MOMENTS MISSIONARIES LIVE FOR

Letter dated 14 December 2015 Dear Family, So we are sitting at the library and some random guy at the computers just turned around, looked at me and said, "Don't cry Sister Cryer!" What the heck! haha. OK so let me just give you some highlights of the week. It's been a little rough. Sister H wants to go home and we are just doing everything we can to keep her out. So it's been hard and ling. BUT there have been some good times. So on Monday, I think I told you, we went up to Bentonville and spent a good chunk of the day with Sister Loveland making chocolates with some of the other Sisters. It was a lot of fun! And the chocolates we made were pretty darn good if I do say so myself. It was really nice to get out and do something different for a change on Monday and I got to see the new mission home! So that was fun. OK so in my email I think I left off with Wednesday night caroling. So the lady that we talked to that night that said she wanted to come to church, we called her on Saturday to see if she still wanted to come but we think she got antied:( I guess it's just not the right time for her yet. Oh well, I still count it as a cool miracle and a positive contact. Thursday was AMAZING! We got to go to a special Zone Conference with Elder Foster of the Seventy. It was incredible. He talked mostly about working with members and I couldn't help but think, 'Where have you been my whole mission!' My whole perspective of what it means to work with members has changed. I wish we could have had this conference about 16 months ago! Haha. But having said that I don't think it would have meant the same thing for me then as it does now. God's timing is perfect so this is when I was supposed to learn it I guess. And it's actually pretty cool because I had just been setting some transfer goals for myself and the main one that I wanted to work on was working with members. So, Heavenly Father recognized my desire (which was not there before) and provided me with what I needed to accomplish that goal. So, Thursday night we were at Braums with some members getting ice-cream and we met this super cool lady. Her name is Kay. She is GOLDEN! We gave her a #ASaviorIsBorn card and asked her to watch the video and when we talked to her two days later she had watched it three times and wanted to meet with us! She was going to come to church on Sunday but woke up not feeling well (darn adversary!) but we are planning to meet with her again and start teaching her. We also had another cool experience the other night. It was 8:30 pm and we can't go in until 9:00 pm and we had absolutely nothing to do. That's one of my least favorite situations to be in. Anyway, I didn't know what to do so we went spirit driving. Spirit driving is kind of hard to describe as far as how you feel when you're doing it. But, anyway, we turned down a street that seemed good, drove past a bunch of houses and then stopped at a small house with a Jeep out front. Then we sat in the car for a few minutes trying to think some positive things about that moment because neither of us wanted to go tracting but I knew that 6-9 is sacred finding time so we had to do it. After all, sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven. So after each of us had said three positive things about that moment in time we prayed and asked for a miracle and then got out of the car and went and knocked on the door. And low and behold, we met Natasha! Miracle! Natasha is Catholic, super sweet, and going to school at JBU. She let us right inside when we knocked on the door because it was cold out and we gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon and she was so excited because she had never heard of it before. We actually just had a lesson with her today and she already has read the introduction even though she' in the middle of finals, and as we talked to her more about what the Book of Mormon is and read Moroni's promise with her she got SO excited! She is just so prepared and ready to learn and she said that she really believes that God sent us to her. The spirit was strong as we were able to bear our witness (both us and the McWhorters who were with us) of the Book of Mormon and testify to her that God did send us to her at this time. Man, it's moments and lessons and people like that that you live for as a missionary! Out of time! I love you all! Hope you have an awesome week! Love Sister Cryer

CAROLING

Dear Family, So, first things first before I forget. That thing you sent me, mom, with the average mission thing and all the different missionaries and their abilities,...I was literally on the floor crying I was laughing so hard! Thank you! It made my day! Ok, now for some of the highlights of the week. We've had some pretty cool experiences this week :) One of them was on Wednesday night. We got to go caroling with the youth. That was a cool experience for a couple different reasons. One, this youth group is really good at singing! We had soprano, alto, tenor, and base going! It sounded so good! So that was nice! Two, Heavenly Father was just really blessing us! We went to an assisted living center and sang to some of the people there, and after we sang I went over to talk to one of the ladies sitting on the couch. Turns out she just recently moved from Mountainburg which I covered when I was serving in Alma! So we started talking about that and then she asked us to come back and visit her more :) Heck yeah! We gave her a #ASaviorIsBorn card with our number and we are super excited to see her again! Another cool blessing came right at the end of the evening. We had just finished caroling at someone's house and were heading out, when we suddenly got the word down the line that someone across the street had heard us singing and requested us to come and sing to them :) Like I said, we sounded pretty good. Just sayin'. Any way, so over we went and sang and then me and Sister Hustad stayed afterwards to talk to the family. Turns out that the grandma is looking for a church to go to and asked us if she could come to ours! HECK YEAH! ...Um, someone needs my computer so I will tell you the rest in my letter! Love you! Sister Cryer

TIRE REPAIRS, A SAVIOR IS BORN, AND THANKSGIVING!

Letter dated 30 November 2015 Dear Family, Well, we are sitting on metal folding chairs in a cement floored, wood walled room at the sketchiest tire place I have ever seen. I LOVE IT! haha. It's called Latino Tires and it's owned by a friend of Brother H, one of our members. It's all Mexican people that work here and it's pretty small and rustic with graffiti all over the back wall where you pull your car in. I actually remember seeing this place a few weeks ago when we were driving home one night. The doors were open into the shop with all the tools everywhere and a couple of cars inside. You could see all the graffiti really brightly contrasted against the dark, dirty colors around it, and there were a few men sitting on buckets and stools in a little group at the back. I remember thinking, "Sketchy," lol. It looked like a scene from a movie, honestly. Anyway, so we are just sitting here waiting for our tire to get patched or whatever they're planning to do. We ran over the mother of all nails last night and when we got up this morning the tire was FLAT. We made a few attempts to change it ourselves and then finally broke down and admitted that we needed a male to give us some help! So Brother Patterson came to the rescue with his son Emerette (almost five years old). Bless their souls! Back at the apartment now. The sketchy Mexican tire place worked out AWESOME and we were even able to give away two A Savior Is Born cards. So it was not unproductive. I am so excited about that initiative! #ASaviorIsBorn. This is going to be the Best Christmas EVER! I decided that the minute I heard about the initiative at MLC. We got to present the initiative to the ward on Sunday and I was so pumped! I hope that some of that enthusiasm rubs off on them. Anyway, to get them going on it we are doing a competition. Whichever family shares it most in a given week will get a plate of homemade cookies or something from us, and whichever family is able to give us a referral from their sharing will get a place of cookies AND four hours of service. Win win! Either way we will get to do service for the members ever week and maybe, in an awesome world, even get some referrals from it! Are the missionaries there doing anything cool to promote it? Thanksgiving was great! TONS of food! We ate 3 Thanksgiving day dinners. One at 2:00 one at 4:00 and one at 6:00. The 2:00 pm one was with a guy named George and his wife and siblings and cousin and stuff. George volunteers at the Mana center which is a food bank that we go to every Tuesday. So that's how we know him. We had gone over to his cousin, Linda's house on Monday night to help her unpack some stuff (she is moving into a new house) and they invited us to come and spend some time on Thanksgiving with them. So we did. We got to show them the video "A Savior Is Born" before we left. The second dinner was with Marla and all her family. She is the manager of the Mana center and she LOVES the missionaries. Anyway, we are hoping to be able to show her the video soon, and maybe get her to start taking the lessons. Pray for us! Pray that we will have an opportunity to share the video with her and that her heart will be open and ready for it. The third dinner we had was with the Pattersons. They are some of our favorite people in the ward. They are just SO awesome. We had an awesome evening with them! Oh my goodness. I love the Pattersons! We had an active member lesson with them last night and then while they fed us pie we went into the music room and they serenaded us with piano, violin, and vocals. It was so awesome! OK back to Thanksgiving for a minute; my favorite part of the day was when we got to do service at the Methodist church. They were serving a free Thanksgiving day meal and so we got to go and help serve the food. Boy was it fun! There is just nothing in this world as wonderful as service! I have decided that I want to do a lot more service when I get home, especially around the holidays. Anyway, I am basically out of time as far as writing stuff down goes now. Preparation day is coming to a close. I hope y'all have an amazing week! Know that I love you and that the gospel is true! It really is! Love Sister Cryer

TEACHING SO MANY WONDERFUL PEOPLE!

