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

HAPPY THANKSGIVING WEEK

(Sister Reeder and I having Halloween dinner with President and Sister Loveland) Hello peeps! Happy Thanksgiving week! Ok, I don't have a whole ton of time because we have a zone outing today :D so I will just give you some of the highlights: We were finally able to meet some of our investigators this past week! Ruby and Charles. They started investigating the church at the beginning of the year but then in May or June or something they left Siloam and were in Louisiana taking care of Charles' dad. Any way, we had talked to them over the phone, but we were finally able to go and meet them and have a lesson with them and then they came to church on Sunday and loved it! So we are excited to keep working with them :D Ruby is more excited than Charles is, but she said that Charles wasn't in the best of moods when he went to church and he came back in a very good mood, so hopefully he will open up to us :) Ruby is just awesome. We gave her a gospel principles book to take home with her and she called us later on that evening and said, "I'm just studying in that book you gave me and it talks about the book of Moses. Where is that?"! She is just awesome! We love them both already! Also one of our investigators, Molita, and her boyfriend are getting married. That was the one thing that was stopping Molita from getting baptized, they had to get married. So now that that's happening we have high hopes that she will be baptized soon :D We had 3 INVESTIGATORS AT CHURCH! AND WE GOT 16 LESSONS THIS WEEK! It has been so nice to see our numbers steadily getting better! All I can say is that we better not get transferred because we are just starting to get things figured out! ...That probably means that we are going to get transferred... We didn't end up getting to see that Bible bashing guy that we met Sunday night. Instead we talked to a nice old couple that had just recently been in Eugene OR visiting friends, and we also met a really cool guy named A.J. and his family. It was funny because we were just knocking on doors, but when we knocked on their door they were like, "Hey! Come on in!" like they had known us forever! Sweet! haha So we went in and were able to talk to A.J. for about 20-30 minutes about how he came to believe in Christ and we talked to him about the Book of Mormon as well. The spirit was there which was really cool, because a lot of times when people who already have a strong belief in Christ and in the Bible hear us say "Book of Mormon" they become really closed off all of sudden and start telling us all the reasons that the Book of Mormon is false. But with A.J. it just kind of felt different. I don't know. He brought up all the same concerns that everyone does (don't add or take away from the Bible) but it didn't feel like he was attacking and he seemed open to learning more. When we asked him if he would like to study with us he said that he would have to talk to his wife and kids about it, but that he might be interested :D So here's hoping! We ate two dinners back to back on Sunday. That was rough. They were both super big dinners and I thought I was going to pop! But I made it through, alright, albeit a little sick to the stomach! haha Wednesday we had an awesome lesson with a less active, Sister Martin. I don't remember if I told you about her or not, but when we met her last week (or maybe the week before) she basically told us that we were welcome to come over but she was not going back to church, period. Well, we had our lesson on Wednesday and we were able to have Sister Bailey with us.Sister Bailey is Sister Martins best friend. Any way, Sister Bailey did most of the teaching, we just kind of sat and distended, and it was so good! It was exactly what Sister Martin needed and as Sister Bailey talked to her she just opened up and told us that she really did want to get back into the church and bring her kids, and have her husband come (he is not a member) and it was just so good! And actually her husband was really nice for being anti Mormon! He actually sat in on some of the lesson and talked to us :D So that was awesome! Member present lessons, man; it works! Saturday was fun because we had the Spanish Elders down to try and contact someone that we had tracted into and we ended up having the wrong address somehow! Any way we knocked the address that we had and a white English speaking girl answered the door and said that Renae (the Spanish guy) didn't live there. She had no idea who that was. Well, then we saw a bunch of Spanish people going into that house! What the heck! So we went back and asked one of the Spanish guys and he said, "He's not back yet." Then the girl came around the corner and said, "Yeah, he doesn't live here anymore." Ok...we went from not knowing who he is, to he's just not here right now, to he moved. ...well great. So instead of contacting Renea we took the Spanish Elders to try and talk to our neighbors who speak Spanish. That was pretty hilarious because we parked at a church about a half block away from our apartment, pointed out the door that they needed to knock and then sent them on their way with me and Sister Reeder in the car peering out the back window to see what would happen :D haha They got to talk to them, and got a phone number, so we shall see. The Elders also took our bike rack off our hands, or rather off the back of our car! So it's nice to have that gone. We had to ask for some help from a guy out chopping wood because we didn't have the right wrench, but he helped us out and we were able to get it off. I tried to give the guy a Book of Mormon to say thanks, but he didn't want it. JUST TAKE IT! Oh well. Alright, I think that's pretty much all my highlights... We had a crunchy rice casserole with Sister Palmer for dinner on Friday night. That was so funny! The rice was completely raw! haha It hadn't cooked at all. Poor Sister Palmer was so embarrassed! We kept telling her it was ok, and it really was! It tasted great, even if it was a little crunchy and I had seconds :D She is so cute! She is the seminary teacher. All I can say is seminary must be a hoot! haha Well, I hope y'all have a wonderful week! Be good and remember who you are and all that rot! haha Love you! Sister Cryer PS Here is a picture of all the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders in our mission. Can you see me?

