Week 62: My Comp's name is my name!

Mount Timpanogos Temple

What up party people

This week was fast, busy, and as almost always, epic.

Tuesday was the final day Elder Ropka's farewell tour. We delivered mail to almost everyone in the zone in the morning and got to see everyone, and then we met with or stopped by like all of our investigators and ward mission leaders. It also snowed like 4 inches up here. It was so much snow and so early in the season that a bunch of tree branches broke under the snow. I had no idea that that's why trees lose their leaves in the winter until now. One of our stake high councilors over missionary work to us to breakfast at Kneader's that morning too (bottomless French toast....)

Wednesday was transfer day and it was lit. I got to see like everyone I knew in the mission. As I was walking around I was actually feeling overwhelmed about the amount of homies I needed to dab up. My new comp is Elder Parker and he's epic. He's from North Carolina and he's been out the exact same amount of time as me. We started online MTC the same day even. People will say to him a lot, "You don't sound like you're from North Carolina," and he'll say, "It's cuz I grew up in Arizona till I was 9, so as for the North Carolina accent, I can't speak it but I can translate it." He actually lived in the dorm building next to mine at BYU while I was there, and we even have some mutual friends, but we never ran into each other there. He's also originally assigned to the Philippines, but he also doesn't think he's going haha. He was just in Eagle Mountain for 5 transfers, so he's really excited to just be somewhere else!

I've really enjoyed being with Elder Parker so far though. He worked at a Chick-fil-a back home for 2 YEARS, so he loves Chick-fil-a too! It's like being comps with Elder Dieker again, but now we have a car and can actually go! He also loves working out. So we went there on Thursday, and we also went to the temple! One of the kids that he taught in Eagle Mountain that got baptized was going to the temple for the first time with the kids in his ward, so after getting permission from President Evanson, we got to go too!

Friday was dope because we had an MLC breakfast at the mission home, but then that night was pretty legendary. We had a full night of contacting ahead of us, and we ended up meeting a lady named Claudia. She and her family had just moved here from Washington, and even though they already have a church they go to, she wanted to learn more about ours! She gratefully accepted a Book of Mormon and a Restoration pamphlet, and we'll probably go by in a few weeks to talk to her again. Then a little while later, we knocked a door of a guy named Rob who moved here from Arizona about a year and a half ago, and he wanted to learn about the Church too! We set up an appointment with him and we're going back tonight! Then later that night we knocked a member family's door and they invited us in and asked if their daughter had called us. They told us that their daughter and her boyfriend are learning about each other's faiths, so she wants her boyfriend to meet with us at her house! I walked out of that house and I was like, "Bruh what is happening?!?"

Having a fresh set of eyes on the area is really great because Elder Ropka had been here a longgggg time. I'm really excited to continue working with Elder Parker in Suncrest! He's honestly a really good companion and he's been really helpful. We're going through our investigators and reevaluating their interest levels, because a lot of the people here Elder Ropka had been teaching for a long time and not a whole lot had come from it. So we'll probably stop meeting with some of them, but we'll find new people to teach too!

Pday today we got all our stuff done really early, so we played pickleball at the mission office courts with some friends we ran into there, and then we played pickleball and Spikeball with ours and another district at a park in Lehi. Pretty epic day. If every pday was like that, I'd be fine honestly.

The mission is so great. I'm realizing how little I really have left. It's already slipping away and it's so weird to think that it will even come to an end eventually. But it will of course, always, be epic.

Love you all!!

Elder Snyder