IS IT SIGNIFICANT?!

Letter dated January 19, 2015 Dear Family, I am so behind on everything writing wise! This is so stupid!!! The annoying thing is that the past transfer and this one has been such a blast and so many things have happened but I haven't been able to write things down. I am freaking out! Well, here's a cool story. So we have been wanting to invite Antwain to be baptized on a specific date. We had prayed about it before but hadn't been able to come up with a particular date. All we knew was some time in February. So we prayed about it again and came up with the 21st. Sweet. Well, a few days later Sister Nelson shared with me that she had the feeling that Antwain could be ready earlier. O.K. So we prayed again and decided on February 7th. Well, we show up for our lesson with Antwain (last week) and do our thing and then at the end of the lesson we invite him to be baptized on the 7th. He kind of freaked out a little bit. I guess he was thinking we would pick some time in March. Nope. We move fast! Anyway, the cool part was that after he had calmed down a little bit he asked if it was significant that he had requested and gotten that day off. IS IT SIGNIFICANT?! HECK YES!!! How cool is that?!!! We were all so excited! Sister Nelson and I especially because it gave us another confirmation that the 7th is the day that Antwain should be baptized. I love how Heavenly Father works. Sam, you asked a little bit ago if I had any advice on setting spiritual goals. That's a really good question. I could suggest reading in Preach My Gospel on page 146 and also look in Chapter 6. At the end of the chapter there is an Attribute Activity that I have found useful in measuring my spiritual goals/growth. I think if you can identify what you want to improve in or grow in or strengthen your testimony on then you can set more measurable goals to attain the desired improvement/growth/strength. Also for testimony stuff, it might be helpful to write down a before and after testimony. Hope that helps! I will keep thinking about it though. Love Sister Cryer

WEIRDEST EXPERIENCE YET

Hello Family! So, this week has been crazy and I honestly don't know what to say about it. Mostly it's been crazy because of an even that happened on Monday after I had emailed you and which I will not disclose in this email, just for kicks. You have to wait for my letter :) Hmm...I'm trying to think what I have not already told you in my letter! Haha We got a new investigator on Sunday. It was on of the weirdest experiences I have ever had on my misison. We were desperate for a new investigator on Sunday. We were asking everyone and finally we got a referral from one of our investigators, Antwain. He said that his friend Nick from work might be interested. We were told to meet him at the Stake 'n Shake on National in 15 minutes. He was tall and thin and white and had scraggly brown hair. That's all we got. OK...We had Jon and Eliza with us, otherwise we probably wouldn't have gone. So we got to Stake n' Shake and found a table and then just sat there creepily staring at people as they came and went. We waited for a good 15-20 minutes, and then finally we figured out that Nick was the guy that had come in a while ago and was sitting a few tables down from us. So he joined us at our table and we started talking. It was a little awkward though...especially because at this particular time Stake n' Shake was kind of busy, and LOUD. Not to mention that his voice was kind of quiet. I could barely hear what he was saying, when he did say something, and so for most of the meeting I had to guess at what to say, so I just went for it. Poor Sister Nelson couldn't hear a thing so it was pretty much just me the whole time. Eliza stepped in and helped me out though. It was just really strange. Hey, he agreed to meet with us again though :) so that's good. Um...what else? Jon Mayer came to church yesterday! We have been trying to get him to church for so long now!!! And he came! :D We were so happy! Zach came to church as well. He is one of our investigators that we haven't been able to see in a while. He is doing great though. We talked to him about church after he got our of priesthood and he said that he had loved it! We talked about the Holy Ghost and how much he loves that feeling. We talked about baptism and how he can have the gift of the Holy Ghost and he said that is something that he really wants and he is so exited to be baptized! Zach is the best! At the end of the lesson he gave the closing prayer and it was one of the simplest most sincere and heartfelt prayers I have ever heard. Me and Sister Nelson couldn't stop talking about it after he had gone! Well, sorry, this is kind of a short email this week. Love you all! Have an amazing week! Remember to say your prayers every day :) Heavenly Father wants to hear from you. He loves you so much! Sister Cryer P.S. Here are a couple of pictures of us at the St. Louis Temple

