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