So hello all my people! First of all, updates about transfers. I am staying in Siloam Springs. Sister Reeder is being transfered to...somewhere in Okalahoma. Skyatook and Pawhuska or something like that. Please forgive the spelling because I am sure it is wrong. Any way, I am still an STL (Sister Training Leader) and I will be getting another brand new 'greenie' to train. I am so excited! It's going to be an absolute blast and I am way excited. :D Sister Reeder is sad to be going, so I have been doing a lot of consoling and some teasing to try and get her ok with heading off to a new area. I know she will love it, she just has to get there and meet some of the people. Well, I am sending you a letter with updates about the events of the week, so for this email I wanted to tell you about some of the people that we are working with. So, let me first just say that I am so happy with the miracles that we have seen the past 6 weeks! I didn't know that we had been so blessed until we were doing our weekly planning on Saturday. That's when I realized that when we first got here we had no investigators to speak of at all. Nothing and nobody to work with. NOW we have two progressing investigators, and several pretty solid investigators and a few potentials that I think really have some real potential! It was so cool to suddenly realize how much we had been able to do with Heavenly Father's help! Any way, so our two progressing investigators are Ruby (you remember Ruby and Charles right? They are the ones that just got back from Louisianna) and Molita. I don't know if I've told you about Molita at all. She is a sweet marshallese lady. Her boyfriend, Asner, is a member but very less active. Any way, they have been coming to church since their daughter Monalisa got baptized last year. Molita wants to be baptized so badly but she hasn't been able to yet because they have not been able to affort to get married. That darn law of chastity. lol jk Any way, Bishop has been working with them a ton and they are planning to get married on December 12th! We are so excited for them!!!!!!!! Ruby is progressing great! She told us in the last lesson that we had with her that she wants to get baptized, and she asked us what she needed to do in order to be ready. Talk about golden! haha What I thought was so cool though is the reason she wants to get baptized is she wants to have the spirit with her more! She is just so cool! We love her! We are trying to figure out how to get Charles more involved...He's not very interested right now but we found out the other day that he can't hear very well, so that might be some of the reason why he's not interested! He can't hear what we're saying! Any way, so we are trying to figure out how to help him. We don't want to yell our lessons, but maybe we could just try and have some more visual aids and stuff. We are also still working with the Slaters, that family that we went and saw with Drew on Sunday night that just let us right in and then wanted to feed us! We had a good discussion with them about the gospel last Monday and we are going to go over again tonight and hopefully go over the restoration. We really want to teach them about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. We think that will help them the most at this point, so hopefully they will let us! We have those potentials that I think I told you about last time, AJ and John and Christina. We are going to hopefully get ahold of them this week and maybe start meeting with them. We also got to contact a referral last night...well at least we talked to her roommate or mom or something. Her name is Larisa Pack (the referral) and we are hopefully going to go see her on Tuesday...tomorrow. Wow. Time goes by fast! haha Sister Martin is a less active that we are working with. She is working on quitting smoking. We haven't been able to see her all this week because she has been sick. Hopefully we will be able to go and see her soon. So, some fun stuff coming up in the mission that I am WAY excited for: A visit from Elder Foster of the 70 on Dec 10-11 A mission wide Christmas conference Dec 21 Hopefully going to Zach Omans sealing in the temple sometime in December! Can you believe it???? He is getting married in the temple! I AM SO EXCITED FOR HIM! If Zach was the only person that I had helped on my mission, it would have been worth it, because he is receiving all the blessings that the restored gospel can give him! Seeing my trainee Sister Gerard at MLC. She is a STL now! Skyping my peeps! Have a wonderful week y'all! Sister Cryer #asaviorisborn

HAPPY THANKSGIVING WEEK

(Sister Reeder and I having Halloween dinner with President and Sister Loveland) Hello peeps! Happy Thanksgiving week! Ok, I don't have a whole ton of time because we have a zone outing today :D so I will just give you some of the highlights: We were finally able to meet some of our investigators this past week! Ruby and Charles. They started investigating the church at the beginning of the year but then in May or June or something they left Siloam and were in Louisiana taking care of Charles' dad. Any way, we had talked to them over the phone, but we were finally able to go and meet them and have a lesson with them and then they came to church on Sunday and loved it! So we are excited to keep working with them :D Ruby is more excited than Charles is, but she said that Charles wasn't in the best of moods when he went to church and he came back in a very good mood, so hopefully he will open up to us :) Ruby is just awesome. We gave her a gospel principles book to take home with her and she called us later on that evening and said, "I'm just studying in that book you gave me and it talks about the book of Moses. Where is that?"! She is just awesome! We love them both already! Also one of our investigators, Molita, and her boyfriend are getting married. That was the one thing that was stopping Molita from getting baptized, they had to get married. So now that that's happening we have high hopes that she will be baptized soon :D We had 3 INVESTIGATORS AT CHURCH! AND WE GOT 16 LESSONS THIS WEEK! It has been so nice to see our numbers steadily getting better! All I can say is that we better not get transferred because we are just starting to get things figured out! ...That probably means that we are going to get transferred... We didn't end up getting to see that Bible bashing guy that we met Sunday night. Instead we talked to a nice old couple that had just recently been in Eugene OR visiting friends, and we also met a really cool guy named A.J. and his family. It was funny because we were just knocking on doors, but when we knocked on their door they were like, "Hey! Come on in!" like they had known us forever! Sweet! haha So we went in and were able to talk to A.J. for about 20-30 minutes about how he came to believe in Christ and we talked to him about the Book of Mormon as well. The spirit was there which was really cool, because a lot of times when people who already have a strong belief in Christ and in the Bible hear us say "Book of Mormon" they become really closed off all of sudden and start telling us all the reasons that the Book of Mormon is false. But with A.J. it just kind of felt different. I don't know. He brought up all the same concerns that everyone does (don't add or take away from the Bible) but it didn't feel like he was attacking and he seemed open to learning more. When we asked him if he would like to study with us he said that he would have to talk to his wife and kids about it, but that he might be interested :D So here's hoping! We ate two dinners back to back on Sunday. That was rough. They were both super big dinners and I thought I was going to pop! But I made it through, alright, albeit a little sick to the stomach! haha Wednesday we had an awesome lesson with a less active, Sister Martin. I don't remember if I told you about her or not, but when we met her last week (or maybe the week before) she basically told us that we were welcome to come over but she was not going back to church, period. Well, we had our lesson on Wednesday and we were able to have Sister Bailey with us.Sister Bailey is Sister Martins best friend. Any way, Sister Bailey did most of the teaching, we just kind of sat and distended, and it was so good! It was exactly what Sister Martin needed and as Sister Bailey talked to her she just opened up and told us that she really did want to get back into the church and bring her kids, and have her husband come (he is not a member) and it was just so good! And actually her husband was really nice for being anti Mormon! He actually sat in on some of the lesson and talked to us :D So that was awesome! Member present lessons, man; it works! Saturday was fun because we had the Spanish Elders down to try and contact someone that we had tracted into and we ended up having the wrong address somehow! Any way we knocked the address that we had and a white English speaking girl answered the door and said that Renae (the Spanish guy) didn't live there. She had no idea who that was. Well, then we saw a bunch of Spanish people going into that house! What the heck! So we went back and asked one of the Spanish guys and he said, "He's not back yet." Then the girl came around the corner and said, "Yeah, he doesn't live here anymore." Ok...we went from not knowing who he is, to he's just not here right now, to he moved. ...well great. So instead of contacting Renea we took the Spanish Elders to try and talk to our neighbors who speak Spanish. That was pretty hilarious because we parked at a church about a half block away from our apartment, pointed out the door that they needed to knock and then sent them on their way with me and Sister Reeder in the car peering out the back window to see what would happen :D haha They got to talk to them, and got a phone number, so we shall see. The Elders also took our bike rack off our hands, or rather off the back of our car! So it's nice to have that gone. We had to ask for some help from a guy out chopping wood because we didn't have the right wrench, but he helped us out and we were able to get it off. I tried to give the guy a Book of Mormon to say thanks, but he didn't want it. JUST TAKE IT! Oh well. Alright, I think that's pretty much all my highlights... We had a crunchy rice casserole with Sister Palmer for dinner on Friday night. That was so funny! The rice was completely raw! haha It hadn't cooked at all. Poor Sister Palmer was so embarrassed! We kept telling her it was ok, and it really was! It tasted great, even if it was a little crunchy and I had seconds :D She is so cute! She is the seminary teacher. All I can say is seminary must be a hoot! haha Well, I hope y'all have a wonderful week! Be good and remember who you are and all that rot! haha Love you! Sister Cryer PS Here is a picture of all the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders in our mission. Can you see me?

THRILLED TO MY VERY TOE TIPS

Letter Dated 16 November 2015 Dear Family, Man, I feel like I never write letters anymore! In my last area I played ultimate frisbee all day on prep day and now I clean all day on prep day! Haha. Well, not so taday. I went super fast with my cleaning today so now I actually have time to sit down and write a little bit. So, the Siloam Springs ward had a chili cook off this past Friday, and ME AND SISTER REEDER GOT TO BE THE JUDGES! That was so cool! I have never been the judge of anything so I was thrilled to my very toe tips! And I don't know when this happened but I LOVE CHILI! It's become one of my favorite meals and I have no idea why. Haha. We got to go to the temple on Saturday with one of our recent converts. That was so awesome! We didn't get to do anything, we just sat and watched but it was just so wonderful to be at the temple! The car ride home was pretty fun too! I taught everyone (Drew, Brother Patterson, and Gracie) to play "What's in your milk" and we were dying laughing the whole way home! Drew especially! He thinks he's the funniest man alive! Haha. It was a great time though. When we got back Sister Reeder and I headed to Walmart with the intent to do some OTMing. Well, unknown to us apparently it was national "Everyone who speaks only Spanish congregate at Walmart Day" So many Mexicans! I couldn't help thinking of mom and Sam as I fumbled my way through, "Hola,...Somos misioneros de la Iglesia de Jesucristo...de...uh,...here's a card....the web site" (making computer like hand gestures that probably looked more like a two year old playing the piano) "has...videos de jesucristo....muy bien." Haha. It was so funny! But hey, we gave out three pass along cards and guess what? They were in Spanish! I may not have been expecting Spanish people but Heavenly Father was! I honestly didn't even know we had Spanish pass along cards in the apartment! So that was a cool little miracle. We got to speak in Sacrament meeting on Sunday. That was fun because we got the assignment Friday night. We didn't really have time to prepare for anything Saturday because of the temple so we pretty much wrote/prepared our talks Sunday morning. I think I have spoken in church more in the past year than the rest of my life put together. No joke. Haha. Anyway, I told you about Sunday in my email...Well I actually did miss one thing. Before we went to have dinner with the McWhotrtors we contacted a former investigator, Rick, and he said we could come back! Sunday was just such an awesome day! OK one more kind of funny thing. While we were shopping today I saw a freezer door open in one of the isles. Without even thinking about it I went down the isle and closed the door. Well, Sister Reeder didn't see me go down the isle so when I came out she had stopped and was looking back in my direction with a look of utter terror on her face! It was pretty funny! Anyway, I'd better wrap up, my hand is starting to hurt. I love you all! Sister Cryer

