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 :)