THINGS ARE IMPROVING

Letter dated 20 April 2015 So here is my picture card. I just spent the past 30ish minutes going back through and looking at all the pictures that I've taken in the past 8 months. My mission has been so awesome! I have made some great memories and friendships. So this week was really good. We are slowly improving as far as numbers go and we are getting some systems set up between ward and branch as far as coordinating exchanges and dinners. So we are exited about that. So, it's pretty crazy that y'all have been doing Spanish again! That's way cool because me and Sister Moreno have been running into Spanish everywhere! We are wondering if Heavenly Father is trying to tell us something....Anyway, I may be learning a bit of Spanish myself. We'll see though. It was really crazy though! We actually tracted into a less active lady from Mexico who nobody knew was there! So that was cool. The only problem was, she literally only spoke Spanish. So that was fun! Sister Moreno did pretty much all the talking there. She knows way more Spanish than I do. Anyway that was a cool miracle that we found her. Then later that day, continuing on the Spanish track, our cd's turned Spanish on us! I didn't know there was Spanish tracks on that cd but I guess there are. Then we ran into another guy from Mexico when we tried to contact a family from West Ward. Then we got taken out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. It's just craziness! By that time I had accepted fate and did my best to talk to our waiter in Spanish. That made him super happy even though I don't know how to say much. Anyway, he told me I didn't really have much of an accent when I spoke. So at least I sound good even if what I say doesn't make sense! On Wednesday night we got to go to the YW camp dessert auction. That was way fun! And guess what? Bishop bought us a cake! We LOVE bishop Mohoney! haha! On Friday we got to do some service for one of the older sisters in West ward. Let me tell you, I have never seen so many leaves in my life! I got blisters on both my thumbs from raking for 2 1/2 hours straight, and we didn't even get close to finishing! But we did good work (filled 18 bags) and it felt so good to do some physical labor and serve! Moral of the story, let the missionaries serve! It's the best thing ever! We had an exchange with Garon on Saturday. That was an adventure! We were trying to contact one of our recent converts in a trailer park. Sister Moreno pointed out the correct trailer and we parked. As we walked up to the door we proceeded to tell Garon about how this family had the cutest dog in the world. We knock on the door and immediately a very small, annoying sounding dog starts barking it's head off. It didn't really sound like the right dog though and when the door opened and a gross little brown dog jumped at the screen door and tried to attack us we knew something was off. The funniest thing was that Sister Moreno said, "That is NOT a cute dog!" plenty loud enough for the girl who opened the door to hear. I almost lost it completely! Seriously, I had to 'cough' so many times during that conversation. Too funny! Anyway, totally wrong trailer. We talked to the girl for a few minutes though and found out that her mom had been looking for a church. So, potential investigator! All three of us had a good laugh as we headed over to the right trailer! We had dinner with a Private Detective Saturday night. He looks exactly like Ben Stiller except with awesome steely grey hair. He's pretty cool, Brother G. His wife is the Primary President. Anyway that was fun. We played a game with them to get referrals where we just ask them questions like, "Who do you know who has ever eaten a bug?" They write down as many names as they can think of for each question, without using the same person twice. Then we have them circle all the non members and we talk about how they can have a gospel conversation with some of those people. Anyway, whoever has the most names wins and they get a prize. In this case a ball with a cartoon face drawn on it. Well, I love you all! Have an amazing week! Love Sister Cryer

NOT MUCH TO REPORT

Email date April 27, 2015 Well, ...I didn't remember about Sarah, but I believe that you told me. I will try to be more diligent in my study of your weekly emails to me. My apologies oh fatherly one :) Well, ok, let me do the ice cream test first. If those are the original sized of the cones then starting from the left you would have Sam, then dad, then mom. Well, ...dad, then Sam, then mom? I can't decide if Sam's would be smaller or bigger. I know she likes ice cream. No, I am going with my original guess. Sam, then Dad then Mom. Those apple things look amazing mom! Wow!!! How about sending one of those to me in the mail? I wouldn't say no ;) Sam, y'all look so great with yo tassel!!! ahaha! Seriously though, I am so proud of you! You rock this whole world! I am about to tip out of my chair it's rocking so much. Hey, so in my letter I asked about Ben and Alisa, but I got those questions answered with the letter that I just got from you today Sam :) Going to Portland for a while huh? That's so cool! And Ben getting hit by a car...not so cool but the stunt he pulled off is pretty sweet. Real Live Super Hero right here! Crazy! Those skills that he attained and sharpened on the biking trips with the scouts are paying off it looks like. Well, I am sorry this is such a lame email! I guess, some almost news is that we might be able to go see a show this week :) We have an investigator, Mary, that we want to try and get her kids involved in the lessons. Right now they are not involved at all. We are going off of faith that she even has kids at all! We haven't so much as seen their toes let alone their faces. Any way, we thought that we might be able to coax them into view if we took them to a show :) So we will let you know how that goes :D Other than that, we get transfer calls this weekend! Would you believe it!!! I actually do find that very hard to believe. This transfer has flown by! Me and Sister Moreno are both praying that we stay, so, fingers crossed. Well, Have an awesome week! Hopefully my letter is better than this email lol. Love you all! Sister Cryer

