Johnson, Ethan

It’s incredibly rare to leave your trainer in the first 3 months of the mission. It’s even rarer for your trainer to leave you. Yet, both of those things happened this last week. On the mission, every six weeks these things called transfers happen. Transfers are new location assignments that are sent out to all the missionaries within one mission. Missionaries stay in the cities they’re already living in or move across the mission, keep their companion or get a new one, and receive new assignments like becoming missionary trainers or get released from assignments. So, kinda a big deal.  The area I was covering with my trainer, Elder Elmer, was closed. It doesn’t exist anymore. Another pair of Elders now oversees it, but that meant Elder Elmer and I had to move elsewhere. We were split up, he went to the city city of Houston and I was shipped off to a small city named Sealy. When we found out he exclaimed, “I’m going to the Celestial Kingdom and you’re going to Outer Darkness.” This...

It’s incredibly rare to leave your trainer in the first 3 months of the mission. It’s even rarer for your trainer to leave you. Yet, both of those things happened this last week. On the mission, every six weeks these things called transfers happen. Transfers are new location assignments that are sent out to all the missionaries within one mission. Missionaries stay in the cities they’re already living in or move across the mission, keep their companion or get a new one, and receive new assignments like becoming missionary trainers or get released from assignments. So, kinda a big deal.  The area I was covering with my trainer, Elder Elmer, was closed. It doesn’t exist anymore. Another pair of Elders now oversees it, but that meant Elder Elmer and I had to move elsewhere. We were split up, he went to the city city of Houston and I was shipped off to a small city named Sealy. When we found out he exclaimed, “I’m going to the Celestial Kingdom and you’re going to Outer Darkness.” This...

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, not only as a mediator, but how it relates to everything else. To have time to do something is a miracle, and to not have time to do something is a solemn occurrence. We are born with an expiration date for this life, and the time we have varies from person to person.  A couple weeks ago, one of our friends died. His ex-wife called us and said he had died on a Wednesday and no one had found out until Saturday. We don’t know how it happened, we don’t know why, and we didn’t know what we could do because immediately after she hung up. We had never met with Julio. We had a budding relationship over the phone and had been trying to set up a lesson with him in person because he had referred himself to the missionaries. Yet, we never met with him. A couple days before this happened, I put into our schedule that we would meet him at a restaurant and get to know him–because we never had time. That was on Wednesday. The Wednesday he would have died if ou...

I don’t have a lot of energy, nor desire, to write up something to keep my creative flame stoked, so instead this week’s email will essentially be a journal entry I wrote all about yesterday. Besides that, not much else happened this week. Sugar Land, Texas and the people who reside here are awesome and it feels as if I’m living out Boyhood (2014) everytime I ride through neighborhoods and it feels as if I’m living The Tree of Life (2011) every time I fall in back in love with the trees of Texas whilst preaching the Gospel (Terrence Malick would be proud). Not many other crazy things have happened aside from a woman trying to seduce me, listening to some CRAZY syntax in General Conference talks from 1971 (“A few days ago, I had the pleasurable assignment of visiting some of our Lamanite friends in Supai, at the base of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona.” from Marvin J. Ashton in “Love of the Right”), and continuing to harbor some incredible relationships with our friends and my barrio of Ho...