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?