January 1, 2018

Yooo!!!!!! Happy New Year Everybodyyyy!! 

I hope everyone has had an amazing holiday season and is making dang good resolutions for 2018! I believe in each and every one of you that you will actually achieve those resolutions! I know that most resolutions only last a solid month and then nothing, but I have faith you can do it!

Well, the past week has actually not been the most exciting, in fact, it has been kind of rough. I'll just start from the beginning.

A couple of weeks ago on P-day we went to hit golf balls at the nearby driving range with the Zone Leaders. The only other guy that was on the range was this old, bearded guy and as he was leaving, he turns to us and said "I could've been a contender if I wasn't into drugs and crap, but I wouldn't change a thing. What can I say......I love drugs!" It might be the funniest thing I have experienced so far on my mission! The day after that though was Elder Brown's last day in the area because he got transferred up to Orville. It was a little sad, especially since now we can't hear his beautiful piano skills!

Another funny story was as we were teaching Paul Sanchez, right in the middle of our lesson, the police knock on the door and searched his grandma's home for like 10 minutes and were questioning Paul outside! So, during the time I thought to myself, "IDK if we are going be teaching Paul anymore!" That was definitely an experience. I am still not quite sure why the police were there.

One last funny story was how we found a potential investigator named Mercades. We had been visiting with one of our investigators, Valerie Jacox. While getting on our bikes we met Mercades, while she was walking her dog. She lives in the same neighborhood as we do and she explained how much she hates our neighborhood. She was using a lot of potty words!! She said she wanted us to convince her why she should like organized religion so we talked to her for a bit. She said she was interested in meeting with us! Well, the funny thing about it was she was drunk HAHA!

We had a sweet Christmas devotional at the "Antelope Temple" which is a huge church house with two levels and has two chapels inside it.  It was such an awesome, spiritual experience! It was a great reminder of why I am out here doing what I am doing. On Christmas Eve, we had dinner at the Magnussen's home and they have this awesome tradition called Jesus Cake. They sing happy Birthday to Jesus!! How cool is that! Christmas was of course AWESOME since I got to talk to the Fam!!!! But, after that I realized just how much I miss them so for the next couple days I had some lingering homesickness but I'm over that now! We had Christmas dinner at the Dufort's home and it was super sweet.

On Tuesday, we went on exchanges. and Elder Griffin came to our area with me so that was good. Honestly, at first, I was super nervous to be in charge of our area for a day but as the day went on, I realized that I am a better missionary than I give myself credit for. Also, Elder Griffin fell into a bush and lost his soda. That was an unfortunately funny experience!

Thursday was when everything started going downhill!  That morning, we got a message from our top investigator, Mark, who told us he was no longer pursuing the church, which was seriously the hardest thing I have experienced as a missionary! It really hurt. Not only that, but the work has been very slow.  Elder Dixon and I have both agreed we haven’t been working as hard as we could be! That will be changing!

Our saving grace this past week has been John Shade! We met John about a month ago and he came to church once. We hadn't reached out to him for a while so we decided to see how he was doing and just like that.....he's now our top investigator!  We taught him twice this week over Facebook video chat!!

Thank you to everyone that sent me Christmas cards and packages.  I really appreciate it!  I love you all and miss you so very much! I would love to hear from all of you hooligans! Happy New Year!  Remember to put the Savior first in your life, everything else will be much easier!

Elder Schneiter

Zone Selfie

My friend Stan...RIP

IDK we're just weird

MTC Comps forever!