AN AMAZING WEEK

November 16 email Dear Family, SUNDAY! Sunday was the best thing that happened to us all week! We had an awesome day at church and then I got to take a short nap during lunch, and then we had dinner at the Bishops house. I got to watch the cows being fed. That was cool. Any way, while we were over there we were talking to Bishop about some media referrals that we had received, one for a K Slater and one for a Rebekah Hinkle. "Rebekah Hinkle?!" he asked. "Yes" we said a little confused. "We know her! She is a great friend of our family!" How cool is that?! So we got to talk to them about her a little bit and get prepped to go over and see her, and then we had Bishops son Drew come with us. He is preparing to go on a mission to the Philippines soon. So because of situations with time, we did some night tracting around a less active that we had an appointment to see. I was a little skeptical of that just because in my experience people don't usually like talking to you if it's dark outside and you are knocking on their door. But we went and did it anyways and we had some awesome success! We got two lessons, and invitation to church (we invited him to ours too) and two return appointments! One of our return appointments I'm not too sure about. I feel like the guy just wants to Bible bash, but we'll find out. The other one though I am super excited about! John and Christina. They seem super golden! John's best friend is Mormon and he seemed super open to learning more about it. :D Then we had our lesson with the less active, Sister Santoy and that just went really well. We committed her to start reading in the Book of Mormon every night with her kids, and to talk to her husband, who is not a member and does not speak English, about having the Spanish elders come over and teach him. So we are going to be praying for her. It was really cool though, because she basically bore her testimony of Joseph Smith and the church, and from there is was really easy to commit her to try and bring her family into the gospel more :D Then we went and tried to contact Rebekah but she wasn't home :( That was the only sad part of the night but it's O.K. because guess what? While we were shopping at Walmart today we met her! It was so cool! We were just walking down the isle and she was walking towards us. So we smiled at her and then she was passed us, and then she stopped and came back saying "hey!" We stopped and turned back to and she said "I'm Rebekah!" Holy cow!!! Heavenly Father is so good at setting things up so perfectly but so not in the way that you would expect! Any way, so we are hopefully going to see her this weekend. So, back to Sunday night. After trying to contact Rebekah we headed over to try and contact K Slater, our other referral. We found his house and knocked on the door and then nest thing I knew the man who opened it was saying "Well hello!" with a huge smile "come on inside and have a seat! I'm sure glad you came!" What the heck! I have never had that type of reaction with a media referral! haha IT WAS SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We went in and met his wife, Anne and we got to sit and talk to them for about an hour about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and our missions and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Atonement and it was just awesome! They are so great! Super open and kind and just wanting to learn! Any way, it was a miracle and all three of us, Sister Reeder and I and Drew were freaking out we were so excited by the time we left! Basically Heavenly Father blessed us a whole ton and it was pretty much the BEST SUNDAY EVER. I'll tell you about the rest of my life in my letter I think :) Here's hopin' y'all have an incredible week! Remember that sacrIfice brings forth the blessings of heaven! Actually speaking of that let me tell you just a little bit about today: Washing the car. It's always a blast (for me anyway, I think Sister Reeder kind of hates her life every time we have to wash the car!) but today it was particularly exciting because it was raining and super windy. And I was scrubbing. .....I got SO WET! haha But really though, my mascara was running down my face I got so drenched! We had a good laugh when we got back in the car and snapped some pics. Any way, just wanted to tell ya about that! Love you all! Sister Cryer

DON'T CRYER ABOUT IT

November 9, email....Sorry I (mom) fell a little behind being out of town. Hello everybody! Holy cow, where to even start! So Monday was crazy. So crazy that we ended up washing our car in the dark at a super sketchy car wash! That was fun :) Tuesday was awesome because I got to go to MLC and I learned SO MUCH! I don't even know what I did different to prepare, but I felt like Heavenly Father was just opening the windows of Heaven and pouring out a whole ton of good stuff on me! :) It was so cool! I wish I had my notes with me! I do remember though that I learned a lot about prayer and I was able to set some goals for myself :) We have been asking people who we can pray for, so I am making a list in my planner and trying to have that with me when I say my prayers so I remember to pray for everyone. I also want to record somewhere either in my planner or my journal other things that I want to talk to Heavenly Father about, and then after I pray I want to record anything else that I prayed for. I had that idea during MLC and I am hoping that it will help me to make my prayers more meaningful as well as help me remember what I have prayed for and so recognize when my prayers are answered :) Also, I felt called to repentance with regards to the whole STL thing. I haven't been doing what I should be doing. So I made a commitment to change. How I didn't know, but I decided that I needed to change. So I have texted my sisters a few times to see how they are doing and on Saturday when I got to see them at Zone Training and Train the Trainer I made an effort to get to know them and just spend time with them in general. And ya know what? They are awesome! It wasn't hard at all to be able to talk to them and laugh with them (and boy did we have some good laughs!) and I am excited to go on exchanges with them :) Yeah so Saturday was awesome too! It was Zone Training Meeting and Train the Trainer and interviews with President all rolled into one and then lunch afterwards. SO FUN! And, I got so much good stuff from it! One little gem that I took away is actually a line from Praise to the Man. "Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven." That is so true! Elder Lopez used to say that to Elder Olson when he was being trained I guess. They would go out and tract all day in the cold and Elder Olson would complain to Elder Lopez and ask why they were out tracting in the cold. "Well Elder," Elder Lopez would respond, "because sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven." That is so true! I just loved that! I think I am going to start saying that! So, always remember that peeps! Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven! Lets see what was a highlight for Wednesday? ...We got to go into Young Men's for their white shirt Wednesday and do some role plays with them. :D That was an absolute blast! Those kids are nuts! haha We did a role play and taught them the restoration, and they did a great job being very difficult investigators, and then they taught us, and...lets just say that I felt very good about our role play by the time they were finished! haha They were cracking us up! They were in a tripanionship, and there was NO communication between them at all! Big testimony builder to me of teaching with my companion in unity! haha They are awesome though and we had a lot of fun with them! Thursday we had a tornado warning and a sweet thunder and lightning storm :) They have some awesome lightning out here! Any way, that was a pretty cool little tender mercy to me because it was a bit of a rough day of weekly planning.Thank you Heavenly Father! We also got to OTM a lady in Walmart. We had gone in to try and find someone to talk to and low and behold she was standing right there, so we went over and talked to her. She said she had just moved there recently and she didn't have a church yet and would enjoy looking into ours :D awesome! We exchanged info and are still hoping to meet with her sometime. Her name is Janniece. Hopefully we will be able to get a hold of her. We got to go and do some tracting on Friday which was awesome! Work at last! Any way, we got to talk to some pretty neat people. Only one was interested, Jonathan. He is Mexican I think. Any way, we got his info and will hopefully be able to meet with him in a few weeks he said. We also got to talk to a guy named Jefferson. That was a testimony building conversation. He didn't believe us but it always feels good to testify! It's rough when they still don't want to listen though, but life goes on and I am sure Heavenly Father will take care of him. It was the first time he had ever talked to Mormon missionaries he said (what an honor!) so he will have a chance to talk to more in the future I am sure. Maybe he will be ready next time :) We also got to meet Santa Claus. And he told us that we don't believe in the Bible because we add to it. Then he gave us bibles with only the New Testament and Psalms. I didn't say it, but I wanted to say "...doesn't it also say to not take away from the bible either?...This isn't even a whole bible!" haha It was so funny! And legit, he is Santa Clause. He is in the Christmas parade every year :) Saturday, I already told you all the cool stuff pretty much. Well, I guess I have another joke with the assistants now. For whatever reason the assistants like giving me a hard time! We still have the whole deal about time. Not giving me enough time or being late or whatever, but now we have a new joke. "Don't cryer about it." I don't even know how that thing got started but it is so funny how much they love saying it! Elder Whitehead said "usually jokes get lame the more you say them, but for whatever reason this one just gets funnier the more I use it!" haha So he said it in Train the Trainer; I had made a comment about my voice, to apologize for it because I was reading (oh yeah, my voice has decided to fly the coop. It has been gone for about 3-4 days now) and he looked at me and said, "Well, you don't have to cryer about it." Everyone laughed including me as I cried out in denial of letting any moisture escape my little peepers, only to find that I was crying because I was laughing so hard! What a joke! lol Well, I think that's pretty much all my news for today :) I hope you all have a wonderful week! Thank you dad for your experience from the mission! That was very nice for me to hear. Love y'all! Sister Cryer P.S. Remember, sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven!

