Johnson, Ethan

My life on the road continues. This time I spent half of the week at my Mission President’s home and the other half living out of our car in the other Elder’s apartment. Apparently, there have been some complications with the apartment complex that we live in and the cleaning of our apartment, but, thankfully, God has us. On Monday, as we left our apartment to go to transfers, I prayed that we might be able to sleep in our own apartment someday soon and pleaded with God to help us. Immediately after we left the apartment, a man driving a golf cart whirred by and stopped, asking me, “Do you live in the apartment with the mold?” How did he know?? He explained that we needed to go into the leasing office and sign something for them to send a contractor to fix the mold. An immediate response to a plea to God. The irony also immediately set in, all of last week was pointless because the apartment complex wasn’t making any attempts to clean our apartment because there was a document that nee...

Inside Llewyn Davis (2014) is a film that I often thought about this week. Not only because it is an impeccable film but because it is about the distraught wanderings of a sleepless soul; I was a sleepless soul with a lot of distraught wanderings this week. The week began with a P-Day cut short to drive to Bay City (two and a half hours southwest) with the APs and spent the night on the floor of a bishop’s house because we were setting up for the mission tour with Elder Dunn and Elder Egbo. The next day, we set up for the next zone conference in Sugar Land until like 11:30pm, sleeping on the floor of the AP’s apartment because we have gotten quarantined from our moldy apartment. The following day, we set up for zone conference once again but in Richmond, ending the mission tour with a bang. Elder Phan and I got a total of 15 hours of sleep over the four days that the mission tour ran and we were apartment hopping the entire time. We would run into our apartment, grab a change of clothe...

Certain things on the mission just sneak up on you. They creep up behind your back, sometimes standing there for months at a time, only to appear at terribly-timed moments. Like, for example, how long I have been out on my mission and the amount of time I have left. I feel as if I just arrived in the mission field, and yet, I am closer to my one year mark than when I had arrived. The personification of time is drawing ever nearer with each completed day. Bad habits, your past, testimony, age, inexperience, friends, family–all these things can sneak up on you, seemingly all at once. But, what snuck up on us this week was the black mold fermenting in all of our air vents. About 3 months ago we moved into the Seal Team 6 apartment building. We noticed that some of the air vents had little black specks on them but, with a phone call from a senior missionary, they were discredited and we went about our daily business, every single day. That is, until Elder Phan began to develop a rather unh...

It’s ironic that this week’s email is number 45 because a certain player from a certain movie from a certain game from a certain college football team has the number 45 as his jersey number. That’s right. We got Rudy Ruettiger. The real Rudy from Rudy (1993) is coming to Houston on December 15th to speak about Christ during the Christmas season. This is what we have been planning for the past 3 months. This is it. Our goal is to fill the church building with people who have never been in one of our church buildings before, to showcase the joy and the light and the hope in Christ from Rudy’s story. And, we’re doing everything for this event. All of the advertising, all of the organization, all of the everything. I’ve called Rudy twice now, which is just crazy. Everything I have ever learned has like culminated together to be able to know what to do for this event, it’s just on a bigger scale and scope–and people's conversion depends upon what we do.  So, that’s what’s going on with ...