Little pieces of gold on my trip up the mountain...

Hola Familia! This week went pretty good. Mom- to answer your questions, I have one experience that answers to all three of these questions. (Questions centered around prayer, forgiveness, and trusting in the Lord- ultimately conversion) It was when I was a greenie and I was having the toughest time as you remember. I remember it was super super with 2 capital S's hard. I remember one morning after feeling like things weren’t getting better, I remember I said a prayer and asked Heavenly Father if He loved me-- and I remember I got a strong feeling that He did and that everything was going to be okay..It was kind of like the prayer when I found out I had a tumor.....anyways I had to truly trust in the Lord that this trial was for my good. I knew He knows better and for whatever reason I was supposed to be going through this trial and because I knew it was the Lord’s will that made it easier. I think the biggest blessing of conversion is the access to the Holy Ghost. The more converted we are in the gospel, the more the Spirit will be able to dwell with us and effect our lives but not only that but the lives of others. The whole thing of conversion is to become a disciple of Jesus Christ. The more we become like Him, as His disciple, the more converted we are. This includes sacrifice of everything. Luke 14:33. As we give this sacrifice we are honoring our baptism covenants to take upon us the name of Jesus Christ..That means this- Luke 14:27. To take up our cross means that we give our own life to God and not seek our will. Matthew 10:37-39..as we become disciples of Christ "example of the believers" we will have the full companionship of the Holy Ghost to influence our lives and the lives of others. Obviously too another blessing is that you will be happier because you will be developing charity. Charity is key because without it we are nothing, as we lay hold upon every good thing like it says in Moroni 7:19 we will see people as Christ see's them and we will only see the good. When we are this positive we are obviously going to be happy. The important thing is that we need to know how we can lay hold upon the good things...the question Moroni 7:20..the answer is in verse 25. But you gotta break verse 25 down :)… The last part says "until the coming of Christ"..aka conversion. This week we were asked to pray for a mountain to climb..based off the talk by Henry B Eyring in conference. The whole point of this was to strengthen our faith. So I did it. The following day -after I prayed for a mountain, I messed up my knee..and it still hurts unfortunately. But no -I haven't gone to the doctor yet. We are struggling a bit finding people to teach. I have responsibilities to help missionaries in my district...and I am stressing about if I’m helping my companion enough. Whether or not I’m being the best missionary I can be seems to be my mountain. My mountain may be big, but it’s nothing Christ can't get me to the top of...EFY 2007 "Raise me up" listen to it! Anyway so there isn't much work right now so we are praying a ton. However, there were some funny things happened this week. We met this little old lady who is visiting here from Arizona and she basically said she came here to get baptized, so that's just what we'll do haha. So at church yesterday she was rockin a pair of J's hahaha- and she is like 90! It was super sweet. I guess if you are my investigator you wear Jordans, haha. The other thing is that there is a Subway in our area and it is my favorite haha....There is a Mexican lady that works there and the funniest thing is that I speak Spanish right? Well she doesn't know that....and Elder Vital gave me a haircut this week and he accidentally messed up a little and I have a line in the side of my head like down to the scalp so it looks kind of weird...anyways, she told her other co-worker, in Spanish, that I had a bad hair cut but I still looked cute, hahaha. Those are just little pieces of gold on my trip up the mountain haha. I will continue to pray for more faith as my trials are coming so that I can get over them. I know it's not possible without the help of Christ so I have to turn to Him and He will receive me. Alma 5:33! Siempre Crean, Elder Creer

Mission Pictures!

She wanted this son to change as well, and now he has...