LIFE IN SILOAM

Hola! (Look at that. I put a little bit of Spanish in there) So how are your lives going? From one end it sounds like a crazy awesome and hot adventure, and from the other end it sounds pretty tame and domestic and damp. So...Not sure what to say further on that. haha Well, my week has been great! Missionary work has been kind of different the past week and a half since I arrived in Siloam. I didn't tell you this in my last letter but my companion is dealing with depression right now. It is something that she has dealt with in the past but not for a while and didn't think it would be a problem on her mission. So it was a bit of a shock for everyone that she is struggling with it again, and the consequences are that we don't get nearly as much time out of the apartment working as we normally would. I am often times alone in the morning exercising in the apartment and then doing studies while she gets some extra sleep. We are meeting with a counselor as well to try and work things out and that takes up time. Any way, so things have been quite different. But, Heavenly Father knows what He's doing, and He put us here together for a reason. So I am just doing the best that I can with what I have been given and trying to help my companion to work through this and stay out on her mission. If you could keep her in your prayers that would be awesome. The work that we have been able to do has been mostly trying to contact people that are supposedly investigators but have not had their records updated since spring time this year. ...The Elders were not very good at updating records, bless their hearts. So there is no way of knowing if they have been taught recently, if they want to continue learning, what they were taught, if they were dropped, NOTHING. So that's been fun. So yeah, lot's of phone calls and trying to stop by and talking to our ward mission leader about people. And it's not just that way with the investigators. It's that way with our recent converts and less actives too. Fun times! We have been able to contact a few people and have some return appointments so we are excited about that. We even picked up a new investigator last night! His name is Eddie and he reminds me a little bit of Jaren. We had gone over to visit the Hurts. They are sort of recent converts who have gone less active. We thought they might even have gone back to their old church. That was not the case when we got there though. They let us in and they were so excited to see us and talked about how much they wished they could come to church, but their health just wont let them anymore. Any way, they brought their grandson (or some kind of relation) out to see us because they said he might be interested in learning about the church :) That was Eddie. We aren't totally sure yet what kind of interest level he has, but he is willing to learn and he said he has already read the entire Book of Mormon! That was a shocker! A good one though :) I have made some animal friends this week :) My companion doesn't like animals very much. So every time there is an animal somewhere, usually a dog, I try and distract it so it doesn't bother her. So the other day I made friends with what looked like a bloodhound puppy, a boxer, and a chihuahua, and a gray cat. I've actually gotten a lot more comfortable with dogs on my mission! haha I have learned that if you can get the dog to come to you, then everything is good, but if you are the one moving towards the dog and it's not moving, then you might end up being in trouble. So I just get them to come to me :) And it's worked out pretty well so far. We got to play volley ball with Bishop and his family as well as Juan. Juan is an English teacher from Colombia and he is here with a group of his students. The kids are staying with various families around town and he is staying with the Bishops family. So we played volley ball with them and had a blast! I got hit in the head with the volley ball. That was pretty funny! Drew, Bishops son (he is 18 and getting ready to go on a mission) decided to try serving the ball as hard as he could in a time out. Well, let me tell you, that kid has got a great serve! The only problem was that my head was in the way. I wasn't looking when it happened so it cannoned into the side of my head, and it was so hard that I was literally pushed over and had to side step so that I didn't topple like a domino. haha It was so funny! I was cracking up and Drew was laughing and in shock and apologizing all at the same time, and Bishop kept asking me for about 10 minutes if I was really ok. Good times. There is a place here called the Mana Center that is kind of like the outreach in Alma. It's a lot slower paced though, but it's fun. Everyone there is super nice :) The lady that is in charge of the whole deal though, Marla, loves missionaries! She has pretty much adopted us. I guess the first missionary she adopted was Elder Connor. Funny because I know him. He was in my first district! Any way, ever since him Marla has just kind of adopted all the missionaries that come through. She feeds them and they would go over and help her with yard work and stuff. So we got to go over the other day and help her plant some bulbs and flowers in her yard on Friday. That was so much fun! I never really thought I would miss yard work, but it was so nice to just get down in the dirt and plant stuff and rake leaves and chop up roots with a shovel. :) Plus it was a beautiful day that we got to go over :) We got to have dinner with President and Sister Loveland on Halloween. That was a blast and a tender mercy! The blast because we love President and Sister Loveland and it was so fun to be able to spend some two on two time with them. The tender mercy part because being Halloween we were supposed to be in our apartment by 6pm. LAME! So when they called and offered to take us out to dinner because they were in town, we literally started jumping up and down because we got to get out of the apartment! Well, I am running low on time and I still have to email Pres. so I am going to sign off for now :) But I hope you all have an awesome week! I am sure going to! Love Sister Cryer P.S. Sorry about the lack of pics from my end. :/ The computers here don't have a way for me to plug my camera in. So until further notice you probably wont be getting any pics...

SILOAM SPRINGS ARKANSAS

OK, first things first. Siloam Springs is so pretty! I love it here! If it wasn't for all the bugs and humidity in the summer time I could live here! There are a few really pretty parks with little riverlettes and bridges and things and down town is all old shops and cafes with tables and chairs and umbrellas out front, and with all the leaves changing and falling it is pretty much picture perfect! In fact I am hoping to get out with my camera today and snap a few shots! I'll try and get some people in there amongst the leaves, mom ;) Well let's see, what can I tell you about? It's kind of weird because at the beginning of the week I was in Alma and now I'm in Siloam...Crazy. Any way, Max and Artie came and played basket ball and ultimate frisbee with us on Monday. Our last hurrah! It was a lot of fun :) Most of Monday night Tuesday and Wednesday was just trying to meet with everyone so that I could say goodbye. Nothing too eventful other than getting bit by a dog on my foot. That was fun. lol Thursday was a bit crazy. We had to be at transfer point at 7:45am to pick up Sister Fausetts new comp, Sister Pratt, and the plan was that I would just stay there and hang out with the other missionaries until I got on the Bull at 2. Well, little did we know until 7oclock that morning that there weren't going to be any Sisters at transfer point for me to hang out with. What the heck! What were we going to do?! Me and Elder Van Houten came up with all kinds of ideas as we discussed the possibilities over the phone, but what ended up happening is we got a ride up to transfer point, and then came back to Alma as a tripanionship, went to outreach, had lunch, and then I got another ride up to transfer point with Sister Egerton at 1pm because there were sisters there by that point. Any way, it was pretty crazy! I got to go to outreach again though so that was cool and slightly awkward! haha Because I had gone in on Monday and said goodbye to everyone already, so then to have to show up and be like "haha you thought I was leaving didn't you! lol jk" was a tad bit awkward. But it was great to be able to see everyone again. Transfers was fun. It always is. I actually had a little tender mercy in the parking lot before I got on the bull to leave: We were all about to load up and head out when I suddenly hear "Sister Cryer, you're not leaving us are you?" from behind me. I turned around and saw Sister Smith, one of the ward members that had been so good to us! She had just come into town to go shopping and saw all the missionaries so had come over to see what was going on. I got to give her a hug and get a picture with her before I left :) So now, back to Siloam Springs! The area is absolutely beautiful! The Bishop is incredible! Bishop McWhorter. He is so pumped about missionary work! He reminds me a little bit of Bishop Nothum in that regard, so I know that the work and the ward here is going to be awesome! So much depends on the Bishop, and if he is excited about missionary work, then everyone else will be as well :) So the Bishop is amazing, and the ward is awesome! Everyone is so friendly and have already been so kind to us! We shotgunned Elders so they are excited to have Sisters again. Speaking of shotgunning Elders, we have spent a lot of time today cleaning. haha The apartment is actually pretty nice, upstairs and downstairs with two bathrooms. But...you could tell that Elders had been living there. haha There was a lot of dust and trash and papers everywhere, not a very updated area book as far as I can tell and just a lot of work to do in general to get the place together. I wish I had taken before and after pictures, but oh well. Let's just say that it has put my cleaning and organizational skills to the test. It's been kind of nice to clean though. Something different :) Ok, I had better head out, but I will try and send you a letter this week too if I can. No promises, because I haven't finished cleaning yet, but I will do my best! haha I love you all! I hope you have an amazing week and share the gospel with someone! Sister Cryer

I'M BEING TRANSFERRED!

Dear Family! Holy cow what a crazy week! I don't have a whole ton of time (what's new right?) so this might be kind of short, but it's something. So transfer calls were on Saturday. I am being transferred to Siloam Spring, AR. I am shotgun training (which basically means that there will be no established missionary there. Me and my comp are both brand new to the area and in this case, my comp is brand new to missionary work! So should be fun) and I'm not sure if I'm an STL still or not. ...Any way, so that's what's going on there :) Let's see what are some of the highlights... We got to have dinner at Gee and Pop's church and ended up talking to their preacher. That was cool! We had a crazy lesson with Myra because her dogs were gassing the place up the whole lesson! Man, we were all gagging! Brother Stuart had to keep opening the door and pumping it back and forth to get some fresh air inside! Craziness! We went tracting in an old retirement community and we got some great excuses for not wanting to talk to us! "I'm not dressed" "I can't pray with you, I have to go to the bathroom" "Sorry sweetie, I cant' stand here and talk to you my hip's broken" What the heck! lol It was pretty funny! Max and Artie came to church on Sunday! That was pretty awesome! It was a pretty great last Sunday present! Well, I'd better sign off, sorry this is so short! I love y'all though and hope you have an awesome week! Sister Cryer P.S. My ponderizing scripture this week is Alma 26:22. That sums up my goals for the rest of my mission pretty much! Love you all! Sister Cryer

BOOM!!!! THE GOSPEL IS TRUE!

hey family! I loved those pictures that you sent! Those messages must have been REAL deep! So, I don't really have a whole ton of time today I am sorry! But I will tell you about the miracle of Sunday! By the time we got to Sunday we were at 11 lessons total for the week and our goal was to have 22 lessons total for the week. Shoot! We had some serious work to do! We didn't have any scheduled lessons so we decided to tract. So we did. We wanted to get as many member present lessons as we could so we got Ian Christensen to come out with us. He is getting ready to go on a mission. He stayed with us for the three hours that we tracted. We got 9 member present lessons during that time! Then after dinner we went and tried to contact a referral but they weren't home. I was pretty much done at that point. We had done good for the day, 9 lessons is really good. But Sister Fausett wanted to get the 11 that we had set goals for. So we did a little bit more tracting. Knocked 2 doors and one OTM and BOOM 11 lessons was born! What a miracle! Heavenly Father blesses the faithful for sure! And I was so grateful for Sister Fausetts desire to keep going and do more! So that night when we were going through our day though, we received a tender mercy. We had forgot about one lesson that we had had with Ian. So instead of 9 member presents we had 10. Instead of 11 lessons total for the day, we had 12. So that bumped us up to 23 total lessons for the week! God is good and the gospel is true! I love you all! Have a blessed week! Sister Cryer P.S. I said fixin' yesterday! haha I am going Arkansas!

