Week 39: Laboring in (the) Vineyard

what's up party people?

This week was awesome! It went by super fast too. I love it here in Vineyard!

We live with 2 other Elders in our apartment, and we actually play pickleball every morning for our exercise. We play some doubles and some singles too. It's a lot of fun. We're getting pretty good at it too. I can beat Elder Ames and Elder Antillon, who are the Elders we live with, but Elder Thomas can still wreck me. I finally invested in a real pickleball paddle today too so now I can really start shredding.

We kinda had a lot of bike troubles this week, but nothing beyond our own abilities. Elder Thomas is now on his 3rd bike since me coming here though haha. His own is in the shop, and the one we borrowed from a member in the meantime got a flat, and now we're using an extra some Elders in our district had.

Something I never thought I'd do on my mission was make spreadsheets, and this week we made a lot of spreadsheets! There's a lot of townhomes and apartments in our area, and our Area Book app can't always read the addresses very accurately because they're all so close together, so spreadsheets are the move. And they're on Google Sheets so we're gonna share them with the Spanish Elders and the YSA Sisters that also cover our area, so we're gonna get cooking on those. Now you know about one of the ways you can go about finding people to teach in a Utah mission.

As exciting as talking about spreadsheets is, we also had some really good lessons! We're teaching a couple named Brian and Diana, and they moved here from CA almost 2 years ago and are very Christian. Diana is a very faithful woman and sees God in every aspect of her life, and it honestly surprises me how open they are to meeting with us and hearing our message. She has a lot of really good questions for us; not skeptical questions, but like actual things she wonders about. It's really fun getting to teach them.

One time an Amazon driver stopped us and gave us $40 worth of gift cards to Jimmy John's, and we treated the Elders we live with to Jimmy John's for dinner. I actually would not recommend Jimmy John's. The closest one to us is up in Orem, and there was a Jersey Mike's right across the street and I was like bruh

This next week is gonna be so lit though because we no longer have to wear masks when we go in people's homes, and we can have meals with members again!! I really can't think of anything that COVID is keeping us from doing as missionaries anymore. We're living the life. AND it's almost summer so like it's pretty awesome here now.

Pday today was fun too. Basically a fat shopping spree at the University Mall, and then a fat lunch at Tucanos!

The mission is so much fun really and it is so satisfying to come home after a long day of work knowing you did the Lord's work.

I love you all!

Elder Snyder