GOOD TIMES IN BRANSON

Email dated April 20, 2015 O.K., first of all NO ONE TOLD ME SARAH WAS PREGNANT!!!! WHAT THE WHAT! Tell her congrats from Sister Cryer! Now, I can tell you about the week :) Let me start with something that happened on Saturday. So me and Sister Moreno were in the car driving to our next appointment when we got a phone call from Brother Brett asking us to speak in sacrament meeting for 15 minutes each tomorrow on two talks from general conference. ...great! haha! We had literally no time to prepare because we didn't have any way to get a hold of the talks until Sunday morning and then we were literally in meetings until the sacrament meeting started! So we got about 10-15 minutes total from prep time and then up we went and delivered our talks. I spoke first and the first thing I told the congregation was that if they weren't prepared to learn from the spirit then they wouldn't get anything out of my talk! I literally had no direction or idea of what I would talk about. I had a bunch of disjointed thoughts and I just prayed to Heavenly Father to please let the spirit guide what I said and cover my mistakes and unpreparedness. I honestly can't remember what I said! I remember that I read D&C 6:33-37 and it actually managed so sum up everything that I had talked about so far and connect it all together which was super cool. I definitely thanked Heavenly Father for that one! Any way, I had some people come up to me afterwards and tell me that they enjoyed my talk and felt the spirit, so: prayer answered! We went to a Relief Society activity on Saturday. They were talking about gardening. And they started out by talking about having your own worm beds. ...YOUR OWN WHAT?! That's right, worm beds. I guess it's a thing out here to have buckets of dirt in your showers and have worms in there and feed them and stuff so that they make you bucket of dirt really nice and then you can use it for fertilizer and stuff. So yeah, that happened. Haha! Me and Sister Moreno were sitting there and we just kept looking at each other and laughing. "where are we?!" lol Any way, maybe you can have a worm bed this year mom! If you want details let me know, I can get em' to ya! ;) So we had a miracle on Monday :) Monday was a bit hectic and we didn't end up having time for dinner before we were off for FHE with YSA and then over to the Meyers house for an AML. We were SO hungry. When we got into the Meyers house though the first thing they asked us was if we had eaten and were we hungry. I love them. As we were dishing up dinner Sister Meyers said that she hadn't been sure if she was feeding us tonight or not. She thought she had signed up for the 20th (which she had. We are having dinner there again tonight) but the alarm on her phone to feed the missionaries had gone off that afternoon for some reason! Well, that might look pretty small to some people, but I took that as a miracle. Heavenly Father knew we would be hungry and he wasn't about to let that happen! Thanks! It was pretty cool. Sooooooooo we got some exciting things coming up hopefully. We might be having the Because He Lives video shown in the Hughes show!!! HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE?! We were talking to Sister Hughes about it and she arranged for us to show the video to her staff. So we went in and showed it to them on Thursday and they LOVED it and they said they thought it would be great in the show! We are excited to see what happens but we are hoping and praying that it works out :) ...This email seems really short but I honestly am not sure what else to write about. I think I put the other stuff in my letter to y'all. Yes, I can guarantee that you will have a letter this week :) I am also sending my picture card home with it, so it will all be in a little yellow padded package. I am sending the card in the little plastic thingy... so if you could send it back in that when you do send it back that would be pretty great :) Well, I think that's about all I got. Mom, you asked if I needed anything. I don't think so. I think I am doing pretty good. Thanks though! :D I love you all and hope you have an awesome week! Sister Cryer PS Here is a pic of me and Sister Moreno after raking leaves for 2 and a half hours Us with our little prize balls :) Good times in Branson!

WHAT DOES GOD WHAT US TO DO?