FUNNY STORIES AND A COUPLE PICS

Letter dated 5 October 2015 Dear Family, So, I am sitting in a Firestone car place waiting for out truck to get an oil change and a tire rotation. That's the reason for the unlined paper. I don't usually go for that kind of paper, but I had to bum it off the guys at the front desk and this is all they had. ANYWAYS....Let me try and remember some of the stuff that we had happen this week...So you know how missionaries aren't allowed to babysit? (Best rule ever!) Well, we kind of ended up babysitting the Jenkins three kids on Saturday at Outreach. Those kids are crazy and there's honestly not much that they can help with, so in a desperate attempt to keep them busy and helping instead of being underfoot we had them help us bag frozen cookies. It was an interesting experience! lol Most of the difficulty came from everyone wanting gloves and there not being enough to go around, and the kids refusing to help if they couldn't wear gloves. And fighting over the cookies themselves. Anyway, we were able to pretty much keep them busy while we were there but boy I sure had a headache by the time we left! And who knows what happened to them once we were gone! Sister Fausett commented as we drove away, "I haven't had to bring out the mom voice in a while. It's just not something you really use while teaching The Restoration!" Haha. We had a good laugh and then started saying a bunch of missionary phrases and lingo in our best 'mom' voices. My personal favorite from Sister Fausett was, "I'm going to turn this salvation around if you don't stop right now." lol O.K. this was another kind of funny thing that happened. We had about an hour Saturday night with nothing to do so we decided to go and contact a referral that we had received for a lady named Karen. Interestingly enough it was the same address as another referral that we had received a couple months ago for a lady named Meagan. Anyway, we had stopped by several times trying to contact Meagan to give her the bible she had ordered and eventually just ended up leaving it in a bag on the steps of the RV. We had since tried several more times to contact Karen without any luck. We decided to go try again though since we hadn't tried at night before. Maybe they would be home. So off we went and pulled up onto the hill in the dark with the RV and big shed and tent in all their sketchy-ness. And they were home! The big double doors of the shed were open and as we pulled up we saw two silhouettes run to the doors and then just stand there. Awkward! lol We got out of the car and started up the conversation asking if there was a Meagan here and had she got the bible we brought. There was a Meagan there and she had got the bible! Yay! So we started talking to them (it was Karen and her daughter Meagan) about the bible and about God and things were looking really great. But then they started asking us about our missionary work and I made the mistake of mentioning that we can't talk to our families except on Christmas and Mother's day. They were shocked and said that just wasn't right; we should be able to talk to our families and they couldn't believe that the church would do that to us etc etc. "Shoot, what did I do?!" I thought to myself. They even told us, "Well if you want to you can come up here anytime and call your moms and no one will ever know." Uh....no thanks! haha. Anyway that basically killed the good streak of conversation. After that it was all them basically telling us that everything we believe and teach is wrong all the way from how we're saved to the fact that apparently the bible tells us not to do genealogy...despite the fact that a good chunk of the bible IS genealogy....figure that one out! lol At the welcome end of the conversation Meagan asked, "So do y'all ever get any free time or anything?" "Yeah, we get some time on Monday," we said. "O.K., well if you want to you can come over sometime and I'll show you all the parts in the bible where it shows that what you believe is wrong."......Yeah, that's exactly what I want to do in my free time! NOT! lol It was pretty nuts! Life is just crazy sometimes. We had a good laugh out of it though. We also got invited by some Baptists to come by for a bible bash sometime. "Yeah! You come over with your list of questions and try to destroy my faith, and I'll make up a list of questions and try to destroy your faith and we'll just have a good old time!" That's basically what he said! I also got offered a beer for the first time in my life by a thin, shirtless man because he said I looked thirsty. Don't worry, I didn't take it. That's actually kind of a funny story too! So we were in the RV park contacting some referrals and we saw a small group of people outside one of the RV's so we thought we would go talk to them. Well, as it turned out they were in the process of getting hammered. Party hard. So it wasn't the best teaching environment, but they wouldn't just let us back out. "Tell me about the Book of Mormon, right now. I'm interested," the girl there said. The guy next to her (the thin shirtless on that offered me the beer) looked at her and said, "Well, could you go over there and talk about it, because I am NOT interested." "You don't even know what it is!" she said. "Yes I do!" he yelled. "Some guy, came to America, what's his name?..." he said pointing to us. "Joseph Smith? we said. "Yeah, Joseph Smith! Joseph Smith came to America, went into the woods and seen Jesus and BOOM! Mormonism is born!"... It was so funny! haha. We gave them a Book of Mormon and said, "Well, you can find out for yourself," and then we walked away. Good stories from tracting and OTMing. Well, I think our car, excuse me, our TRUCK is probably about ready (plus I'm about out of room on this sheet) so I'll call it quits for now. Love y'all! Have a wonderful fall week! Love Sister Cryer P.S. Dad, I hope you stay in Seminary for a while because I want to go with you when I get home! Seminary is the best! (A little pink note enclosed reads, "Dear Sister Cryer's family, Oh, Man! Way to go! You raised a good one. Sister Cryer is pretty much the best trainer ever! She is so kind, loving, and good at listening to the spirit. Keep praying for her because it is obviously doing good. I LOVE HER! Love Sister Fausett") Here are a couple pics that Sister Cryer sent home recently....With the Assistants to the President. Here I am tracting at a tent door!

LET'S ALL PONDERIZE!

Hello family! Hey so this email is going to be super short, so....sorry about that! We've had a great day though and a great week! I got to write a letter this time so you can look forward to that :) I am TOTALLY going to ponderize a scripture every week! I would love to hear what yours are and what you learn from them :) My scripture this week is 2 Nephi 2:28 "And now, my sons, I would that ye should look to the great Mediator, and hearken unto his great commandments; and be faithful unto his words and choose eternal life, according to the will of his Holy Spirit;" I read that scripture today in my personal study and it was just what I needed to help me through some feelings that had been getting me down :) I particularly liked when his says his GREAT commandments. at first I just thought that is was saying that all the commandments of the Lord are great and wonderful, but then I thought of the two GREAT commandments. Love the Lord, and love others. Any way, I don't know if it's talking about those or all the commandments or both, but it was a neat though. :) Well, I love you all! I hope you have a wonderful week! Sister Cryer P.S. The Book of Mormon is true Also, we picked up a new investigator, Chris. If you could keep in your prayers that he will be able to understand the Book of Mormon as he reads, and also that his wife Kendra will be more open to listening to the gospel that would be awesome! Prayers work, so I am excited to see the miracles! I will keep y'all posted!

MORE FAITH MORE MIRACLES

Hey family! How is life? SAM I AM SO EXCITED THAT YOU WERE ABLE TO GO TO THE TEMPLE!!!! The temple is the best place EVER and I can't wait to go again! It feels like forever ago that I was there. Costa Rica huh? That sounds like a blast! Holy cow! You will have a ton to tell me about then I am sure! Life here is so good! Me and Sister Fausett have been working together on having more faith and I think because of our efforts Heavenly Father has been blessing us and we got to see so many miracles and I wish I had time to tell you about all of them! I don't know maybe I will. I will do my best. Tuesday we had some really cool miracles. We had gotten a referral a week or so ago from the Jenkins, a recent convert family, for a lady named Dawn who lived in an RV park in town. "We don't know which RV she is in, but here's where the park is" they said. ...ok... So we went down there on Tuesday to try and find Dawn! I have never tracted in an RV park before but we gave it a shot! First door we knocked on no one was home so we walked around a bit until we found another door that looked like it needed to be knocked on :) Low and behold who should answer the door but Eva, a lady that we know from the outreach that we volunteer at every Thursday! We're not allowed to procylite at the outreach so we hadn't got a chance to really talk to her about the church before, but now we were able to! That in and of itself was a miracle and then on top of that during the conversation she said, "Yeah, I have a friend here, her name is Dawn..." No. Way. "...did you say Dawn?" "Yes, she lives in that trailer right over there." ...the church is so true! It was the coolest thing ever! We were also able to finally have a lesson with Jennifer, that potential that stood us up on Saturday. We were driving past her house to another appointment and we saw her outside. "Should we go back?!" Sister Fausett asked. Honestly I was a little reluctant because we were already running late for our other appointment and the family we were going to go see hadn't been to church in a while and we had been struggling to meet with them. But Sister Fausett said she felt like we should go back. "Lets do it then," I said, so back we went and we were able to have a good 45 minute lesson with her and we think that she has some awesome potential! She really opened up to us a lot and we are hoping to start teaching her soon. On Wednesday we decided to go spirit driving meaning that we just drive and turn where we feel like we should until we get to a spot or house that we feel good about. So we were driving and then I saw a housing development that looked good so I turned off onto that street and drove a little bit and then Sister Fausett picked out a house. There were four girls in the house that we knocked on and we were able to give them each a Book of Mormon! They talked to us for a good while too asking questions and saying things like "...Why doesn't anyone else know about this?!" when we would answer them and when we explained what the Book of Mormon was. It was really neat! We don't think anything will come from it right now, but the seed is planted and it was an awesome experience to be led to them :) Thursday was weird because everything went according to plan. ...that never happens. Friday was awesome because we got all of our weekly planning done! That hasn't happened for a few weeks! Saturday we were trying to contact a referral and ended up tracting a tent. haha That was fun! No one was home though. I will include a pic :) Sunday me and Sister Fausett sang in Sacrament meeting. That was a new experience for me! It was fun though. I am getting a lot more confident with my voice. Heck! I even sang I am a Child of God all by myself at the Mills house for an FHE. I was so scared, but I just didn't look up and it all went ok :) Oh! Also on Sunday we got 4 NEW INVESTIGATORS!!!! Mom and 3 kids. We had our first lesson with them Sunday night at 8 so we barely squeaked it in, but we did it! Heavenly Father is so awesome! He takes such good care of us and blesses us so much for every little thing that we do! Any way, I think that's all I got for ya right now :) I hope you have a wonderful week! I love you! The gospel is true! I see miracles every day and I know that it's true! Sister Cryer

