know its the true word of God. we have a lesson with him tonight that me and sister judd are both so excited for! We are teaching a lot of people and i love it. The church is so true! thats all i know and so i will try and help others come closer to Jesus Christ through the church so hopefully i do what i am ment to do. I love everyone so much it is such a good comfort to know that i have such a good support group at home. Always remember I have the Lord on my side and that if im doing what im suppose to be doing he will always be there to keep me safe so dont you worry about me! I Love you guys. Thanks for your prayers!

Love Sister Johnson<35D.gif>

P.S. Tasia this is an announcement to you, YOU BETTER WRITE ME ASAP!!!