Letter Dated 13 April 2015 Dear Family, I'm writing a letter! Aren't you proud? You should be. So lets see...what can I tell you about this week...? I already told you about the house alarm going off, that was fun. O.K. so on Saturday we did some weekly planning stuff. Meaning we were calling everyone and their dog trying to set up appointments for the week. And that's what we did ALL DAY! Good times. We were going stir crazy by the end! I actually started laughing uncontrollably while leaving a message for one of the sisters in the West ward and finally had to hand the phone off to Sister Moreno! I actually talked to the sister on Sunday. She came up to me and said that she had LOVED the message we left her. "These are my kind of girls, I said to myself." Thank goodness! Anyway, so lots of phone calls. We were trying to get something set up for that night because Sister Shumway was going to be on exchanges with Sister Moreno. (I was going to a baptism in Springfield. More on that later.) Anyway, so we were desperate for SOMETHING (besides tracting) to do with Sister Shumway. After I don't know how many phone calls and everything that we had planned falling though, we finally decided that we were not in line with Heavenly Father. We stopped, took a look at all our options, and then we offered a prayer asking Heavenly Father very specifically what He wanted us to do. After the prayer Sister Moreno had a name come to mind. One phone call later we had an appointment set. It's AMAZING what being in line with God's will can do for you! Prayer is so powerful. So yes, I went to a baptism in Springfield. Did I tell y'all about Kaylynns friend, Michael? Well, anyway it was his baptism. It was so amazing to see him get baptized! Absolutely amazing! When I first met him, and even after teaching him for a bit, I did not think he would get baptized! I am so glad that it's the spirits job to convert, not mine! Anyway, it was so great to see everyone again! Me and Sister Ratto had a good talk/laugh. I swear, we can't be together for more than a minute or two without laughing. Seriously though, within five minutes of me sitting down next to her at the baptism we were laughing about something (specifically a sound like a bomb going off coming from the bathroom). Bishop, sitting behind us, leaned forward and said, "Don't start." Haha! All three of us were ALWAYS laughing at something in meetings. It was great to see Bishop too! We had a good talk. I sure miss him! He is amazing. We met an awesome lady on Friday. She is a less active named Karen. She is a hoot! An absolute crazy lady. This is the note that was left on her teaching record..."LOVES missionaries BUT CALL FIRST!!!! She has guns. lol" She is way fun though and boy does she love missionaries! I wasn't too sure about her at first. She wasn't too sure about me either though! I am totally in her good books now though because I passed the test. When I walked into her house through the back door (we had met her in her garden) there was a stuffed wolf holding a baby in it's mouth by an arm. I saw it, said, "What the heck?", and then started laughing. After that me and Karen were tight. She really is such a sweet lady though! We said a prayer with her and she was crying by the end of it and thanked us for coming over. We were so glad that we had made it over, because we hadn't thought we would be able to. Well, I think that's about it. I hope y'all have an amazing week! I sure love ya! Sister Cryer

MIS-HAPS

Hello family!!! Woohoo Sam!!! Way to be! I bet you are super happy that school is over and done with :) You rock! Way to stick it out to the end! So this week has been good :) We were basically focusing on trying to meet the members this past week, so we were doing a lot of AML's. So on Tuesday we had a bit of an adventure. ...well actually Tuesday itself was just kind of an adventure. We had a beautiful day all planned out, and almost nothing went according to plan! haha, but ya know what? Change is ok. :) So one of the adventures happened when we stopped by to try and see Sister Hughes. She wasn't home so we just left a bunch of sticky notes and candy taped to her door to thank her for feeding us dinner on our first Sunday and to wish her a slightly late but happy easter. So we did that and then we went next door to the neighbors house to try and follow up with the lady who lives there to see if she had watched the Because He Lives video. She wasn't home though so we got in the car and started to drive away. After about a minute of driving though Sister Moreno pulled off the road and turned around and said that we needed to go back and tract a house. So back we went. We parked in front of the house that we had just tried to do some follow up at and then walked to the house across the street to knock on the door. No one was home. ...ok... So we left a card in the door and then decided to go to the next house over to follow up with that family (we had shown them the video when we had dinner with Sister Hughes) and see how they were doing etc, etc. No one was home there either though, so we started to walk back to the car. As we're walking up the driveway we suddenly hear a very loud house alarm start to go off! That's not good. The alarm was coming from the house that we had parked in front of (of course. perfect) and as we looked across the road at the house we saw that the front double doors were wide open. Great. We are the only ones on this stupid street, a house just got burgled and our car is parked right outside the house! Awesome! Well, we weren't about to move, so we just stood there in the sun (it was HOT), called 911 and then waited for about 20-25 minutes for the cops to show up. When they finally did arrive...we left. Yeah. Kind of anticlimactic. Sorry about that. As we drove away though we wondered what the heck was the point of us going back there just to get stuck in a drive way in the blazing sun to not really witness a burglary. There must have been a point, because Heavenly Father told us to go back. We just don't really know what it is. Any thoughts? lol So that was a fun Tuesday :) Thursday our dinner forgot about us. haha! That was fun. We were freaking out because we thought maybe we had told them to meet us somewhere and we had forgotten about it so we were driving between church building and restaurant like crazy trying to find our peeps, only to find out that they were the one's who had forgotten about us. So that was fun. Sunday was really good. Well, let me rephrase that. Sunday was crazy, but we were able to meet with Bishop Mahoney (of the Branson West ward) and he gave both me and Sister Moreno a priesthood blessing which was very much needed. I felt the spirit so strongly when he was giving me my blessing! The priesthood is so real and I am so thankful for it! Have an awesome week y'all! I will send you something in the mail today I promise! Even if it is just a one liner (no worries, I will make sure it is at least better than that!) you will get something in the mail from me :) Love you all! Sister Cryer

