Elder Drew Schneider: November 28, 2016

Thanksgiving
Hey everyone,

I hope your week was good, and that you had a good Thanksgiving. We have many things to be thankful for! My Thanksgiving was pretty good. We had pie for breakfast with the Pearson family as part of their family tradition. It's pretty fun and creative. You get to enjoy the pie more because you're not full. And then at 1 we went to the Schenks house for our first Thanksgiving dinner. That lasted till about 2:30 and then we went to our second Thanksgiving dinner with the McCombers. That lasted till about 4. Then we had the rest of the night free. I was happy to be done eating because two Thanksgivings is enough in one day. But guess what? We had two more the next day! Yup, the first one was at 12:30 with a non-member that invited us. That was pretty sweet. Free food and we now have another person to teach. So that was great, but then we had another Thanksgiving dinner at around 2:30 again. That was with the Nelson family. By this point, I'm not enjoying food at all. I didn't want to see or smell food for the rest of the day. But nope, we had another dinner at 5 after that with the Purcell family. But it wasn't a strait up turkey dinner this time. Is was leftover Thanksgiving made into a burrito. Which is pretty good by the way. But either way, it was still past the point of enjoyment and even comfort. It quickly went from a happy stuffed to a miserable stuffed. One of the families we visited butchered a 50 pound turkey while we got there. The youngest son chased his older brother around with the turkeys head and made creepy noises, it was pretty funny. Thanksgiving was a blast and I'm thankful for all the families that took care of us :)

We also celebrated Elder Darners birthday because his birthday was on Thanksgiving. We put up some stuff in the house and took a picture, it was quite the party.

Once again, we had the opportunity to do more service this week. On Tuesday we put in some fence posts for Leslie, one of our investigators. She's gone on vacation right now so we thought it would be a good surprise to put the fence posts in to secure her wind break fence before she comes home and winter comes in with the strong winds and snow drifts. We had a member get all the tools for us so we could get it all done the right way. This project very quickly brought the realization to my companion and I that we are weenies. It took us about 3 1/2 hours when it only should have taken 1 1/2. To put the poles in solid you just shovel in some dirt and then with a steel rod with a flat round end you pound the dirt down in the hole around the pole. And you just do a little dirt at a time until you've filled it all in with packed dirt. It doesn't take a lot of skill, just work strength and coordination. Which I don't have much of and my companion has none. I'm not sure he knows how to use a hammer. So as you can well imagine it was quite the comedy. Me and my companion were pretty sore afterwards. Pounding that steel rod for a few hours can really tear you up. It was only about 40 pounds but by the end of the project it felt like 100. Nothing like some good ole farmwork to toughen ya up. We left feeling pretty accomplished.

Our proselyting for this week went pretty well. We have been struggling to find new people because we are always stuck in Fairfield and can't go to any of the other towns we cover because we don't have miles to visit them. But we decided to make a trip to Augusta, which is around 30 miles away. And we just started Tracting, and we didn't stop for about 2 1/2 hours. The first person that answered had us come back an hour later. It turned out to be a young family that was awesome. They expressed some things that kind of hold them back but they invited us back for another lesson and dinner. It was a needed miracle. I honestly don't know how interested they are but they are letting us come back so we are going to make the most of it. Either way, they are awesome people that we enjoy.

Now that Thanksgiving is over it's time to move on to Christmas! It's a great time of year to get out and serve. The church has come out with a new video called light the world that is pretty good at explaining that. I encourage you to go watch it. As you serve others your holidays will be better. I love you all and hope your week goes great!

-Elder Schneider