SPECIAL OPPS MISSIONARIES

Hello my peeps! Before the fun stuff I want to apologize for being so sucky at writing a letter as well as an email every week. I am going to do my absolute darndest to get a letter out this week! OK. Now on to the fun stuff. So, I think I told you about the zone outing last Monday. No need to repeat that. But there are a couple of other things that happened on Monday. The first thing that happened was a lesson with Dylan. Outside. For about an hour. And it was freezing. My feet were ice cubes by the time we were done talking. Craziness! We couldn't go inside though because we didn't have a girl. Rules can be really lame sometimes. Just sayin'. But it all worked out and Dylan didn't drop us like he was thinking about doing so everything is all good. :) After Dylan's lesson we ate dinner (pizza. again. haha! Man, I miss our home made pizza!) Then we headed over to the stake center for our lesson with Augi. Have I told you about Augi? I can't remember. Well, Augi is a recent convert, baptized in Tulsa and then moved here where we have been teaching him the lessons again. And a good thing too because, no offense to him, but he didn't know anything. He didn't even know about the Plan of Salvation or The Word of Wisdom or the law of chastity. If I ever meet the Elders that "taught" him...trouble in River cCity. Any way, we had a lesson with Augi. That was a rough lesson. All of the lessons that we have had with him before have been awesome, but this one was ROUGH. For whatever reason he was really mad and you could feel the negativity hanging around him like fog. We tried to teach the lesson but before we got more than a few words in, we recognized that the spirit was gone and we couldn't teach. I have realized again for the hundredth time how important the spirit is in our work and how helpless we are without him. We stopped the lesson and told Augi that we could either reschedule or change the feeling in the room and get the spirit back. After a long time of sulking he said that he wanted to get the spirit back so we could "get the lesson over with". So we all knelt down and said a prayer and then we grabbed some hymn books and sang. It took more than one hymn, but eventually the spirit began to come back into the room and in the end we were able to teach the lesson in an even better way than we had planned. I love the hymns and I have a strong testimony of their ability to bring the spirit into our lives. Tuesday was good. We got to do family history with one of our recent converts, Katie. It was awesome. She is so excited about family history work and just since Tuesday she has found about 15 names 13 of which she got to take to the temple on Saturday. :D We got to go to the temple on Saturday as well!!! It was so wonderful to be back in the temple and to be doing baptisms for the dead. The temple is an amazing place and I am always amazed at the peace that comes from the temple. We got to go because it was Augi's first time. He LOVED it. It was so amazing to see him in the temple doing baptisms! He couldn't stop smiling. :) Oh, and by the way, it is a small world :) Guess who I saw at the temple? Sister Wynder! Do you remember her? I don't even really remember how I know her but she and her husband used to be in our stake. Any way they live in St. Louis now and work in the temple. It was so great to see someone that I knew all the way out here :D I also saw Elder Gordon (one of the Elders in my district in the MTC). That was super unexpected and a nice treat for me. He was in the baptismal room when I walked in. I got a huge grin on my face and waved. It was so great to see him! Any way, Wednesday we had our district meeting. We talked a lot about becoming Special Opps Missionaries. Our district leader Elder Hammit was actually in the army for a while before he came out so he was able to share some interesting insight. One of the things that I thought was really interesting was that in basic training there is no turning back. You just don't have the option to quit. You keep going even if you are about to die! And if you stop, say in the middle of doing a certain amount of push ups, everyone else has to keep going until you start again and finish. No going back. No slacking. But, once you get to special forces training there is a bell at every work out point on the drill field and at any point you can ring the bell and walk away. I thought that was really cool. We are all out on missions. We made that choice and there isn't really any going back. But we don't have to be the greatest missionaries that we can be. We can stay at mediocrity if choose to. I don't know that I explained that very well, but hopefully you got the gist. We also had a lesson with a girl named Kaylynn on Wednesday. We taught her The Restoration and she is gung-ho for Joseph Smith. "How could it not be true!" she said. Exactly!!! Finally someone see's how not only true it is, but that it makes sense. It was a little bit of a scary lesson though because Kaylynns aunt was there, and she is a hard core Catholic. Not only that but she was sitting over in a corner dressed in dark clothes with a depiction of Jesus on the cross above her head. Intimidating. The lesson went alright though, and Kaylynn is doing good. We got a new investigator that night as well. His name is Justin. He is cool. His mom was baptized about 5 years ago and is coming back to activity. He is cool. He is trying to quit smoking and has already gone from about 15 cigarettes a day to about 5 cigarettes a day. SO awesome! Antwain is all set to be baptized on 7 Feb. We are super excited for him! We are slightly worried about the law of chastity right now because he and his girl friend are currently living in the same house because she got kicked out of her grandparents house and doesn't have any where else to go. Hopefully everything is ok. Thursday we taught Charles. He is doing so good! He is so funny. He actually came on the temple trip with us on Saturday. He was in the van with us and he had us all in stitches for almost the whole trip! Friday, the only thing that happened is Bishop got dinner delivered to our house. It was fettuccine chicken Alfredo. The first bite tasted really good. The second bite tasted good. By the time I was a third of the way through the meal I thought I was eating glue. It was so gross! Both me and Sister Nelson were soon rolling on the floor in agony, convinced that we had been poisoned and were seconds away from death. It was a close call, but we made it. Saturday, not really anything more to report. The temple trip was awesome. Sunday was good. My favorite part was our lesson with Jon Mayer. He is such a sweet guy! We got to do the lesson with Bishop outside because it was super nice (and we didn't have a girl). We also had to speak on Sunday. That was fun because for some reason we didn't start preparing for the talks until Saturday night. And I literally had no idea what I was going to say until Sunday morning during personal study and right before I got up to speak. But, I guess it was good. A lot of people told both of us how much they had been touched by what we said. We talked about how knowing that we are children of God effects how we think about ourselves and others. We also drew the plan of salvation in the parking lot of the institute. We are hoping that all the people who park their cars there for school and walk through will see it and get curious :D We'll see. Haha Well, I think that's about all my news. Have an amazing week! Love, Sister Cryer P.S. Could I get Nathan's email address?

