Elder Caden Snell: Willkommen to Das Shtick Department

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!!

Wow, this week has been super super crazy! We had transfers on Tuesday, and I was transferred over to Midwood, Brooklyn. It was really hard to say goodbye to Queens and all the people there I have grown to love. I have never been really good with goodbye’s... but hey, I guess I am getting some more practice? Still hard though :)

Well, Brooklyn has proved to be a very interesting place so far! Haha The people here are very different than what I am used to. We are constantly surrounded by people from the Caribbean islands, Haiti, Africa, the West Indies, Russia, and a whole lot of Hasidic Jewish people. Lots of fun getting to know people from all over the world! Oh! I almost forgot! My new companion is Elder Pratt! He is from Springville, Utah and has been on his mission for 20 months. He and I have been getting along super well! I am really excited for this transfer!

Sorry for not sending out a mass email for the past little bit. Hopefully I can get better at doing that. So I guess I will update you on the last two weeks of being here in Brooklyn!

We have been running all over the place with lessons!!! I don’t know what it is, but we get at least 3 Bible requests every day here! Our schedule is packed with going from place to place, dropping of Bibles, and teaching those Bible referrals. It has been really helpful in building our teaching pool! Almost all of our investigators who we are consistently teaching have come from ordering a free Bible on Mormon.org! It is fantastic!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving on Thursday! Ours was pretty great! We were allowed to have a zone activity in the morning and had a couple dinner appointments later on. For our activity, we just all gathered at the church and played some games. It was a blast getting to know my new zone and becoming friends with the missionaries over here :) For dinner, we went to the Miller’s house. Wow, Sister Miller make some great food!!!!! They are both a little older and had their son’s family over for dinner as well. It was lots of fun and super tasty!

Well, there wasn’t really anything else out of the ordinary that happened this week. Actually, I will tell you a little bit about Jose! He is one of our investigators who we meet with 2-3 times a week. Jose has one of the most pure hearts I have ever come across! He is so sweet and always thinking of others. Jose is just all around a pretty fantastic and Christlike guy. He is a little bit of a slow learner and doesn’t always remember everything we teach him, so we have been teaching him only one principle of the lessons each time we visit. It is super fun teaching him because he gets really excited and happy over each new thing we teach him. Because he doesn’t have the best memory, we sometimes get to teach him the same thing two visits in a row and he gets just as excited about the new things he is learning the second time as he did the first :) it makes me happy seeing him get really excited about the gospel over and over again! This week, we taught him about our pre-mortal life and how we used to live with our Father in Heaven as spirits before coming to Earth. He never knew that we used to life with God and that we are His literal spirit children. When we taught it to him, the spirit filled the little hallway we were sitting in as Jose started tearing up and just saying, “Wow...I never knew that before. I feel so special”. The next lesson, we reviewed what we taught him about our pre-mortal life and he didn’t remember. So, we taught him again where he came from and who his Heavenly Father is, and again the spirit was tangible as Jose stood in amazement and marveled at the fact that he is a child of God saying, “Wow, I never knew that before. I feel so special”. Jose has helped me better appreciate the knowledge that we have of our divine nature and of the basic principles of the gospel. Just like Jose, I feel so special to be able to say that I am a child of God :)

It’s little moments like those with Jose where I am reminded why I am out here. I am so grateful for the thousands of tender mercies and miracles I have experienced on my mission. Each and every day brings me close to the Savior. I can’t express how much I love this work and how grateful I am for our Heavenly Father and our Savior.

I love you all and am thankful for each and every one of you!

Elder Snell

P.S. Elder Pratt and I were riding the bus the other day and saw an huge poster on a building that said “Shtick Dept.”. We decided that it was a German man who was trying to sell his stick collection, so we have been speaking in a German accent all week trying to get each other to purchase our vast collection of sticks of various shapes and sizes