Week 74: Delivered to the Promised Land

Traditional Beginning of Transfers MLC "Bekfist"

Hey Everyone!

This last week has been, in a word, epic.

Leaving Suncrest was like really low key sad, almost to the point where it wasn't sad at all hehe. I will really miss the views (and the apartment hehe), and some of the people we were teaching have become my absolute homies. I'm totally gonna hang out with Bostin and Tara after the mission and play some pickleball for sure. That's what's great about the Utah Orem mission, is visiting the homies after the mission has been part of the plan since day 1.

I do live in Vineyard again. I do live in the same apartment again. I cover a different part of Vineyard than I did before, but the Elders who cover my old stake live in our apartment, so it's fun to talk about the epic Vineyard stake again. They know a lot of the same people, but they actually whitewashed in, so there's a couple things they still don't know about hehe. I LOVE living in Vineyard again, and it's so great getting to be in Orem so much. Shortly after I got transferred out of Vineyard into Sucnrest, I realized that I'd grown to love Orem so much because it was like home! Lots of cars, lots of people, and State St Orem looks like every street in the Valley haha. I love it.

This week has been so packed though. YSA is legendary. I never thought I'd serve in Draper Suncrest, and I never thought I'd serve in UVU YSA. It's super epic though. We cover the UVU YSA 1st stake, which is like north Vineyard and north Orem, so it's a little further from campus so the YSAs we have in our wards are a little older. Most of them are already graduated and either doing grad school or just working. It's super cool because they're like actual adults instead of the kind of YSA I was at BYU hehe. Everybody is super cool and so down to help us out. There are plenty of kids that go to BYU too, which is weird because I'll be going there in the fall. It's been soooooo much fun.

I've also already met a gajillion people that either know me or my family, and having a cousin and a sister at BYU currently makes that happen a lot. On my first day I met my cousin's new boss and my sister's friends, and I've met people with old comps from Thousand Oaks that I know, or even seen people from my home ward at church. There's probably some kind of connection every day, and they really don't phase me anymore honestly. It just happens when you serve in the Utah Orem mission in UVU YSA and you're already as popular as me (jokessssssss).

My companion is Elder Burris and he's awesome. He's already been here for 2 transfers so he's got a great handle on the area. He's much younger than me in the mission, but he's still well-experienced in the mission. He came in with Elder Phelps (my first trainee), so I'm now comps with someone my son's age. Bruh. He came on his mission out of high school so he said hanging out with college kids took some getting used to for him haha. He's from Washington state and is the youngest of 6. I'm actually only going to be comps with him for about a month because he goes to his original assignment in Uruguay on February 10th.

We're teaching a guy named Blake who is actually getting baptized on Sunday! He said he graduated from BYU on a baseball scholarship, and learned LOTS about the Church during that time. Then he started doing graduate classes at UVU, and started going to church every Sunday with a girl he was dating, but after they broke up he found that he was really missing going to church! He started reading the Book of Mormon and going to church again after that, and learning lots of things from his friends still, but thought one day that he probably should just meet with the missionaries already. So he actually referred himself to the missionaries! Blake is awesome because he really is doing this for himself and no other friends or something. He's epic.

This week has honestly been just so crazy and I'm having so much fun being a missionary. President Evanson always says he gets missionaries asking him how they can have fun as a missionary, and he always tells them that missionary work itself is fun. I really thought it was fun this week for sure. I don't know why people don't like getting transferred; new places, new faces, and new challenges are so fun!

Love you all!

Elder Snyder