MEETING MEMBERS IN MY NEW AREA

Hello dearest family! So just FYI, I am DYING to hear your news Sam! I think your letter with that nugget of awesome info must have gone to my old address in Springfield :'( Did you send it to that address or did you send it to the mission office or to my new one? Any way, me and Sister Moreno are still having a blast! Conference was AMAZING! There was so much good stuff said! I received some personal revelation for sure on some things that I can do better and things that I need to work on. I especially loved President Uchtdorf's talk about grace. That Blew My Mind. So good. We were able to watch three of the four sessions with members in the ward which was really good because we are still trying to get to know all the members. That is going to be our focus this week. We are going to try and meet all the members. That is our goal. Any way, what can I tell you about the week?... So there is a family in the ward that me and Sister Moreno absolutely LOVE. Brother and Sister Olave. They have three little girls, Emma, Cloey, Maddy, and a little baby boy named...oh dear. I can't remember their baby's name! Any way, they are the cutest, sweetest little family! We had dinner with them last Monday and we immediately fell in love with them. They dropped off an Easter basket for us on Saturday night. :) Yeah, we love them! To thank them for the basket we went and sticky noted their door yesterday morning before the first session of conference. We had so much fun writing dumb little jokes (like: why did the bunny cross the road? To hop... Yup. That was the joke. We laughed so hard!) Ok so funny story with the Olave's. They live super close to us, so we walked over there to give them a thank you note for feeding us dinner. While we were there we asked Brother Olave if he could help us find some addresses. While we were at the table looking up addresses it started raining. Like, hard core rain. Brother Olave looked up and then looked at us and asked, "Did you drive here?" Me and Sister Moreno looked at each other and then at Brother Olave and said, "We walked." Our statement was accompanied by a sudden flash of lightning and a clap of thunder. Of course. All three of us started laughing at the craziness of this situation! They ended up giving us a ride back to our apartment, bless their souls. I have never seen so much rain! I have this image of Brother Olave standing in shorts and a hoodie with the hood up and holding his baby carrier with a waterfall from the overhang cascading down behind him. I wish I had gotten a picture! On Thursday we had dinner with the Dyers. George has a show in Branson that he does. You would actually probably really like him dad. He does opera I think. Any way, that family is so cool! We had a blast with them :) They had the skinniest cat I have ever seen in my life. It was SO skinny. Kind of creepy in a way, but it was a sweet little cat. Probably going to kick the bucket over pretty soon though. On Friday we had a zone training meeting. We went to Springfield for it so I got to see Sister Ratto and my old zone leaders Elder Rutter and Elder Peventy and everyone. It was SO fun! :) As far as spiritual experiences this week, nothing too mind blowing (Well, conference was amazing of course). There is an older man in our apartment complex though that me and Sister Moreno both feel that we are supposed to help. He is going through a divorce and we keep running into him randomly! It's interesting to see Heavenly Father placing him in our path so that we can bring him to the gospel. I think that's it for me this week :) Hope your having an awesome week y'all! Love you! Sister Cryer