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