THEY'RE JUST COMIN OUT THE WOODWORK!

Hi family! So this week was awesome! It was kind of weird though because we hit the standard and even got over it without even trying very hard! ...We are not sure how that happened, but we aren't complaining. So we got a new investigator on Monday (which is unheard of because Mondays are preparation day so we don't have much time to actually be teaching and especially finding). His name is Zach. He is super awesome and so excited about learning about the gospel. We met with him almost every day this week! It was cool. Any way, one of the things that he mentioned to us was that he loved how much we prayed. I have never really been complimented on that before, so it was pretty cool :) We got a new investigator on Tuesday as well. Kaylynn. She lives about 30 minutes away from us, so it is a bit of a pain to get out to her and teach, but it is kind of fun to have a bit of a road trip as well :D She is cool though :) She was a referral from the Springfield 2nd Sisters. She was given a Book of Mormon a while ago and then last Sunday she just decided that she was going to come to church. So she did! Heavenly Father is definitely preparing people to hear the gospel. I really have gained a strong testimony of that. We got another investigator on Wednesday as well. They were just comin' out of the wood work the first few days of last week! Any way, his name is Bobby. We are a little unsure if we will keep teaching him though because even though he has a little girl. Plus he won't talk in lessons...which makes it a bit rough! We got to do family history with a recent convert, Christine, on Wednesday. That was fun. :) We also had a kind of weird lesson with Zach (new investigator) that night too. We were running way behind schedule and then someone called Zach and needed his help and then someone called us and wanted to pick us up for another lesson and we had to figure things out really fast, in the middle of a lesson! Kinda strange. Thursday was good. It was Augi's birthday. He is one of our recent converts as well. He was really not happy when we met with him but then we gave him a bagel and wished him happy birthday and sang to him. He felt better after that and told us that we were the first people that day to wish him a happy birthday. We were SO glad that we remembered! Friday we had our zone training. That was really cool :) With the new year and the upcoming decrease in missionaries we have a new mission ...standard or focus I guess you could call it. It is called Operation Totally Motivated. Cool right? ;) Basically President Shumway has introduced 5 things to help us to do more with less, or as he put it, become special ops missionaries. 1) Laser Focused 2) Highly Trained 3) Out-Work the Adversary 4) Seamless Team 5) Completely Committed I am super excited about this! We used to have the Five Anchors, and we still do, but President Shumway basically said that the special ops points are a higher law. We will still observe the five anchors but now we are building onto them, putting them into more practice and going the extra mile. I am so stoked! We had an exchange on Saturday. I went to Springfield 2nd ward with Sister Smith. She is my favorite Sister training leader ever. Do you want to know why? First of all she has been here since I have been here, so we have both agreed that we are BFF's. Second, she let me drive!!! I have not driven for months. It was so much fun! I always enjoy exchanges, but it was nice to get back to Sister Nelson on Saturday night. Sunday was really nice actually which is really not normal. Usually it is really stressful, but because we had already hit the standard, we weren't stressed. It was so wonderful. Today has been awesome :D We had a zone outing (and we got all of our cleaning done before the activity too). We basically just played sports. Good times. We had pizza and talked and had a good time. This week the zone has a goal to find a new potential every day. I am excited. Well, I can't really think of anything else. Have an amazing week! Love you all so much! Sister Cryer P.S. We will be getting a new mission president soon. His name is Kevin H. Loveland. I hope he is awesome, because President Shumway is out of this world awesome. So... just sayin'(Email 1/12/2015

