Week 80: Icicles!!!

MLC Breakfast

Hey everyone!

This week there were icicles everywhere. Like everywhere. I will attach several pictures. All week we'd be breaking them off stuff and playing with them. I think it was cuz it was really sunny this week so the snow would melt, but it was still super cold so the melted snow would just freeze into icicles. I'm still not a winter person though so I could still be very wrong about the formation of icicles. Also there's a new Chubby's in Orem by the mall, and I'm really not that big of a fan of Chubby's, but they had 6 different kinds of Mtn Dew in their fountain so that was cool.

We had some really awesome lessons with Amadeus this week. He's the guy that we missed at church last week. He started off giving us a hard time about missing him at church, but then we found out he went to the family ward at 9am instead of the YSA ward at 1! He's a very interesting guy. He's very eccentric and outgoing and free-spirited. He started dating a girl online who introduced him to the Church, so he went to church by himself in San Diego, and then he started meeting with the missionaries there for a while. He was actually on date for baptism there, but then Amadeus pretty impulsively decided to move to Utah to meet up with his girlfriend. He legit found a place to live on Craigslist with a guy that gives him free rent for walking his dogs every like 4 hours.

He really understands the gospel though. As we asked him about how he gained a desire to get baptized and as we went over the baptismal interview questions, he shared some really cool experiences. He reads the Book of Mormon every day and he applies the stories to his life really well. He said that he knows he doesn't know everything, but that he knows enough. He knows there's answers to the questions he has, but he just hasn't found them yet. He likes what he's heard so far, enough so that he was willing to move to Utah for it. He was already agreeing to live certain things like the Word of Wisdom and the law of chastity, but when we explained them to him a little more in depth he kept saying it made a lot of sense. It was cool to see him understand things better, but already have the faith to live it before he understood it. He's going to get baptized on either the 5th or the 12th, and we're really excited for him.

That's what I love about serving in Utah. We always talk about the gathering of Israel, and that it's the most important work in the world. All people everywhere are being gathered in to be the Lord's elect, but what's great about Utah is that people are LITERALLY being gathered here. Utah has been a gathering place since day one back in like the 1840s, but it still is. People come here for one reason or another, but many of them are brought here by the Lord to become part of His kingdom.

On Wednesday some Elders in our district had a lesson come up at the same time they had already agreed to do boys Activity Days activity, so they asked if we could sub in for them, and it was soooo fun. They planned a mini MTC activity and all the boys had missionary tags made for them. They wanted the missionaries to come in and talk about our daily schedule, show them how to tie a tie, and then the leaders gave all the boys these hard questions about the Book of Mormon to try to stump us. Then some of the boys got Nerf guns and would run around the gym trying to shoot other boys that would use a Book of Mormon as shields. It literally was soooo fun. Those other Elders missed out big time.

Thursday we had the MLC breakfast. At the beginning of every transfer, President has the whole MLC over to his house for waffles and training for the new ZLs or STLs. I just like getting to hang out with my friends and eat waffles, but President Evanson is so cool so I like getting to hang out with him too. We also finally got to meet with Toby again and he's now off smoking! It's pretty amazing to see how far he's come, especially since he moved to Utah to start rehab like 7 months ago. I think the Lord is helping him more than he thinks. He's getting baptized on the 12th which is super epic.

Saturday we had CDC (combined district council, whole zone), and we found a cool church building with a basement to hold it in. I spoke on how we want our areas to be like escalators and not elevators. Elevators are like where we find people, then teach people, then baptize people, then start over again. Escalators are like when we're always doing all of them, but the other things are fueled by finding. The finding grind never stops, but it's all part of the job. I think the Lord works on us the same way. I don't know if there's an elevator that takes a straight shot to the celestial kingdom. I think there's probably like a series of elevators where there's lots of different stops, and maybe that last escalator is a looooong way away, but every time we're on an upward escalator it's a great thing.

Sunday was super busy. We went to 4 sacrament meetings, and then we got to go to a devotional at the UVU Institute building with Kalani Sitake! He's the BYU football coach for those of you that dont know. It was really cool to hear him speak, and just to see that he's a super active member too. He told a lot of really cool stories about how the Lord taught him to be obedient through experiences, and then how the Lord has blessed him through righteous living.

I think I've kinda included my spiritual thoughts throughout the email instead of just at the end, so I guess it's just gonna end here haha. Have a great week everyone!

Love,

Elder Snyder