Week 31 ~ December 16, 2013

Good afternoon everyone! Hope the warm weather is hitting you too! it Rained this week instead of snowed!! Tender Mercy of the Lord. He knows me very well! Well this week has been incredible!! It started off with a lesson with one of our most awesome part member families. The Boyd's are like my all time favorite. There is the mom who is a less active member coming back to activity with a non-member husband and then they have 3 daughters who are the most adorable things in the world. We love them so much! We taught them the plan of Salvation. The dad hasn't shown too much interest but he just wants to know what we are teaching his children so he has been sitting in but in the Plan of Salvation he was trying not to act too interested but we had a map laid out all over the floor and he was moving trying to get a good view of the map. When we caught him looking he had to pull his phone out so that he could act not interested :) It was good. Then they came to our ward Party on Friday and I think they enjoyed it. The dad hasnt come to church yet but his girls are loving it! Then there has been this girl coming to church the past couple of weeks and the friends of the girl said that she was ready to take the missionary discussions and get baptized!!!! MIRACLE!! I have never seen something like that in my life! So we are going to start teaching her soon :) she is so great! i am so stoked. It just strengthens my testimony that this is the Lord's work. I can Work and work and work and work and nothing will happen. but as soon as i turn my success over to the Lord is when he starts blessing me with people to share the gospel with. so there are always super prepared people and then there are also those people who just want to bash with us... we had one of those this week too it was so funny :) there was this guy who was a youth pasture for some religion. and he had a paper full of quotes and book of mormon scriptures to try to prove that we dont believe that it is by grace that we are saved and idk all of this crap it was quite funny he was bound and determined to stump us. needless to say he just looked stupid. we had brought this young man with us that just got back from his mission a couple weeks before and so we had to leave and the lesson wasnt really done yet so the kid that just got back from his mission stayed there and didnt argue with him but argued with him for another hour and a half. haha i thought it was so funny. its been good to have people who will go with us to lessons. like that. Well i am almost out of time but i love you all thank you so much for all that you do for me! Merry CHRISTmas! and a happy new year! :)

Love Sister Johnson 

Week 30 ~ December 9, 2013

Well its official I am not ever going to get married!!! Way to much work! haha just kidding i will get married. i will just make sure that i actually like him. haha :) thats my life lesson for the week. Other than that it was a pretty normal week beside the fact that it has hovered around 10 degrees all week!!! it was too cold to even snow! thats what they said or something idk. when it did snow it was just like dry powder on the ground and it blows away and doesnt cause ice on the ground which is quite nice!! i loved that part of it. well okay this sounds lame but this week was very uneventful i am sorry i dont have much to say but nothing really happened. we have just been working with our less active members. there was a random guy at church yesterday and so we introduced ourselves and he was a non member and he is from nevada but his wife is a member and so he just wanted to check it out. which is really awesome that never happens!! haha but yeah i am doing great. this week i promise i will have a lot more things to say. its going to be a good week this week!! well i love and appreciate all you guys do for me!! Happy early Christmas!!!

Love sister Johnson

Week 28 ~ November 25, 2013

Well hello everyone!! things here in colbert are going great!! Tuesday will be my first baptism!  We have been teaching a little 9 year old her name is sophie and she is just the cutest thing in the whole entire world!! she is so excited to be baptized so on tuesday we will have the blessing to watch her get baptized!! this past weekend we have been teaching lots of people we got a lot of lessons last week and then we even got to do service for one of our old investigators and there was 8 elders and 2 sisters me and my companion but it was so much fun. you could tell the elders that grew up actually having to work and do stuff and then the ones that grew up in the city and dont know how to work. its funny how different circumstances affect people so much. obviously i was taught to work and so i was the one splitting the wood with another elder. haha then there was an elder with a chain saw and then another splitting wood and the rest were just gathering the wood and taking it to sister stratton to stack in the truck. we did a lot of wood it was so much fun! i loved every second of it. getting wood back at home isnt half as fun as it is when you are a missionary... sorry mom! :) but yeah it has been great to be a missionary. Meeting Elder Oaks was the best thing that has ever happened to me! When you saw him you can just see the light of christ radiating out of him. he is so kind and you can just feel the love he has for you and the savior and you can just feel how much heavenly father loves you when you see him. thats what i got out of it. i was so happy to shake his hand!! we have just been rockin it out here. i love being a missionary so much. these next couple weeks i am going to try and work on being more loving like elder oaks was! I want others to feel a glimps of what i was able to feel with him. well i love you all so much! thanks for all your love and support! i appreciate all you do for me! 

Love Sister Johnson

Week 27 ~ November 18, 2013

Well hello everyone!! It was great to get all your emails! Thank you so much!! So this week has been another great week! It started a little shaky but things picked up nicely! Thursday we had a zone conference where three different zones get together and they give us this huge training. So yes it was very exciting and i feel like all i want to do is go out and teach people about jesus now and baptize them! haha but anyway in the training we learned about how we are held to a high standard. as missionaries and as members of the church. we focused on the missionary one at the meeting. but Pres. Mullen told us that the lord is hastening his work and that he has a new vision for the mission. So President Mullen told us that he had received revelation for the mission and he said that we can be bringing more souls unto christ. he said that last month we had 35 baptisms throughout the mission. he said that the lord wants that doubled and that we can be having 3 lessons per day with 4 of our investigators at church every week, our church attendance up by 10%, AND last but not least he said that each companionship can be having a baptism every week! So I am letting the Lord have me and he can use me as his instrument. so from me he will be getting one baptism a week. i have so much faith that is very much possible and that i can live up to this standard that the Lord has for me. its so great! i can just feel the excitement that the lord has for his work!  so that night after the training we picked up a new investigator! then saturday we got another investigator ( we will have to pass him off to the ysa sisters though :(  )  but then saturday morning our ward mission leader called up me and sister stratton and had some very exciting news!! he said that he and his wife have been working with this person and that she has agreed to go to church and that she wanted to learn more about our church and so we are now going to teach her the discussions is our ward mission leaders home!! so its just like things are falling into place to succeed!! its so exciting!! :) Saturday we also had a lesson with some less actives that think they are active but never come to church so we called them unto repentance and they were at church yesterday! :) saturday was jsut a day full of miracles! then on sunday we had like 4 less actives at church and 2 investigators so we are slowly getting to our goals! that is less than one week of the announcement of the Lords new vision. The members are starting to see that we wont leave them alone until they get us people to teach so it has been so great!! i love it. This is the Lords work and he is doing it! i love this time that i ahve to be a missionary! :) i miss you all but sorry im not coming back anytime soon ;)!!!

