It's so green down here!

Aloha!

Well folks, after spending the first half of my mission entirely in the desert, I have finally been transferred down the hill! It's crazy, I've been in the desert surrounded by dust, dirt, and Joshua Trees for so long, it almost feels like I'm on another planet.  I'm now serving down in Ontrario in the Mountain View ward. I'm excited for the change! My new comp is Elder Gomez from Utah (just like half of us out here). He's champ!

The last few days in an area are always a little sad; saying goodbye to all the people you've worked with and spent most of your time around. I was able to see a lot of the people we saw quite frequently, which was nice :) I had to say goodbye to Elder Paxton, who I served with for 3 transfers, which equates to about 4 1/2 months, which is quite legendary, if I do say so myself! He's staying up in Hesperia to take care of Mojave River.

We saw Jeremy a few times this week and he read us some more of his comedy routine, and boy, it's golden! He has a bit where he talks about things to say when a telemarketer calls and it's all insanely weird, dark, and often a bit edgy, but soo funny. He's been a little depressed lately, but he's slowly, but surely making progress.

Stay positive and love your life!!

Aloha ke Akua

-Elder Johnson 

"This fire is outta control" -Franz Ferdinand

Aloha!

Holy cow.. Last night was insane.. When we got out of church yesterday at 4, the there was a huge dark cloud of brown smoke in the sky. At around noon yesterday a fire started right near Silverwood Lake, which isn't too far from where we live in Hesperia. By the time evening came around the sky was just completely full of smoke and the fire had burned about 1500 acres and was 0% contained. When we came in last night at around 9:30, we found out they were going to be evacuating our whole zone down up to Victorville! It was crazy.. When you cram 8 Elders into a small apartment, you're asking for one crazy night! But it's doing better now. We're moved back into our place in Hesperia and sky isn't AS full of smoke as it was. The last I've heard is the fire has burned 4500 acres, but is now 5% contained haha.

Other than the fire, this week has been a fairly good week. We saw Yolanda, who is still making a recovery from her surgery. We saw a couple of our investigators that we haven't been able to contact for a while, which was really good.

 We finally made it over to Jeremy's to help him clean his apartment! But it didn't really go the way we thought it would.. He wanted to start my clearing off a couple of the tables he had that were clutter with junk and bottles and bottles of pills. We literally dumped everything off the tables into garbage bags. We were about to take the garbage bags out, but Jeremy stopped us and said he didn't want to get rid of all that stuff; he just wanted all the stuff in garbage bags to get it out of the way. So we set those bags aside and got some separate garbage bags to put in everything that was for sure garbage, like used paper plates and empty macaroni cans. After a couple minutes he said, "alright, that should be enough." Elder Paxton and I just looked at each other like, "what??" We hadn't even made a dent. Jeremy kept saying that he was too scared. He was too attached to all the junk lying around his apartment. It was pretty sad, but we ended up helping him type up his poetry, which was good for him.

Life is good. We all go through hard times, and each of us has our own unique challenges, but remember that everything will be alright. Your heavenly father loves you and he is there for you :)

Stay positive and love your life!!

Aloha ke Akua

-Elder Johnson

Serving at the Lord's Table

Fire too close to home....

Sunday night evacuation

"Put that pain to some good use, anyway" -Nahko

Aloha!

Holy Cow, Is it August already? As the old Green Day song says, "it seems so frightening; time passes by like lightning." Seriously though, I'll hit my year mark this month and it totally does not feel like I've been out that long haha

This has been a pretty interesting week. Last Monday, Elder Paxton actually dislocated his shoulder during sports at our zone activity. He was in excruciating pain. I think the worst was waiting around in the urgent care for 45 minutes while he was just in constant pain, but once they fixed him up he was A LOT better. They did give him some pain killer that was six times more potent than morphine, which for sure helped XD

Because of the injury, He has to be off the bike for a couple week, so the work has been a little slow. We've done quite a bit of walking, which I actually don't mind too much. It's kind of nice :)

Yolanda had her surgery and is doing really well! They went through her throat to get to her neck, so her voice is a little weak, but she happy and in recovery mode!

Jeremy said some pretty interesting things. He told us one of his incredible new poems. I remember there was some line about "vomiting purple furniture" XD

Stay positive and love your life!!

Aloha ke Akua

-Elder Johnson