THRILLED TO MY VERY TOE TIPS

Letter Dated 16 November 2015 Dear Family, Man, I feel like I never write letters anymore! In my last area I played ultimate frisbee all day on prep day and now I clean all day on prep day! Haha. Well, not so taday. I went super fast with my cleaning today so now I actually have time to sit down and write a little bit. So, the Siloam Springs ward had a chili cook off this past Friday, and ME AND SISTER REEDER GOT TO BE THE JUDGES! That was so cool! I have never been the judge of anything so I was thrilled to my very toe tips! And I don't know when this happened but I LOVE CHILI! It's become one of my favorite meals and I have no idea why. Haha. We got to go to the temple on Saturday with one of our recent converts. That was so awesome! We didn't get to do anything, we just sat and watched but it was just so wonderful to be at the temple! The car ride home was pretty fun too! I taught everyone (Drew, Brother Patterson, and Gracie) to play "What's in your milk" and we were dying laughing the whole way home! Drew especially! He thinks he's the funniest man alive! Haha. It was a great time though. When we got back Sister Reeder and I headed to Walmart with the intent to do some OTMing. Well, unknown to us apparently it was national "Everyone who speaks only Spanish congregate at Walmart Day" So many Mexicans! I couldn't help thinking of mom and Sam as I fumbled my way through, "Hola,...Somos misioneros de la Iglesia de Jesucristo...de...uh,...here's a card....the web site" (making computer like hand gestures that probably looked more like a two year old playing the piano) "has...videos de jesucristo....muy bien." Haha. It was so funny! But hey, we gave out three pass along cards and guess what? They were in Spanish! I may not have been expecting Spanish people but Heavenly Father was! I honestly didn't even know we had Spanish pass along cards in the apartment! So that was a cool little miracle. We got to speak in Sacrament meeting on Sunday. That was fun because we got the assignment Friday night. We didn't really have time to prepare for anything Saturday because of the temple so we pretty much wrote/prepared our talks Sunday morning. I think I have spoken in church more in the past year than the rest of my life put together. No joke. Haha. Anyway, I told you about Sunday in my email...Well I actually did miss one thing. Before we went to have dinner with the McWhotrtors we contacted a former investigator, Rick, and he said we could come back! Sunday was just such an awesome day! OK one more kind of funny thing. While we were shopping today I saw a freezer door open in one of the isles. Without even thinking about it I went down the isle and closed the door. Well, Sister Reeder didn't see me go down the isle so when I came out she had stopped and was looking back in my direction with a look of utter terror on her face! It was pretty funny! Anyway, I'd better wrap up, my hand is starting to hurt. I love you all! Sister Cryer

AN AMAZING WEEK

November 16 email Dear Family, SUNDAY! Sunday was the best thing that happened to us all week! We had an awesome day at church and then I got to take a short nap during lunch, and then we had dinner at the Bishops house. I got to watch the cows being fed. That was cool. Any way, while we were over there we were talking to Bishop about some media referrals that we had received, one for a K Slater and one for a Rebekah Hinkle. "Rebekah Hinkle?!" he asked. "Yes" we said a little confused. "We know her! She is a great friend of our family!" How cool is that?! So we got to talk to them about her a little bit and get prepped to go over and see her, and then we had Bishops son Drew come with us. He is preparing to go on a mission to the Philippines soon. So because of situations with time, we did some night tracting around a less active that we had an appointment to see. I was a little skeptical of that just because in my experience people don't usually like talking to you if it's dark outside and you are knocking on their door. But we went and did it anyways and we had some awesome success! We got two lessons, and invitation to church (we invited him to ours too) and two return appointments! One of our return appointments I'm not too sure about. I feel like the guy just wants to Bible bash, but we'll find out. The other one though I am super excited about! John and Christina. They seem super golden! John's best friend is Mormon and he seemed super open to learning more about it. :D Then we had our lesson with the less active, Sister Santoy and that just went really well. We committed her to start reading in the Book of Mormon every night with her kids, and to talk to her husband, who is not a member and does not speak English, about having the Spanish elders come over and teach him. So we are going to be praying for her. It was really cool though, because she basically bore her testimony of Joseph Smith and the church, and from there is was really easy to commit her to try and bring her family into the gospel more :D Then we went and tried to contact Rebekah but she wasn't home :( That was the only sad part of the night but it's O.K. because guess what? While we were shopping at Walmart today we met her! It was so cool! We were just walking down the isle and she was walking towards us. So we smiled at her and then she was passed us, and then she stopped and came back saying "hey!" We stopped and turned back to and she said "I'm Rebekah!" Holy cow!!! Heavenly Father is so good at setting things up so perfectly but so not in the way that you would expect! Any way, so we are hopefully going to see her this weekend. So, back to Sunday night. After trying to contact Rebekah we headed over to try and contact K Slater, our other referral. We found his house and knocked on the door and then nest thing I knew the man who opened it was saying "Well hello!" with a huge smile "come on inside and have a seat! I'm sure glad you came!" What the heck! I have never had that type of reaction with a media referral! haha IT WAS SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We went in and met his wife, Anne and we got to sit and talk to them for about an hour about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and our missions and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Atonement and it was just awesome! They are so great! Super open and kind and just wanting to learn! Any way, it was a miracle and all three of us, Sister Reeder and I and Drew were freaking out we were so excited by the time we left! Basically Heavenly Father blessed us a whole ton and it was pretty much the BEST SUNDAY EVER. I'll tell you about the rest of my life in my letter I think :) Here's hopin' y'all have an incredible week! Remember that sacrIfice brings forth the blessings of heaven! Actually speaking of that let me tell you just a little bit about today: Washing the car. It's always a blast (for me anyway, I think Sister Reeder kind of hates her life every time we have to wash the car!) but today it was particularly exciting because it was raining and super windy. And I was scrubbing. .....I got SO WET! haha But really though, my mascara was running down my face I got so drenched! We had a good laugh when we got back in the car and snapped some pics. Any way, just wanted to tell ya about that! Love you all! Sister Cryer