Random Mission Pictures

The combine I rode at the Thorntons in Kuna

Me and my cow Tri-tip(we feed him everyday on the farm where we live)

The aftermath of July 4th

Meridian "miracle" South Zone

Funny zone picture

My MTC District at the Provo Temple

Week 11

Hey Mom, wow I almost was thinking that I wasn't gonna get a letter
from you this week, I was almost done writing my e-mails before it
said I finally got one from you. lol

So good luck on the tri! I want to do that for sure when I get back
home. For exercise we use our total gym, I think I told you we bought
one. We got it at a garage sale for 20 bucks and it's awesome. We
play basketball on Monday and Friday at 6 am and then on Wednesday
and Thursday starting this week, we are going to start running to one
of our church buildings that's a mile away. It's really hard to find time
and energy to work out and it's impossible to not eat a lot here when
every night people feed us a feast!

Brent's baptism was awesome, he asked me to give a talk on the Holy
Ghost too so that was cool. It went really well. I'm getting pretty
good at talking now. I went up and talked for 5 minutes with out
anything really written out or anything.

Brent's Baptism 08/08/09

Brent's baptism (Tammy, Jared, Elder Johnson, Brent)

Elder Mintoghe is from D.C.  He lived in the inner city so probably
areas the Bakers would never even dream of walking down. He
does know a friend of mine from BYU so that was cool to make
that connection.

The weather here has been ok. This week it rained two days straight.
It was horrible because we were on bikes. We had to tract in it too
so we were soaking wet for those two days, but I guess rain is rare
here so I won't have too many of those days here which is good.
Speaking of bikes, whoever assembled my bike didn't do it right. They
didn't put the cranks in right and I found out the bent crank was due
to that. We have a guy here that used to work at a bike shop and he
basically has one in is garage now. I went over there for him to check
it out and he took of my crank and it was almost completely stripped
inside. That would have cost me a couple hundred bucks for new
cranks, but he had an extra old pair so he put that on for me. It was a
big blessing, but I wasn't happy to find out my bike that is only two
months old had stripped cranks.

The kids out here start school in two weeks, so we're trying to use up
a lot of time with our Priests now before school starts. We would get
to go to the Boise Temple every week here in Nampa because we
have a lady that usually takes us but the Temple is closed for
cleaning for another ten days, so in two weeks we'll go. 

Out here we eat at Sonic, Panda, Qdoba, Subway and Mcdonalds, so
any of those places would be awesome. I haven't gotten Tammy's
package or letter yet, I got Grandma and Grandpa's last week, it was
nice. I haven't received a piece of mail for 5 days and I'm dying right
now to be honest, lol, getting mail is amazing here and I hate when I
don't get any lol. 

Ok, I'll end on a good note, we have two baptisms this month,
Saundra is getting baptized on the 22nd and Tyler is getting baptized
on the 29th. So that's exciting and we're also challenging another
investigator tonight to be baptized so good stuff is happening.

Well I love you guys and thanks a lot for the post card
it was awesome, those pictures look sweet. Love you guys!!

Week 10: Hello From Nampa

I am officially in Nampa now and its been really good.

So here in Nampa, we live in a big red barn. It's actually a garage and
we live on top but it looks like a barn. We have our own bathroom,
kitchen, kitchen table and a couch plus our beds, so it's much better
than our last place. We cover half a stake here. We cover the Nampa
South Stake, the 5th, 10th, 17th, 22nd and 28th ward. The 28th ward
is a singles ward so that's cool to go there, but that ward is dead. We
have had no work there in months, mostly because the ward mission
leader has been engaged and isn't really going anymore and they
haven't called a new one yet. We do have some investigators in the
other wards. I got put here because one set of elders used to cover
the whole stake, 9 wards, but they just split it up so that 2 sets of
Elders cover the stake now. Elder Mintoghe was here before and he
said that most of the work and investigators went to the other Elders
area so we spent a lot of time this week tracting and going through
former investigators and other potentials. We had success! We found 
3 investigators! That is proof that if missionaries can find people to
teach through tracting, no excuses for members to not give them
people to teach. My request is for you to find people for the
missionaries to teach. If we get referrals we won't have to spend the
30 hours of tracting we did this week. 

We teach a boy named Tyler Gregory here, his mom is LA (less active)
and he's 13 and decided to take the lessons. Last night we taught him
and I challenged him to be baptized and he accepted and is gonna be
baptized on August 29th! It was awesome, it was the first time I
challenged someone and it was scary to be honest! But it was so
rewarding. So out here we have 2 others that we are gonna 
challenge to baptism this week. One is Saundra, and she is a 20 year
old single mom, her friend is Mormon and she has been taking the
lessons. We've only taught her twice but she has been coming to
church every week and loving it and she said she has felt such a great
peace ever since. She is so GOLDEN! The other is a little girl named
Sara, she's 12 and all her family is LA and she is the only non-member.
We call her an OAY (over age youth). She is so smart and I think next
week we'll challenge her. We actually have one more you wants to be 
baptized but she lives with her boyfriend and we told her that she has
to move out, break up, or get married to be baptized and she doesn't
like any of those choices so it will be a while before she gets baptized
I think.

Elder Mintoghe is so awesome. He's been out 18 months. His story is
that he was born in Gabon, a country on the western coast of Africa.
He moved to Washington DC when he was 6 and lived here ever since.
He's a convert, he ran into the missionaries when he was 17. He's
such a power house and has taught me so much!!! I'm going to learn
so much from him this transfer, it's going to be great. We are in a car 
share here. We share with 2 other sets of missionaries. How we do it
is we get it four days, then they get it 4 days, then the other set gets
it 4 days then we get it again. It's kinda different but our area is
smaller so its ok to be on bikes. We have a lot of restaurants here too,
we have Panda Express and Qdoba! It's awesome but its expensive
so we get stuff to cook at home. The members here are great and
feed us every night and feed us a lot! We take the Priests out on
splits with us a lot which is really cool. We are the Nampa Zone, and
our Zone Leaders are cool and there are like 3 other Elders I know
that are cool. So my last zone was amazing I guess. We played
beach volleyball this morning which was fun, about 10 of them
showed up, which I guess is really unusual. Then Elder Mintoghe and
I went with a member to IOU Sushi, it's this all you can eat sushi
place, it's so good!

One more cool note about Brent, (one of our investigators from Kuna),
Elder Stepherson called me the other night and told me that Brent
told him that he had a dream that he needed to get baptized, he said
that he loved Elder Stepherson and me so much he wants to do it
before we go too far away and wont get to come to his baptism. He
is trying to figure out a date that works before September 9th
(that's the next transfers) BRENT'S GETTING BAPTIZED!!!!!!!
Man I was so happy to hear that!

The pictures from Top Sail look like some fun!

My e-mail and p-day will never change...ever. Neither will my mailing
address @ the mission home. Don't worry about that...you will always
have contact with me lol.

Well I have got to go, we have an appointment in a little while.
It looks like we do emails in the afternoons here, not the mornings.
Well I hope everything is going good! 

I love you guys!