FIRST 2015 EMAIL

Phew! Well that was a close one. The internet here is being a little sketchy and it wasn't letting me open your email to me this week! It finally got it's act together though and I was able to read about bowling (rounding off the week. Good one dad) and the widow makers and the temple and everything :) And what is this about Sam being sick?! Not OK. Not cool. Not acceptable. Get better. With that being said, this week has been good :) Kind of different, but good. On Monday both me and Sister Nelson were going a little stir crazy so we went down to the stake center and played basket ball for about three hours. We also had Elders Rutter, Morris, Swainston, and Webb there as well. It was a lot of fun and afterwards we went and got Andy's to pay back Elders Rutter and Morris for winning our bet. Good times. We got to have dinner with a family that night. The Robertsons. That was fun. We don't have dinners in homes very much. Usually at the institute or a restaurant. So that was nice. Tuesday was too good to be true. Literally. We had a ton of wonderfull plans and most of them ended up falliing through. The day was still good though. We had Zach, our recent convert, with us for some of that day helping us out with stuff. That was really great! It was an eye opener for him though when we went out to contact some referrals and got a lot of rejection. He was shocked and saying how sorry he was for us. It's funny though because while he was freaking out about it, me and Sister Nelson were having a good laugh about it. You have to laugh about things on the mission otherwise you would break! So, I am glad that it is easy for me to laugh. I never knew that would come in handy so much on the mission. Wednesday was New Years so we had to be in by 6. It made for a short day. Me and Sister Nelson just made some videos and had fun and laughed a lot. It was weird though to have to go to bed at 10:30 still. People were texting us all night! Thursday was weekly planning day. So not much to say there. Me and Sister Nelson do really good for about half of the ordeal, and then by the time we are going through the second half we are starting to loose it a little bit. Need I say more? Friday, ...We had a lesson with Jon (the less active). He is doing super good. We talked about prophets and we shared experiences about how we gained our testimonies of the prophet and how having a prophet has blessed us in our lives. It was really cool and the spirit was there. One thing that I remembered during that lesson was when you told me to pray, mom, and ask if President Monson was a prophet. I remember doing that. I don't remember when I recieved and answer but I can tell you that I now know that President Monson is a prophet of God. Thank you mom, for that counsel :) Saturday was slow. Not much to say about Saturday. Sunday was NOT slow. Haha! I don't know what is up with Sundays here, but they are StressFull! There are always a bunch of people who all want to meet with us after church. Good thing, but it means that we have to really try and move through the lessons quickly so that we can get to everyone but at the same time make sure that everyone gets what they need and that we teach by the spirit. We did get a new investigator on Sunday :) That was a miracle that we were able to see. His name is Charles. :) He is awesome. We met him a little while ago and then we lost track of him for a while. But then this last week we finally got his phone number and we were able to text him and invite hime to church. AND HE CAME! He is super excited to learn about the gospel and he said that this is the happiest christian religion he has ever seen. Darn Right! Haha! We are excited to work with him. Phew! And we are back to Monday :D I am excited for the new week :) So, what are some new years resolutions that y'all have? One of mine is to study a christlike attribute every month. For January I am studying hope. :) Have an amazing week! Love you all! Sister Cryer

