Laboring in the Lord's vineyard {literally}‏

Let me start off this week by saying that our church is surrounded by vineyards, which I find quite comical. Actually, so is our house. And basically everything here. Sonoma is pretty much one giant vineyard! But my companion and I were talking this week about how this is the Lord's vineyard as well, and we are his servants sent here to do his work. There is so much good fruit here that we need to find, branches that need to be grafted in, trees that need nourishing, and so on. Essentially, we are living a much less glorified version of Jacob 5, which is such an incredible opportunity and experience. Sonoma is such a beautiful vineyard, both literally and metaphorically!

So, here in this wonderful vineyard, we have a goal to see miracles every day, and I can promise you that we do! It is so incredible because every night we come home and ask each other what our favorite miracle of the day was, and while some days we may only have one or two, sometimes we have more than we can count. So I have two favorite miracles this week that I want to share with you. First, Jeremias came to church!! I don't know if I told you about him at all last week, but he's one of our strongest investigators but he has to work a lot so it's super hard to make it to church. But this week we told him about the Easter program and had a super spiritual lesson with him, and then sunday came around and there he was! He told us he'd been talking with his boss all weekend and finally late saturday night he agreed to give him a few hours off to go to church! It was so awesome. My other favorite miracle of this week was finding Miriam. She is married with 5 kids and has had an incredibly rough life, but she is so happy and loving despite everything she's been through. So far we've hardly taught her anything because she talks so much and so fast her husband has to stop her to let us talk. She is so hilarious. Her husband has only said about two words, because he's super shy and apparently he's not very talkative (I wonder why). But she is so amazing and I truly can't wait to be able to teach her more!

Another miracle this week, which is even hard for me to believe, I turned down an offer for cherry coke. Haha for those of you who don't know, cherry coke is my favorite thing in the entire world, so we met this guy who had a huge bottle of cherry coke and next to it was a huge bottle of tequila. He was clearly super drunk but was really nice to us and offered to share. Turning that down was probably one of my biggest trials yet on the mission... but in the event that he might have already poured some tequila in there, I thought I better be safe. haha mom, are you proud?!

Well, I had my first run-in with some Jehovah's witnesses this week. To be fair, I didn't really realize it was a run-in until after the fact. Haha so we were walking past these two women and we started talking to them and talked a little bit about the gospel and then they were like "oh, you're mormons! we visit one of your members!" and innocent me said "oh cool, for what?" and then they laughed and walked away. Ya, they were Jehovah's witnesses. Awkward.

If any of you remember how I said I was in the choir in the MTC, I thought I would be done with singing after those six weeks but somehow I am now in the ward choir and it is probably the most uncomfortable experience of my life. All 5 members are around age 70, and then there's me and sister nimmer. We're the only altos and she's tone deaf, so it's been an adventure. Haha and speaking of music, for any of you planning on serving a mission that play the piano and don't practice hymns cause you've told yourself that you'll never play for church anyways (like myself), DO IT. Practice! Cause they will find you, and they will force you to play whether you're good or not, so if you don't want to end up like me, please do it. That's my advice for this week.

Well, that's just about all I have to say about my week, but I hope you all have a wonderful week and a happy easter! Don't forget to watch conference!!

Love always,

Sister Suzanna Lewis

Hopefully these pictures work! So our district volunteers and this super fun garden park here in sonoma where we basically just weed and plant and do gardening stuff for a couple hours. So here's me and my companion in the garden! 

The second picture is the lovely note someone left on our car yesterday which I thought was funny and I wanted to share. We are very much loved here in Sonoma. <3

(Leave and don't come back. . .We are ALWAYS Watching!)