Johnson, Ethan

I don’t know how I’ll be able to summarize the past two weeks if I can barely remember what happened yesterday, but here goes nothing. Tuân, our most progressing friend, has fallen off. We don’t know if he’s even alive. He texted us “Tôi bỏ cuộc” which means “I give up,” but also could mean “I’m going to kill myself” given the context of his text. We haven’t heard from him since he texted us this. So, everyone, please, please, please pray for him.  We had a Zone Conference one of these two weeks and it went super good. We trained in front of the entire mission on how “Saturday is a Special Day” because it’s the day we get ready for Sunday–on media. We invite all our friends to church using all the content we post. That’s been a big push for us as a mission because the general authorities have given us, and a couple other missions, this initiative to get our friends to church and to wholly prioritize that. Through our faith, we set a goal of 300 friends coming to church this past Su...

This week was loaded.  Since we’ve been rolling out FaceBook messenger ads (which are essentially where people can directly message our FaceBook pages) we have been talking to a Vietnamese guy named Liem Nguyễn. He’s an older dude, a devout Christian, and he had been spamming us for the past couple of days. He would send us pictures of his religious texts and quote scripture without really talking back to us and actually ended up sending us pictures of the Sách Mặc Môn (Book of Mormon), Giáo Lý và Giao Ước (Doctrine and Covenants), Trân Châu Vô Giá (Pearl of Great Price), which is CRAZY so–through some PI training I developed during my high school Senior Assassin days–I was able to track down where he lived and we decided to pull up on him (after he had invited us to come talk to him without giving us a phone number or a house address). I ended up finding the right house because the second we got there, he invited us inside and explained that it was a miracle we had come to his hou...

A lot has happened these past two weeks, so let’s get into it. Richard was baptized. BOOM. Seal Team 6 was expanded. BANG. We now have our own district with us and the Assistants. POW. I love Việt nam. WOW. We have two Vietnamese baptisms happening this weekend. REVOLUTIONARY. Keith got baptized. HOLY. I was sick. OH NO. But now I’m better. WOOO.  Essentially these past two weeks have been a blur. I cannot even begin to recollect what happened but I know things happened. I went to Galveston which was like a dream come true–it reminded me so much of back home it was crazy–and I am going to do anything to get back. I now have a MacBook Pro that I am currently using to type this email out which is crazy. I am literally celestial kingdom living right now. I feel like I was meant to serve in the Vietnamese branch because so much of what I learned in Sealy directly applies to the strategies of missionary work and member-relations in the Vietnamese branch and already we’ve seen so many mi...