Elder Caden Snell: "The sluggard will not plow by reason of the [m]old..."

Hi everyone!

I hope your week has been as exciting as mine has hahaha. Oh my
goodness, it has been eventful.

So, the above quote if from Proverbs 20: 4. I did have to revise it
just a little to fit with the content of this email :)

Here we go. So, on Thursday we (the elders in my district + Elder
Portlock) were asked by a family in our ward if we could help them out
with some packing. They are not physically capable of packing,
themselves, so we were happy to help them out :) anyways, 4 years ago,
this family was one of the many who had some complications due to
hurricane Sandy. The basement in which they live was flooded. Instead
of attempting to clear out their wet and soiled belongings, they
decided to horde them in the back bedroom...for 4 years... Their
landlord just recently found out about it, and gave them so many
opportunities to leave and she would take care of it. The family never
took the landlord up on her generous offers, so they are now being
evicted. Bishop heard that they asked us to come help them pack, so he
bought us face masks knowing of the hazardous living situation
(picture posted below). So, the day comes, and we have our masks on,
ready to get to work. Just as we were about to go down to the
basement, we hear the nastiest coughing fit ever! We were all pretty
scared. The landlord happened to be there that day and offered us
gloves. We accepted them and made our way down to the basement. The
smell was absolutely putrid. When we got down there, the family got
pretty offended that we had the masks saying, "We've lived here for 9
years, and we're not dead!" We got to work making and packing boxes
while the family watched and Elder Portlock and Elder McCleary were
talking with the landlord. After some time, Elder McCleary came down
the stairs and said that the landlord doesn't want us getting sick and
invited us to leave. The daughter of the family lost all control of
herself and started screaming and cursing and hurling items. Major
scene. Let's just say that we got out of there before the cops showed
up... haha Hopefully I got everything that happened in that story. It
was definitely an experience hahahaha super funny to talk about! It
was very fun!

So, our MegaZone conference was on Friday! In preparation for it,
Sister Reynolds (President's wife) asked everyone to prepare a short
talk about diligence and send them to her 3 days before the meeting. I
also had one week to prepare a musical number for the conference. Half
way through the conference, Sister Reynolds asked three missionaries
to come up to the pulpit and share their talks with the two zones. I
was one of the three missionaries who got to share their talks! I
worked hard on preparing it, and was grateful for the opportunity to
share it with everyone else :) the musical number went very well as! I
accompanied a couple sister and elders as they sang the EFY Medley for
"As Sisters in Zion/We'll Bring the World His Truth".

One last story: Elder Jensen and I got a media request for a Book of
Mormon from the Huntington Hospital. "Awesome!", we thought, "we will
go teach a lesson to someone who has been humbled and in need of the
gospel!" We get there and are told the patient is on floor 5N -- the
psychiatric unit. We took the elevator up to the 5 floor and entered
the psychiatric unit of the hospital. Turns out that the patient in
the the psych ward was baptized into the Church when she was 8 and
later baptized Catholic. She wanted to come back to the LDS Church and
was grateful that we took the time to come see her in the Psych ward!
It was awesome!

General Conference was pretty much the greatest thing EVER!!! My
district watched it in the chapel with only a couple other members who
didn't have TV's and the spirit in that chapel was SO strong. Heavenly
Father knows each and everyone of us individually and answers our
prayers. I learned so much from General Conference and were direct
answers to all of my questions and prayers. I love this gospel!

That's it for this week! I love you all!
Elder Snell