God Expects Spiritual Fruit not Religious Nuts

Hello Rest of the World!

This is Sister Johanson! All is well. It's been quite a crazy week! I know you are all prolly expecting to hear about our experiences with the floods and all that jazz...but not much to report on that yet. I promise there will be some in the weeks to come. Our church leaders had been prompted not to dive in to all the service opportunities yet and then it rained some more this weekend and broke some more dams throughout the state and cities close to us. So now we are really going to get the ball rolling with helping out with neighboring cities. Orangeburg was hit, but not nearly as bad as the rest of the state fortunately. So us missionaries are excited to get out and help in the weeks to come. There is a lot of devastation and its so sad to see and hear about. 

Although we haven't been able to help out a whole lot with clean up yet, Sister Rymer and I had a bunch of other service opportunities this week! Amazingly. We helped clean out one of our Less Actives closets who gave us lots of her old clothes. She's about like 80 somethin so we got some real nice sweaters..;) I think my favorite service project of the week was with this one lady who we met a few weeks ago. We texted her Thursday night to see how she was doing and then she texted us back Friday morning saying she had had a really bad week and needed help and company peeling apples. So we got to help her peel apples!! Cuz shes making lots of pies :) She gave us some to take home but it was my most favorite fall service project I've ever done. And then we were able to have a great spiritual thought afterward and got her thinking about baptism. 

I think one of my favorite things about being a missionary is being able to see how God really does play a part in every one of His children's lives. We went and taught a lady named Mayhellen this week. We had met her a couple weeks ago and this was the first real lesson we had. But we committed her to be baptized and she said she has been thinking about baptism ever since we started coming around. But every single person I've talked to, being that God is such a common topic here in the South, it's amazing to see how God is preparing every person to receive the gospel. They may not be completely ready to accept it right now but He is preparing them. We're just helping along in the process. 

I think our most interesting day of the week had to be Saturday. We went to visit a referral who we've been able to talk to on the phone but haven't been able to meet him in person yet. So we went to just stop by and see if we could catch him. We pull up to his house (or what we thought was his house) and there are 3 older guys standing out in the garage. We could tell they were drunk but we wanted to go see if we could find Pernell (that's the referrals name). We asked if Pernell was there and they said that he had died 15 years ago. Well we knew that wasn't possible being that we had talked to him on the phone. So we gave them a Book of Mormon and said that we had to go. As we were leaving one of them yells, "I love you!" so we both just kinda laughed. Then he yells, "Say it back!!" so I yell, "We Love you!!!" and then we get in our car and drive away. Then later that night we had dinner at a members house who said she said she had some investigators for us. Man, you learn a lot of different things in the south. The one lady we actually got to teach some of the restoration to was..very "learned." She has done a lot of research in her days and really enlightened our minds to things I had never even considered. She asked us about where Jesus was in his childhood and teenage years. Well she knows! "Because He was such a mischievous child, his parents didn't know how to help in control His powers. And everybody in Egypt were partiers, they all loved beer. So He went over to India and learned from the monks. They helped Him learn how to channel His powers by meditation and yoga. Ya know things like that. But then they kicked Him out because He was trying to convert them." (By the way kids, that is false doctrine. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.) But anyway...she demanded us to ask her to be baptized so we did. But we didn't feel it was appropriate to put her on date yet. We want her to come to church so she can get an idea of what she's actually learning.

But anyway...that was our week in a nutshell. Hope you guys are all doing well, that you're dry wherever you are. I love you all! 

Sister Johanson JR

A yw who wanted to take selfies.

Our nice drive through the country

And north South Carolina...which lies I. The middle of SC.