First E-mail from North Carolina

My first area is Sampson County-North Carolina.  The town we live in is Clinton, NC.  I teach in English and Spanish and the branch here is small.  There are more inactives than members in it.  I love it here already!! It rained three times and is raining today, as well.  My bike is AMAZING!! But in this area we get a car because of how spread out it is.  So, I have only rode it once... but LOVED it!

It's been a crazy first week though!! We have already had to drop some investigators and have been visiting a lot of the inactives.  It's hard to find anyone to teach though.  THERE ARE SO MANY DIFFERENT CHURCHES!! I have had a lot of doors slammed in my face already.  So, we were tracking last night and we kept getting door after door slammed.  So, it's like 8:30 p.m. and we still had not done our language study for the evening.  I don't get to speak Spanish a whole lot because all of our investigators are English Speaking.  But that's fine, but I was getting a little depressed last night.  Its hard to want to share something that has blessed my life sooo much and people keep rejecting it.  So, I was getting a little bit down.  After we got another door slammed in our faces, I looked at my companion and was like, can we please pray for some help here? We are running out of people to teach.  People keep dropping us or are just not interested.  So, after that we went to a couple more homes and no one was home at one and the other was just not interested.  I told him, I'm done.  So, we started to head home, when my companion pulled over at some house and said, Let's try this one.  We did and it was a Puerto Rican Man and African American lady.  They had a 9 year old boy and two little girls.  When the dad opened the door, I said, "Do you want more peace, joy and happiness in your home? Do you want your family to be together forever?"  He looks at us and then looks at the woman... and says to her... "Do you want our family to be together forever"?  She jumps up and comes and lets us in.  We begin to teach the Restoration of the Gospel and they were like wow!! They want to get baptized but they are not married.  So we couldn't set a date but are going back tomorrow.  It's looking good and I hope it turns out great!! 

My faith in my Savior has grown so much and I love serving.  This is a tough area and it's hard to find people.  The people in the branch who are active are worn out of doing missionary work.  So, it is difficult to get any help.  But, I will always work my hardest!! Nooooo matter what ... no matter how hard it gets... I will continue to work!

I look forward to the letters this week!!

LOVE,

Elder Michael Johnson