The 3rd doors the Charm

Bonjour family and friends!

We met some really cool people this week and had some great learning experiences. Here are just a few highlights!

We were contacting and nobody was really interested. It started getting a little frustrating that nobody would even talk with us for more than 10 seconds! But we all know the "miracle comes after the trial of your faith", and our faith was sure being tried, so we knew our miracle was coming soon! We walked around the corner and met a lady named Cathrine! She is actually a professor at a Christian school and she teaches the religion classes. She told us that she actually didn't know much about our church, but she once had a student give a presentation on our beliefs. We were quickly able to clear up some misconceptions that she had heard. We talked with her for a solid 20 minutes and we were able to introduce the Book of Mormon. She asked where she could get one because it really intrigued her. We handed her our copy and testified of its truthfulness!

Exploring castles on PDay!

When people have heard false doctrine, or have questions about our beliefs, I immediately turn to the Book of Mormon because that is how I have received my own testimony of this church and our beliefs. The Book of Mormon has brought me a lot of confidence as a missionary because I know that it is true and that it truly is the "keystone of our religion." Elder Holland gave a General Conference talk a couple years ago on the Book of Mormon and he said, "For 179 years this book has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other book in modern religious history--perhaps like no other book in any religious history. And still it stands. Failed theories about its origins have been born and parroted and have died.. None of these.. answers for this book has ever withstood examination because there is no other answer than the one Joseph gave as its young unlearned translator. In this I stand with my own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, “No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it, unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.”

The biggest miracle of the week.. We had a couple hours left in the night, so we decided to go knock on doors. We chose a little town named "Capellen" because we had heard of a man who was less active that lived in that city. The only problem was, we didn't have his address. We tried calling around to some people to get it but we couldn't get in touch with anyone with the address.  In fact, his address was lost and therefore nobody in the Ward actually knew where he lived. I had seen it briefly a couple months prior so I tried to remember his address from what I had seen. To be honest, I couldn't remember at all what the address was, but I turned to Sœur Brown and told her that I thought his house number was possibly 98. She looked at a map of the town and found three streets that had houses that even went up to that high in house numbers. We decided to just pick a street and check to see if that was his house, and if not, just continue knocking on doors. We both felt impressed to go the same street. The interesting part is that this street only went up to house number 95, so logically it didn't make any sense to try this street. We went anyways and sure enough, there was no house number 98. We decided that even though we couldn't find his house, we would knock on some houses on that street anyways. Usually we knock on houses that are right next to each other, but this time we both just randomly started walking back the way we came and skipped a bunch of houses! We got all the way down until the house number 60, before we started knocking on any doors. We knocked on two doors and then a complete miracle happened... The third door we knocked on, ended up being the house of the member that we were looking for!

There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of houses in that neighborhood that we could have knocked on. I know that it wasn't just coincidence that we knocked on his door. We went into his neighborhood not having an address but knowing that the Lord would provide a way. We felt a little like Nephi when he said, "And I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do." We were thinking that he would provide a way in more of the sense of us getting in touch with a member to give us the address, but that didn't workout so He provided another way. I learned a lot of different lessons from this experience. 1st lesson-"with God nothing is impossible.” 2nd lesson- Go forward in faith 3rd lesson- We are simply "instruments in Gods hands."

I am so grateful that 17 months into my mission, Heavenly Father continues to provide learning experiences for me everyday. The miracles never cease! L'église est vrai.

Love, Sœur Johnson