FEELING USELESS AND SEEING MIRACLES

Email dated September 21, 2015 Hey! So this might be a little on the short side, but I will do my best to give you some of the highlights of the week! :) So, highlight number 1 I got to go to MLC (must be some kind of mission leader councilon Tuesday. That was fun mostly because me and Sister Booms got permission to ride up with the zone leaders so we wouldn't have to waste as many miles. That was a fun car ride! We were talking and laughing the whole way :) The funniest topic of conversations started when Elder Van Houten said, "Ok, so serious question." "Yeah?" me and Sister Booms replied. "...what do Sisters talk about?" haha it was funny! Apparently him and Elder Johnson had spent a lot of time one night trying to figure out what Sisters talk about because everyone says they're prefect...so they must just talk about the gospel all the time. Not true. lol We ended up concluding that Elders and Sisters talk about pretty much the same things. Then MLC itself was good, but I don't understand what the purpose of it is...and when I asked Elder Van Houten he said "that's a good question. ...I don't know." Cool. Me and Sister Booms we pretty exasperated about the whole thing because STL's in general are kind of pointless in my opinion, but we are completely pointless, even more so than other STL's because we aren't over any Sisters! haha Holy cow, we were just cracking up about the whole situation. Split STL's and the only other sisters in the zone are our companions. So we'll just swap comps at some point this transfer I guess. Any way, so we were feeling comically useless, and then to add insult to injury they didn't give us any binders like they were handing out to everyone else with info about our assignment and stuff AND we just didn't know what was going on in the meeting. They would say stuff like, "ok, so now we are going to go around and talk about what's going good in our zones," and me and Sister Booms would look at each other and go "I don't know what's going on in the zone do you?" "Nope." or, "Now we're going to look at the talk by Elder Nelson, so if you could all pull that out" ...me and Sister Booms, "What talk???" It was ridiculous! But we had some good conversations on the car ride home :) Saturday morning we were able to see some pretty cool miracles! We had set a goal Friday night to get 2 lessons and 1 referral. High goals for that particular day because we were scheduled to be in Fort Smith almost the whole day helping out with a play that the ward was doing. Any way, that is a different story. So, pretty high goals. We had a lesson with a potential named Jennifer scheduled for 11 on Saturday morning so after studies and a quick bite to eat we headed off to that. When we pulled up though, her car wasn't there. NO! We knocked anyway, but no one was home. Well perfect. Now we had an hour and a half with nothing to do! So we decided to go tracting. The first door we knocked we talked to a very large man without a shirt named Chris. Slightly awkward, but we were able to get a lesson with him :) Then we OTM'd some people out on their porch playing a game and after that started knocking doors again. Just before we started heading back the way we had come to follow up with another potential we decided to knock one more door. A girl opened it, early 20's and as we started talking to her we found out that her mom is a Mormon, and she said she would love to meet with us and learn more about the church :) Awesome! We got her number and said we would set up a time with her because she wasn't sure about her schedule and then we asked if there was anyone else that she knew that could use and uplifting message. "Yeah actually," she said. "my cousin lives just across the way and she has been looking for a church too. When y'all come over I will make sure she is here as well." WHAT?! Awesome!!!! Right there, we got 2 lessons and 1 referral! It was an absolute miracle because I didn't know how we were going to do it. THE GOSPEL IS TRUE. After that we tried contacting our potential but she wasn't home, so then we decided to go down a side road that we both felt good about. It emptied us out onto a main road and across from us there was a cemetery. There weren't really any houses and the only people that were out were two women in the cemetery putting flowers on one of the graves. Hmm. We both wanted to talk to them but weren't sure that it was really appropriate for us to just go up and start talking to them, so we wandered around for a little bit, started walking away, didn't feel good, said a prayer and then went back and gave the each a pass along card. As we walked away we were both glad that we had done it, and I don't know why we were supposed to, but Heavenly Father does, and I think we did what He wanted us to. So Saturday morning was full of miracles and it was awesome! Well, I'd better go an email Pres! Love you all! Thank you so much for your letters and thoughts and prayers! It means a lot and helps more than you know and more that I know :) Sister Cryer

LOST AGAIN

Letter dated 14 September 2015 Dear Family, Holy Cow! I can't believe it's the middle of September already! Is it getting cold there? It's not here. But that's OK. Grandma sent me a sweater in a package the other day which I appreciate but can't really use it yet because it's still too hot for sweaters. So, some stuff about the week....well, first of all, lunch took forever to make today because I forgot to turn on the burner! So I kept waiting and waiting for my water to boil before I finally figured out what was wrong! Sister Fausett and I had a pretty good laugh about that. We got lost on Saturday trying to deliver some cupcakes to one of our members who's husband had a birthday. Sister Murray had taken the GPS with her so I didn't really know where I was going. I thought I knew, but I really didn't know. So we got lost and burned a ton of miles. It was actually pretty funny and I was cracking up about it! I think Sister Fausett was a little frustrated but I thought it was hilarious! Anyway after driving a ways on what I thought was the right road I finally admitted that we were not going the right way so I turned around and headed back to the main road. I pulled into a little gas station and we tried to call our member with no luck. Who else would know how to get there? Most everyone in the ward were at Saturday sessions of conference. As I racked my brain trying to think who we could call I suddenly had the thought to call Max. (Have I told you about Max? He works at outreach and is a friend of the Cranfords who we were trying to get the cupcakes to. He also seems to be an eternal potential investigator.) He would know how to get to the Cranfords house. So we called him and he answered! Thank goodness! We told him the predicament that we were in and asked if he could help us. "Where are you right now?" he asked. "We're at 71 and 348 at a little gas station," I said. What does the gas station look like?" "Uh...it is a little rock building,"... "Have you passed the yellow flashing lights?" he asked "What!? I tell ya, no one does directions by names and street signs here! They go by landmarks like big hills and curves and far-see's and yellow flashing lights. It was so funny to listen as Max figured out where we were and gave us directions to get to the Cranfords. He did eventually throw in one street name, and that's how I figured out where the heck he was telling me to go! Anyway, good on him, he got us where we needed to go. So we delivered our cupcakes. All's well that ends well, right? We still weren't sure what the purpose was in our getting lost but we were sure it had happened for a reason. Well, later that night as we were getting settled in for the night and doing our planning and stuff I had the thought to invite Max to Stake Conference. "Hmmm," I thought. I told Sister Fausett the idea and she totally agreed! So we called Max up and thanked him for helping us to find the Cranfords. Then from that we were able to invite him to come to Stake Conference. He said he would love to, but he had some family plans already in place so he wouldn't be able to make it, but that he was grateful for the offer and would love to come to church sometime,..."maybe I could come next week," he said. Woohoo! So Max might be coming church next Sunday. Pray for him. After we got off the phone Sister Fausett said, "I bet that's why we got lost today. So we could call Max and get directions and that way we would have an opportunity to call him tonight and invite him to Stake Conference and it wouldn't be awkward. Maybe she's right. Mom, I wanted to say thank you for what you sent me about the Sacrament. That was so awesome! I have been trying to figure out what I can do as a missionary to more fully keep the Sabbath day holy, because sometimes it's not really a day of rest, and for a missionary it can become very much just like any other day. So I have been thinking what I can do to make my Sundays more holy. What you sent me helped to answer my question. Thank you. Have a wonderful week. Love Sister Cryer

NEW COMPANION

First of all, that table looks awesome! I LIKE it :) Second, I don't know what my responsabilities as a STL are yet ...but I have my first MLC tomorrow (Missionary Leadership Coorolation...or something like that) tomorrow, so that should be fun. I feel kind of bad because I am going to have to leave my brand new comp in charge of the area for the whole day pretty much most likely. But I know Heavenly Father will help her out, and she is an awesome missionary anyway so I am not too worried She will do great! So yeah, Sister Fausett is amazing! I always get the pretrained missionaries I feel like. So that is pretty awesome for me! haha I have had to do a little bit of comforting for homesickness which is not really my strong point, but I did my best. So...cant' ask for more than that. We have been having a lot of fun together though. And guess what? Sister Fausett loves dancing too! She said that tap is one of her favorites. So we are getting along just great! lol So let me start at the beginning of the week here. Our zone outing that we had on Monday was super fun! We pretty much played sports all day. I am amazed how much I have come to love sports on my mission! I pulled a muscle in my leg within the first 5min or so, but I just kept going. We started out with ultimate Frisbee, and then we went and did and impromptu service project for the Jenkins dad who is inactive and needed help unloading a moving van close to the church. Then we came back and played volley ball and then we played some basketball and then more ultimate Frisbee. It was a ton of fun. It took me a few hours to warm up and be any good at anything we were doing, but by the time we rolled around to ultimate Frisbee at the end, I scored almost all the points for my team. So be proud and possibly a little bit amazed. :) Monday night we went to visit a couple families so that Sister Murray could say goodbye. One place was a little sketch...even more than it usually is, because there were bugs, mostly cockroaches EVERYWHERE. It was pretty nasty. We had to dump out all our stuff from our bags before we went in for the night to make sure that we didn't bring any into the apartment with us. Again, mom, thank you for keeping a clean home! Tuesday was pretty uneventful. Just saying bye to a bunch of peeps. Wednesday...not much went on. Thursday was transfer day. So we headed off to the Fort Smith Wal Mart parking lot and played hot potato with the Elders until the transfer bull got there. I got to see Sister Peterson from the MTC! I was so excited! And Elder Koffard, my zone leader in Branson. He is home now. It was funny because he came over and faked like he was going to give me a hug, and I freaked out! haha I have been well trained I guess. lol Poor Sister Fausett, first day is so rough! I tried to make sure we were pretty much working the whole time. We did service and visited people and had some lessons, and she said that it helped a lot to be doing stuff. Friday was a little rough again though because he had to do weekly planning at some point! We took a lot of breaks though and it worked out kind of ok. We didn't get it all done... :/ Hey, I'm not a perfect trainer, what can I say. Oh well. Maybe we can finish it tonight. The best part of the week though was Sunday. It was stake conference and (drum roll) ELDER BEDNAR WAS THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It. was. so. cool. You just know that these men are apostles when they speak! You can't help but know it :D What made it even cooler though is that Elder Bednar is from this area, so he almost seemed to relax a little bit more because he was home. He had us laughing all throughout his talk it was great! One of the things that he talked about was the importance of listening to our priesthood leaders who hold keys. The first part of his talk he just went over everything that the stake president had gone over, and hammered the importance of knowing what he said, the invitations he extended and the blessings he promised. I got everything down in my notebook except the blessings, so I have a little bit of repenting to do, but not doing too bad :) Any way, Sake conference was just amazing! Highlight of the week for sure :) I hope y'all have a wonderful week! I love you! The gospel is true! The savior lives! The atonement is real! Sister Cryer P.S. This is a pic with my zone leaders at transfer point. They are pretty nuts, so we get along great! haha

SHORT AND SWEET

Hey so this email is going to be super short BECAUSE we have a zone outing that is going to be super awesome and eat up all the time that we have today. SO lets get the important things out of the way. TRANSFERS. I am staying in Alma and Sister Murray is going to Bartlesville OK. I am getting another greenie AND I am going to be a Sister Training Leader. ...whatever that fillipin' means! I don't even know. SO don't ask lol Well, That's about all my news. Sorry for the lack of good stuff. I will give you something better next week! I DO love you all though! Love is not measured by the length of the email. Always remember that. Sister CryerSister Murray and I enjoying dinner with a family.

