you gotta lose some weight to get through the narrow gate

Tue, Feb 3, 2009

It’s my last week as a super green greenie!!! After Thursday I’ll only be a green greenie. Transfers are this week but both me and sister Davenport are staying put. Okay, so this week I decided to carry around a little notebook with me so I could write down all the stuff I wanted to write y’all because before I would sit down at the computer and completely forget everything that happened so now I’m more organized.

Okay, I totally forgot last week to talk about how I got to go out to lunch with my Aunt Ellen, Uncle Mike, and cousin Andrew. It was a lot of fun. We went to an authentic bbq place. Yum. It was cool to see them again cause we reminisced about Mexico. Fun stuff.

The coolest thing that happened this week was that Juliet and Justin were baptized and confirmed. Yay! Juliet is a 5’ Barbie doll. She was taught previously by some missionaries in August, but then stopped returning phone calls. A couple months later Juliet called us after the other sisters had left and said that she still wanted to learn more. We taught her and invited her to be baptized and she accepted. Wow. As soon as that baptism date was set her world went crazy. Her mom had to go to the hospital, she had a haircut disaster—a bunch of bad stuff. She ended up postponing the baptism. For the 31st, but then things were going crazy some more and she started feeling like she wasn’t ready and she was super stressed and wanted to hold off the baptism another week. We told her this was a decision between her and God, but we felt like she was ready if she chose to be baptized. She left a message the night before that said, “Well, I was thinking about it and I’ve decided I want to be baptized…(intense half second pause)…tomorrow. I don’t think I can handle another week of torture.” Yay!!!! It was great. She’s so tiny that she was baptized in a little eight year old dress. She loved it.

Justin is the husband of Colleen who was baptized last month. He wasn’t ready to be baptized when his wife was. We had decided to back off from him for a while and give him some room to decide what he wanted to do. But we were teaching Keeley (Colleen’s 14-year-old daughter and Justin’s step daughter) and she decided that she wanted to be baptized, but she was nervous about what her father would think. We told her that we would fast with her to soften her father’s heart so that he would allow her to make this decision. We invited Colleen and Justin to join us in the fast. Colleen called Justin and was talking to him and then she said, “He said he’ll do it too.” Sister Davenport and I looked at each other and said “Do what?” “He’ll get baptized too…with Keeley.” We almost fell over with shock. It was cool. In the end Keeley decided to wait a little while longer, but her dad has totally changed. Whereas before he wouldn’t even discuss the church with her. Now he’s researching it and says he likes the morals but doesn’t believe in Joseph Smith. Miracle.
Larry the minister came to the baptism and the confirmation and said that he liked it a lot. During the meeting a three year old chucked a balled up program over the bench and it hit Larry in the chest. “I’m being stoned!” he exclaimed. The kid’s parents were mortified. Larry also said something really funny. He was writing a sermon and said, “you gotta lose some weight to get through the narrow gate.” Haha. Good old Larry.

The other day we parked our car on the side of the road and I saw this guy running down the sidewalk and all of the sudden I heard myself saying “I have to talk to this guy.” The next thing I knew I was jumping out of the car and startled the guy. “Hi!” said I. “Oh, hi..” He ran right passed me. Oh no! I was supposed to talk to him. So I yelled after him, “Can I give you a card?” Lame tactic, but it was all I could think of to say. “What? A card for what” “A free book of Mormon.” The guy stopped and listened as we explained who were are. He told us that he was a youth minister for his church but has been very confused about authority and wonder if he really even had authority to be a minister. Then wanted to understand more about being baptized by the Holy Ghost. He said that he had been to Utah and had met a lot of Mormons and he said that they seemed like they were people who were in the world but not of the world. Phew! I always hold my breath when someone says they knew some Mormons cause I’m afraid those Mormons might have left a negative impression, but so far everyone says good things about the Mormons they knew. Anyways, we have an appointment with him tomorrow.

Question: What is going on with the Zoo’s? We hear all this filtered news, but is there really no money to feed the zoo animals? And what is going on with the economy because in Austin things are starting to get bad.

We are getting new elders in this area that will be taking over one of our wards so we will only have two wards. Phew. We were spread too thin. And I don’t care what anyone says, 7 hours of church is a lot of church. But I like it.

We helped a lady yesterday clean out her house. She collects beanie babies. She had 20 boxes full of beanie babies. That’s a lot of beanie babies.

I love listening to little kid's prayers. They always say, “thank you for this day. Thank you for the sisters.” I love being a “sister.” It was weird at first, but it’s growing on me. I like being Sister Johnson. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I just really like it when people here call me Sister Johnson.

The other day I decided that being a kid is so cool and I miss it. There were kids climbing into the sewer and I just sighed thinking about when Kirsten and I would play by the sewer singing songs to the alligator that lived there. Only we could see him.

Okay. That’s everything on my list. Next week I’ll work on an organized flow of ideas. Welcome to the brain of me.
sj