Love, Sister Tori Johnson

Week 26 ~ November 12, 2013

Okay i will try and write this out before i get too busy at the end haha but oh my it is a great time to be a missionary ESPECIALLY in washington. one the 24th of November we are having a special stake conference where elder Dallin H Oaks is going to come and speak to us and we were given strict instruction to not plan anything right after the conferecne because he wants to meet us and give us some help. OUR STAKE ONLY ;) tender mercy of the Lord!! the other missionaries are going to be so jealous haha but yeah i am excited for that! then there is rumors flying like crazy!! i guess elder ballard gathered all of the stake presidents and our mission president together in our mission and told them that our mission needs to step up our work. He told the stake presidents to gather all the Return missionaries together and so president Larson (our stake president) came to sacrament meeting on sunday and made an announcement to all the return missionaries to come up to the stand after the first meeting was over and told them that they need to do more for the Lord. they are all returned missionaries and know what it take so he told them that they needed each find one person for us to teach before Christmas. there are like 60 RM's in my ward. I feel like the work is just on the edge of an explosion! like no joke. my whole out look on missionary work changed when i heard this. i HAVE to be here. i dont want to be anywhere else. but in the Allegory of the Olive Tree in Jacob 5 it is like the final stage of the work. Heavenly Father is going to send forth his best servants to prune and help the vineyard one last time and try to bring forth good fruit one last time. This is it! Then He is here! I am so excited to be out here. this work is way bigger than me and way bigger than any of us. we are just suppose to do our part to get someone to teach. its vital they hear the message of the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I hate how is has taken me this long to figure it out. We are having a zone conference again on thursday and we are going to get training on what elder ballard taught Pres. Mullen when they had that meeting. its going to be awesome. rumor is we are going to be pressed to have a baptism a week! big goals but i have total faith that if that is what heavenly father wants that is what i will do. Other than all my excitement for missionary work I am doing so great!! I have started a Fast with our ward. for 40 days one member of our ward will be fasting. i myself wanted to participate so for 40 days i gave up sweets and treats and candy. its been so great! just from this fast we have seen so many miracles!! but i also have been gaining weight so this will be good for me i have been on a health kick! i love it. i just feel so much healthier and happier. its been so energizing! i will come back home and everyone will think i am weird but hey, thats what a mission does to you right? im suppose to come back awkward and weird haha. i can promise you that will happen. if it doesnt than we will have bigger problems. I love you all so much and appreciate you all so much! stay strong and know that Jesus loves each of you so perfectly! 

Love Sister Tori Johnson

Week 25 ~ November 5, 2013

Well well well what do we have here. SNOW! thats what!! crazy i know!!! i was not expecting that either! so my email is on tuesday this week because i went to the temple this morning. wonderful like always and very uplifting. Satan has been working on me and Sister Stratton a lot these past few days. But its great because thats when I can expect something incredible to happen. 

Halloween was great! we had a trunk or treat with our ward. that turned out great and we had one of our investigators there and then a few less active families there. i love things like that were it is easy for those people to come. then daylight savings hit.... i can honestly say i do not understand the point of switching my clock an hour back! it just seems silly to me. especially since it is now completely dark by 4:30 in the afternoon now. seriously they should just quit doing it if you ask me. well i dont have much time now everyone keeps emailing me back really quickly and so i get distracted but we are having a baptism on the 24th of november there is a 9 year old girl that we are teaching. her dad is a member and so she is a little late on getting baptized but we are excited for it. teaching the law of chastity to a 9 year old isnt really that fun. i made sister stratton do that part and i did the work of wisdom :) hahahaha it was classic! she didnt do it very good and i wasnt about to reiterate the things she missed so i just kept going haha she is 9 we just skipped that part! haha anyway things are oging great here in spokane! i love it here and the people are great! life is wonderful and i love and miss you guys!! I pray for you all often! 

Love sister Tori Johnson  

Week 24 ~ October 28, 2013

Well i made it through another week. dont worry i didnt die! but i am actually doing great!!!! i had a bit of a cold the last couple of weeks and so i am starting to get over that. but this week we have really started to get our ward more involved in the work! I love it when we are able to get our ward members excited about missionary work! this last week we were able to teach a young man who is dating a less active girl in our ward. he is so great! he has gone to church with his friends his whole life practically and really just wants to learn and grow! I asked him last night if he wanted to be baptized and he said he does more than anything he just wants to make sure he is doing it for the right reasons. well he is 22 years old so guess what... He gets to go to the ysa ward!! SO LAME!!!! he is so prepared! but that is okay it is all the same work! but I am doing good fall is beautiful I love it out here! winteris just around the corner though! I am mentally preparing myself for the worst! I love and appreciate all you guys do for me! I will keep praying for you all and I hope your all praying for me! I need all the prayers I can get :) haha I love you!

Love Sister Tori Johnson