CHRISTMAS WEEK

Hellllllllooooooooooo family!!! IT WAS SO GREAT TO TALK TO Y'ALL ON CHRISTMAS! That was by far the highlight of my day. I LOVED it! So this past week has been kinda weird just because it's the holidays. It was weird as well though just because we had a wager going with our zone leaders. Our goal was to hit the standard (20 lessons, 60% member present, 1 investigator at church, 2 new investigators). That is hard on a normal week sometimes let alone Christmas week! We lost 4 working days (Monday because of zone conference, Tuesday because of a delayed preparation day, Wednesday because of Christmas eve, and Thursday because of Christmas) so we literally only had Friday Saturday and Sunday to get most of everything we needed in order to hit the standard. It was rough. We almost made it too!!! We didn't get our last investigator that we needed. We were so close to getting a new investigator on Sunday night too, and then it just didn't happen. We did get to see some small miracles though, and I am sure we had Heavenly Fathers help in meeting the standard as much as we did. It does make me wonder though what else we could have done. But it was cool to see people put in our path and we now have some definite potential new investigators for this next week :) The zone leaders were able to hit the standard so good for them! But now we have to buy the zone leaders 'Andys' frozen yogurt. IT'S KILLIN' ME! I was dead set on NOT loosing. Oh well. It was fun! And we wouldn't have done nearly as well as we did this past week if we hadn't had that little wager. Us and the zone leaders were the only ones who really did good this week in the zone. Everyone else's numbers were really low. I got to go to Bass Pro on Tuesday! You should go online and look it up. It is a hunting and fishing store, but there is soooooo much more to it than that! It is AMAZING. You should definitely look it up and take a peek at all the coolness :) We got to watch Frozen as a zone on Wednesday :) That was super fun! We went to a members home and they had a flippin' theater room! It was pretty sweet! We also took guesses as to who was going to be transferred and what assignments people would have. I took 2nd place in the guessing ;) Pretty sweet Let's see. On Christmas right after I finished skyping y'all, me and Sister Nelson headed outside with some nerf guns and had a battle. The gun fight ended when Sister Nelson shot me in the head and we ran inside laughing to take a picture of the welt! It was super funny! OH! So, we are trying to come up with a name for one of Bishops horses. He is brown. Any ideas? All of mine got shot out of the sky. Haha We also got to spend some time with Lauren Kelso. Sister Kelso said that I should go to BYUI and be Laurens room mate. She was also talking about adopting me and Sister Nelson. They are a fun family :) We had transfer calls as well on Saturday night. Any guesses as to where I am going? ;) I'M STAYING IN SPRINGFIELD YSA WITH SISTER NELSON!!! And I am super happy about it! WOOHOO! Here comes another awesome 6 weeks :) So, yesterday was pretty crazy, mostly because in order to hit the standard we needed to get 10 lessons! Aaaaaaahhahhhhhh!!! We got the 10 lessons though :D It was close, but we got 'em! One of the last lessons that we had that day was really awesome. It was with Jon. He is a less active, and I am pretty sure that I have told you about him before. Any way, it was such a good lesson! I was a bit nervous because we hadn't had any time to plan his lesson so we were going into it with only a slight idea of what to teach. It was directed by the spirit though and we were able to finally understand what his concern is I think. I honestly think that the root of all his problems right now is that he doesn't know that God loves him. He said he want's to believe that God loves him, but he can't understand why He would. That was one of the coolest moments in my mission because at that moment I got to feel the spirit so strongly bearing testimony to me that God did love Jon. And I told him so! And I told him that until he knew for himself that God loved him, to remember that Sister Cryer knows that God loves him. All I can say is that I hope the spirit was as strong for everybody else as it was for me! At the end of the lesson I asked Jon if he would say the closing prayer. He said that he could try. It took him a little while, but he did it! I was so proud of him!!! It was one of the simplest most beautiful prayers I think I have ever heard and by the end of it both me and Jon were crying! It was amazing! The only damper was that I couldn't jump up and give him a hug, and I really wanted to! So I told Ryan to do it for me! There ya go. That's the spiritual experience for this week :) It was a good one :D Well, I guess one more kind of cool thing. We had a lesson with Zach (recent convert) on Sunday. He is doing so good! Me and Sister Nelson were talking about it afterward as we were walking to an appointment. Basically he is just different. He is confident and happy and good and better and...he is just doing so good! And the cool thing is that you can see it. I have never really been able to see the "difference" that people talk about until I saw Zach yesterday. It was so cool and I can't even describe it, he just 'looked' lighter and happier and like he had the spirit with him. It was the coolest thing! I am so happy for him :) Well, eth, thet , ethe that's all folks! ;) Get it? That's from bugs bunny Love you all! Have an amazing week and an awesome new years! Blow the horn extra hard so I can hear it! :) Sister Cryer (December 29 email)