SERVICE: ONE OF THE GREATEST JOYS

Dear Family, I JUST GOT THE BEST NEWS EVER!!!! Do you remember Dylan, Cysco's friend in Springfield? Well, Sister Reese just emailed me and told me that HE GOT BAPTIZED!!!!!!!!! He just needed the right missionaries. Holy cow do I ever love missionary work! The gospel is SO true! Any way, that email just made my entire life even better than it already is! So we had a pretty great week this week. TONS of service which was AWESOME. In fact, let me just give you a history of all the service because that was almost all we did I feel like and that's what most of the week was I feel like. The highlights anyway :) So on Thursday we went and did service at outreach as usual. We do that every Thursday 9-12:30 am. This past Thursday a lot of members from our ward were there too which was fun :) and of course Max was there, our eternal potential investigator. Have I told you about him? He is awesome and he needs the gospel so bad! He just needs to let us teach him! Any way, he has warmed up to us now, so we are hoping that soon he will let us teach him. But in the mean time we just get to talk to him at outreach and occasionally at Gencie's house when we go over for dinner. Any way, Thursday me and Sister Murray pretty much bagged frozen chicken tenders the whole time. That's ok though. My back was a little sore afterwards but it was still a good time. Throughout the bagging process we had an ice war with the Elders chucking little chunks of ice at grated ice at them as they chucked it at us and told us to work faster. Max started it I think, but the Elders were more than eager to join in. haha Me and Sister Murray held our own though. Another slightly funny thing that happened was when Brother Black came into the back to see how we were doing. He stood behind me and when I looked at him he was just watching me, smiling. "what?" I said. "You've been doing that the whole time!" he said laughing. "so what?" I tried to say, but somehow for some unexplained reason, my tongue decided to go on strike and I couldn't get the words out. I ended up saying something in martian and that just made brother Black laugh even more. After doing outreach us and the Elders went and got some pizza and then went to a park to eat lunch. After lunch we still had some lunch time to we spent some time on the swings tossing a Frisbee back and forth and laughing a lot. ...Missionaries are very easily entertained I have noticed. haha! It's pretty hard to catch a Frisbee when you are on a swing though! Takes consummate skill and dexterity. ... :) After lunch me and Sister Murray got to stay in our grubs and go over to Myra's house to help her clean. Her house is pretty dirty. ...She has four dogs and she doesn't do any cleaning really so...you can imagine. We worked on the kitchen and in about three and a half hours we were able to get some of the kitchen cleaned up. There were a ton of dished, dirt and dust and hair everywhere and roaches roaming around across the counters. ...pretty nasty. We had to do quite a bit of scrubbing and lots of coaxing to get Myra to let us do as much scrubbing as we did. We also did a little bit of organizing, as much as Myra would let us. It was driving me crazy how everything was so jumbled together with no rime or reason to it! It felt good to help her clean though, even if it was pretty gross. Mom, I just want to say thank you for keeping a clean home! There are just so many homes here that are not clean, and as I was cleaning Myra's kitchen for her, I was so grateful to you for teaching me how to keep things clean! Friday we got to help a new family move into the ward. That was cool because there were about 30 people I would say from the ward that showed up to help, and me and Sister Murray were the only girls. haha We jumped up into the truck and touched every single box as it went off, handing it to the priesthood to take into the house. It was a lot of fun! and apparently helped to build some member trust too as Brother Black told me that the priesthood was impressed with our help. :) So THAT'S a good thing :) Saturday we did out reach again. We went early that day, around 7am because Saturday is always super busy for them and we had another service project scheduled at 10 so we couldn't go when we usually do. So we went at 7 and helped to unload and shift things around and get things ready for the day (I am finally getting the hang of the little fork lift think on the truck that moves the crates around. I don't usually get the crates stuck on the side of the truck anymore when I move them. Actually I had a good scare on Thursday because I had gotten one of the pallets stuck on the side of the truck and as I was trying to get it unstuck Max decided to come and give me a hand. Very nice of him and everything but I didn't notice when he came up behind me until I saw an arm reaching around me and it freaked me out! I let out a yell and jumped back heart pumping and breathing hard! haha all three of us had a good laugh about that one!) and then guess what we did? Bagged chicken. haha! Max had a good laugh about that. I think me and Sister Murray are becoming the official baggers of out reach bagging everything from flour and sugar to cookies to chicken. After we finished at outreach that morning we headed back to the apartment where Helen picked us up and took us to her daughters house in Van Buren. She is getting ready to sell her house so we were helping her clean up one of her flower beds. We dug it out and then put weed block paper stuff down and then cut holes and planted shrubs and then spread mulch over the top. Then we decorated around the edges with rocks and put some big rocks between the shrubs. It looked dang good when we were finished! :) Ok, so I am out of time...dang it! Moral of the story this week is that service is one of the greatest joys that there is in life. I wish I had done more before I came out, and I am sure planning to do more when I get home :) Service is just the best way to live. Love you all! Have a great week! Sister Cryer

RECENT CONVERTS

Letter dated August 24, 2015 Dear Family, Wow! August is going by SO fast! That's a mercy because July seemed to crawl by. It was July for forever! At least that's how it felt for me, I don't know about y'all. Anyway, on to the news of the week! Sister Murray just read something about freezing eggs in a cooking tips book....I really want to freeze an egg now and see what happens! OK! Now on to the news of the week:) So on Tuesday we had some open time and no one to go see so we decided to sticky note some peeps doors. We used a lot of sticky notes because we put one letter or one word on each one so we could make it look crazy and fun on the doors. Anyway, everything worked out surprisingly well. Either people weren't home or didn't see us and their dogs didn't hear us and we were able to sticky note in stealth mode, completely undetected, despite the fact that we stick out like a sore thumb in skirts with badges running madly down streets away from members homes and into our truck:) It was good times! We got to go on exchange with Brother Brewer, the Young Men's President, to go see Noah. He is 13 years old, recently baptized and pretty ADHD. Haha! That kid was everywhere! We couldn't stay on one topic for more than 30 seconds it felt like. They had a cute hound dog (super big) with an adorable wrinkly face. They also had a pond full of tadpoles and green water. Anyway, we talked with Noah about the temple and the Book of Mormon. He said he really wanted to come to church but he lives so far out in the boonies that it's hard to find people willing and able to give him rides. So we are trying to work that one out. We were able to do some family history with some of our recent converts. Myra and Helen. I sure love those two! They are a hoot! Especially Helen. She is a feisty older lady with a big heart and a desire to follow God. She has some eye problems too. She said that when she drives she can see the road just fine, she just can't see the speedometer....That's Helen! haha! Myra is a sweetheart too. She is very shy and has had a pretty rough life. She loves animals (she has 4 dogs) and she is so strong in the gospel already. Anyway, so we got to swap family history stories with each other on Wednesday. Myra was telling us that her mom had to have surgery on her leg to take out the bone and they put a goats bone in to replace her bone! What the heck! I didn't even think that could happen. Hmmmm, what else? I think the only other exciting thing happened after our zone training meeting. We had arranged to ride up with someone and to get a ride back with someone else, which was fine. We arrived on time and had our meeting and everything was great. Our ride home however wasn't quite as smooth. We had miscalculated how long our meeting would go, so at 12:00 all the other missionaries were heading out to go grab a bite to eat and me and Sister Murray were stuck at the church waiting for out member who would arrive at 1:00. That wouldn't have been so horrible were it not for the fact that I was SO hungry. There was nothing we could do though despite our zones best efforts to get us to CC's pizza with all of them. So, off they went and there we stayed. We decided to study while we waited so we plopped down onto the couches in the foyer and began. We hadn't been sitting there too long when we got a call from Fort Smith Spanish Elders, Elder Millet and Elder Busi. "Hola," I said. "Como esta ustedes?" I heard an excited exclamation from the Elders that I was speaking Spanish to them. lol "Que pasa?" I asked. They proceeded to inform me, in Spanish, (which I caught enough of to know what they were saying...kind of) that they had gone to an eggrollery near their apartment and bought egg rolls and they were bringing them back for us! "Bless their souls!" I said to Sister Murray when I hung up! Those Elders are the best! They couldn't come inside the church so we found a flat rock outside in the sun (a little hot but not too bad) and ate egg rolls, swapping tips for investigators and finding and the like. Well, I think that's about all my news. I love you tons and bunches! Have an incredible weekend! Love Sister Cryer P.S. "Teddy Bear" by Elvis was playing in Walmart today while we were shopping. It was pretty much the best thing ever! haha P.P.S There is a colony of daddy long legs that have just recently decided to set up house in our doorway. Really? So going in and out of the apartment has been a bit of an ordeal this week. A stick and a bottle of hair spray usually gets them running the right direction (away)....usually:)