Hola Familia! So transfer updates...... I am staying here in Rose Park again- haha that will make 6 months. I am training Elder Vital and I’m still a District Leader. President said that we would be serving together and invited us to come to new missionary training even though I got him a week earlier. So with this knowledge we started planning. For the new missionary training there is always a welcoming introduction that they do. They call the greenie up to the front and then they say “Your companion will be....Elder ____________”....Then everyone claps. So Elder Vital and I planned a super cool entry that we would do when Prez announced that we would be serving together. Nobody else there really knew that we were already assigned to each other so we thought it would be really funny when we had this sick intro when they call our names. So the night before transfers we practiced what we were going to do. What we did was when President said Elder Vital is serving with Elder Creer, Elder Vital threw off the arm off the President that was on his shoulder then ran and found the nearest chair, then ran with the chair back to President and while he was running the chair back to President, I jumped off my chair and ran towards them and Vital put the chair down and bent over right behind the chair and I ran and jumped off the chair as high as I could and when I was in the air I yelled go and then I hit the ground and jumped while doing a 180 and Vital had done the same and we high fived in mid air and started yelling! hahahahaha -Everyone was dazzled fo sho! Everyone was asking us what our secret was and he just told them, "companionship unity" and all the other greenies had their mouths wide open dropped at the floor not knowing what to think on their first day haha. Elder Rasmussen and Menendez are still the zone leaders. Elder Blakely is a District Leader! Elder Shuster is a District Leader too! Elder Shuster is also companions with Elder Heaton from the MTC! Elder Yancey went to Toella and is training. Today Sister Winn invited us over for lunch and she just told us to find whatever was in the cupboards or the fridge and we could eat whatever we wanted but she wasn't going to make us anything, haha. She then interviewed me for the mission newsletter we have, like a little spotlight thing. It was funny at the end when she asked me what my favorite quote was and I began thinking of some I knew: "I don't take breaks, I just break records" -lil Wayne's song about Kobe Bryant, "Heroes get remembered, but legends never die" -Babe Ruth from The Sandlot...and "Is she dead? No!" - Penguins from Madagascar 2. Then she saw I was having trouble selecting my favorite quote; I didn't tell her any of these, just thought them...and she asked something like why it was hard to choose and I said I knew a lot of good movies hahaha....Then she said she was talking about a quote from an Apostle.......so the one I like the most is the one from conference from Neil L. Anderson that says that there are angles all around us. It was funny :) We had a baptism this week for a guy with an interesting story. His story is that about 4 weeks ago I was looking through the area book after saying a prayer to try and figure out who the most prepared people were that we needed to go and visit. When I got to his name I felt the strongest feeling in the world that he needed to be baptized. So we tried calling his number and it had been disconnected and then we attempted to go to his house to visit him there and he had moved. So there was nothing we could do. Then the next week we got a referral from Temple Square for the same guy! So we went to his house and the first 4 times we went to his house he wasn't there and we were trying to go at different times to try and catch him home, right? Sounds like the smart thing to do? The smarter thing to do is to pray and ask God when he is going to be home and when he is to let us know and we would go and visit them. So we did just that and one night we felt very strongly that we needed to go and try and visit him one more time. This time he was home and invited us right in. We sat down and began to talk. I was trying to find his main concern before the opening prayer so that we could perhaps promise him he would receive and answer to his question or concern that he had. The first 2 inspired questions we asked he didn't really respond, then we felt prompted to invite him to be baptized,-- in the first 2 minutes, haha. So we did and he said “yes” and agreed to a date. We then had a prayer and taught him about baptism and the Atonement, shared a Book of Mormon story that related to him and then left with the Spirit there. Another day we took him to Temple Square and he had an amazing experience there with the Sister Missionaries. They also kept contact with him until his baptism to assure that everything would be okay. So he was baptized last night. There is a member that is his boss that has been helping us out a lot with him. We wonder if he was a Mission President or something. Because when you stand next to him you can feel the Spirit- it is amazing! Also we had another miracle this week. We had a marriage and baptisms two transfers ago with Elder Morales for a couple and their children, except for their 17 year old. He wasn't interested at all in the church. He told us he didn't want to live the commandments. I remember having the strongest feeling in the world that before I left the area we would baptize him. So anyway, that was like two months ago and then earlier this week we were walking home one night (because I didn't have any more miles on the car) and we decided to veer off from the path home and go the opposite direction, obviously guided by the Spirit. Then we found this kid and he began to tell us that his older friend was baptized a few weeks ago and that he went to his ward with him a few times and he told us that he had changed and he told us he wanted to get baptized. His friend had invited him to be baptized at the end of May but he had told us that he didn't want to wait and he wanted to do it sooner so then we committed him for May 13th. He agreed to think about it that night. So we told him to pray and to ask God if it was the day that God wanted him to be baptized and he said it was. His mom especially was very very excited for him as she has been talking to me constantly since her baptism that she wanted this son to change as well, and now he has. Things are going good right now, definitely happy :) Love ya! Siempre Crean, Elder Creer

They would never set foot in a church before...

Hola Familia!

My new comp got here. His name is Elder Vital and he is from Ciudad Juarez Mexico.  We don't have too much in common...he likes metal music, I like reggae...he had a band, I played sports....he is a convert, I am not....he talks really really fast, I don't....he weighs a buck 140, I do not...hahaha but we are getting along great! He is a pretty good teacher already and a great addition. We had 3 baptisms this week. One was for the mom of two kids who were baptized earlier in the transfers. It was cool to see almost their whole family get baptized.

The other two baptisms we had this week were for a couple that was married a few weeks ago.  They also live with another couple who were baptized and married a little bit ago as well. Before us they wouldn't even let missionaries in the door. We love them. They would never set foot in a church before and now all 4 of them go every single week!

Transfers are in 2 days..I bet you all 1000 bucks that I am going to stay in Rose Park for another 6 weeks since I am training Elder Vital.

We also had Zone Conference this week and the biggest thing we talked about was this question..."What does Jesus Christ think of me?"..And I was thinking about that a lot and then yesterday after church the Bishop pulled me aside and told me that “The Lord has a lot of trust in me because of all the prepared people He has been sending” and that I needed to know that. So I think I got my answer to my question which helped out a lot. 

Well all is good here in Rose Park..

Siempre Cree,

Elder Creer