LEARNING ABOUT CHARITY

Hello Family!!!!!!!! Boy I sure love getting pics :) That probably means that you love getting pics too huh? Did you get the ones that I sent last week? This week has been great. We were able to hit the 9 week goal this past week of having 10 exchanges which was awesome because we have been struggling to get the goals all the way, and the most exchanges we have had in this area for a while is 6 in one week. So that was pretty neat :) Yesterday (Sunday) was awesome because we got FIVE referrals out of nowhere! The Blacks gave us four and then one of the Wade girls gave us one. We were on cloud 9! It was pretty much awesome! I felt very blessed and noticed by Heavenly Father :) So there is a guy at outreach named Max, have I told you about him? Any way, we have been trying to get him to be a new investigator but without a whole ton of luck. He just never seems to want to meet with us really, but a few weeks ago we were able to ask sister Cranford, who is also at outreach all the time, to invite him over for dinner when we were going to be there. So she did and he came! We had a great conversation with him and got to know him better and he was able to get to know us a little better. Then this past week at out reach he asked us if we were having dinner at Sister Cranford's again any time soon and we said not that we knew of. Immediately he went over to Sister Cranford and asked if we could do a dinner again! Woohoo! He actually wants to do something! So we have high hopes of being able to start teaching him :D That was a neat little miracle that happened this week. Lets see what else? We had our zone training meeting this past Thursday and Interviews with President Loveland. That was fun! President Loveland is very different from President Shumway, but I love him and very much enjoyed my interview with him! He gave me some assignments to study how the spirit works so I am excited to study that more :) Me and Sister Murray also had the opportunity to instruct in zone training about charity. That was awesome! I have been learning a lot about charity! The definition of charity is "the pure love of Christ" right? (Moroni 7:47) Ok, well I was reading about all the things that charity is and in Moroni 7:45 one of the things that it talks about is that charity rejoices in truth not in iniquity. Well with the standard thoughts about charity being 'loving people as Christ loves them' I didn't understand how that worked. How does loving people lead to loving truth and righteousness? It didn't make sense to me. And as well where it talks about how charity causes you to believe all things. How does loving people cause you to believe all things??? I found my answer in Matthew 22:36-40. The FIRST great commandment is to LOVE GOD. Not to love others, to love God. Then, after your love of God is established, you are able to love others. Now THAT made sense to me. In one of his recent conferences addresses Elder Uchtdorf talked about how we should obey God out of love and gratitude for him. Loving and serving others is a commandment from God, but in order to keep those commandments correctly we need to love God first. So charity has two parts then. Loving God as Christ did, and loving others as Christ did. Any way, I could go on, but I am kind of running out of time already so I wont. haha I will make sure to get a letter in the mail though with some of the other fun things that me and Sister Murray have been doing. I hope you all have a wonderful week! Love you! Sister Cryer This is me and Brother Black our ward mission leader. He is pretty great :)

AWKWARD DINNER, DEVILISH CAT, & A PRACTICAL JOKE

Letter dated August 10, 2015 Dear Family, So I have just been flipping through my planner trying to jog my memory about what happened that would be letter worthy and there's not actually a whole ton. I told you about the best stuff in my email, but there are a couple small things that I can tell you about. I met the bishop for the first time on Sunday! I had been hoping to meet him on Thursday because we had a dinner appointment with them. But that was not meant to be apparently because we ended up eating at their house without either bishop or his wife there. Awkward! Here's how that thing happened....We forgot to confirm. That is basically what happened. So we were on our way out to their house and we ended up taking some wrong turns so we called bishop to let him know that we would be late. "Hi Bishop, it's the Sisters!" Hi Sisters! How are you?" "We're good. We just wanted to let you know that we took some wrong turns but we are on our way and should be there in about 15 minutes." "O.K. Where are you heading to?" ....Uh....that's not a good response coming from the person you are heading to for dinner. "Your house...? Your wife signed up for dinner." "Oh. O.K. Let me check with her"......."Yea, O.K. come on over." "...O.K." When we get there bishops wife is on the phone and getting ready to run out the door to go to work. Bishop was gone. So we ended up just eating the left overs of the dinner that the family had made earlier and we sat and ate by ourselves and talked to their kids (all married with kids of their own). They were all super nice about it, but talk about awkward. #missionlife We got to have lunch at the Stuarts house on Thursday with four of the Elders in our zone. That was fun. We do service every Thursday and then go over to the Stuarts to eat. Anyway, those Elders are so nuts!...but then again, what Elders aren't, ya know! You will be glad to hear dad, that they spent most of their time at the Stuarts "playing with" aka 'terrorizing' the Stuarts cat. That cat is pretty devilish though....so it was funny to watch the Elders jumping around and yelling as the cat swiped at their feet. She held her own for sure. O.K. I do have to tell you about the joke that me and Sister Murray played on ward council. First of all as a disclaimer: Brother Black is a jokester and prankster like no other. So it's kind of rubbed off on us. Sister Murray wears glasses and she is legally blind without them. Well, on Sunday she wore contacts and no one knew that she wore contacts. So right before ward council started Brother Black came up to us and said, "Sister Murray, where are your glasses?" "I broke them," I responded. "Yeah," Sister Murray agreed. "She got really upset and just stomped on them and broke them last night." Now, does that story sound believable to you? Well, Brother Black believed it. And so did the whole ward council! We weren't even trying to trick them. We didn't even try to keep a straight face, and yet we had the whole ward council believing it! In fact, about 10 minutes after we had left (we don't stay for the whole ward council) Brother Black came and found us and asked if just the frames were broken or the lenses too etc, etc. Apparently it was a topic in ward council and they were trying to figure out how they could replace them and where the money was going to come from. We told Brother Black that is was a joke and started busting up laughing. He just stared at us for a few seconds and then he started smiling and gave each of us a knuckle bump. It was pretty great. Well, I think that's pretty much all the news I have. Love you all! Hope your week is going good so far. Love Sister Cryer Card sent separately with the same date: Hey Family, Guess what I forgot to do? Several things. First of all I forgot to say that I was so sad to hear about Jack! I'm sure Jackson and Snuggles are looking out for him in the spirit world though. Also, I think I'm going to start taking a bubble bath daily! Tell Aunt Gloria thanks! I also wanted to say thank you for all your prayers. I know that they help. And I need to get all the help I can! haha. But really though, I am very grateful. And thank you mom for sharing that with me about your prayer being answered through my experience. Heavenly Father is such a good father. So merciful and loving. Also, I wanted to tell you that I loved hearing about y'alls insights on the brother of Jared. That's where I have been studying too, trying to figure out what the brother of Jared did to get to the point of being able to see God. It has been so neat to study! Something that I enjoyed doing was comparing Ether 3:2-13 with Mosiah 4:9-10....Anyway, thanks for sharing. I will try and share more next week. Love you! Sister Cryer

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF LIFE?

Letter dated August 3, 2015 Dear Family, So, I just had a panic attack because I dropped two M&M's on the floor. It was pretty funny!...but maybe you had to be there. Anyway, really quick mom, you asked a question about training that I don't think I answered. It's not a once a trainer always a trainer deal. It's very much up in the air as far as what's going to happen each transfer. Honestly, I wouldn't mind training for the rest of my mission, but I doubt I will. But who knows! Anything could happen. Well, I feel like I pretty much told you everything....I'm sure I can come up with something else though. We did a TON of cleaning today. The apartment was a little bit on the nasty side. It feels a lot better now though. The bathroom....well, I won't go into details I guess. It sufficeth me to say that cleanliness is next to godliness and this apartment is now closer to heaven than it was before. Fun fat (hahahahaha!) FACT (not fat): Our apartment has a problem with fruit flies at the moment. NASTY! We bought ourselves a little bouquet of flowers today because apparently the stuff that you put in the water to keep the flowers fresh kills the fruit flies. Who knew! So anyway, we have flowers around our apartment which is super nice. Hey! Guess what! Elder Bednar is coming to our mission in September!!! I am SO EXCITED! It has caused me to do some self evaluation for which I am very grateful. It made me think a little bit about the second coming. That I really do just need to be prepared at all times so that I am ready when He comes again. Thinking about that made me very grateful for the Atonement as well because there is so much that I need to work on, but because of the Atonement I don't have to worry about being imperfect. All I have to do is progress. And that reminds me of a thought I had the other day. We were saying a prayer and all of a sudden the question popped into my head, "What is the purpose of life?" What the heck! Don't I teach people the answer to that question? Why should I be asking it? But I was. For whatever reason that question was suddenly a very real question that I had. I felt like Enos when he said, "My soul hungered." Well, I knew right where to find an answer. I went into Preach My Gospel and almost immediately I found a highlighted sentence that said, "Our purpose in this life is to have joy and prepare to return to God's presence." I felt such a thrill of joy and peace as I read that! What a great purpose to have! My purpose is to have joy and prepare to return to my Heavenly Fathers presence! So anything in this life that does not contribute to one of those two categories (joy or preparation) is not worth our time. SO COOL! I just love the gospel! I love how we can always learn new things, not only with our heads, by study, but with our hearts, by the spirit. Anyway, it was cool to have my testimony strengthened in that doctrinal point. And now, because my testimony of that point is strengthened I should hopefully be able to teach it with more power. I just love how all that works! Anyway, I think I've pretty much given you all my news. I love you all a ton. Love Sister Cryer P.S. I was drawing at church to keep myself awake! Don't worry, I was listening. We were talking about keeping the Sabbath Day holy. There has been a lot on that lately. Anything changing at home or at church because of that new focus of the church? Just curious. I am trying to find some way to make Sundays special, because as a missionary I feel like Sundays are the same as every other day pretty much. So I am trying to figure out how I can still do everything I am supposed to as a missionary on Sunday but still make the day feel special. Any ideas?