November 28, 2016 🎄Christmas Season is upon us🎄

Hey Everbody,
So Thanksgiving is over and that means...Christmas is again upon us
with all its glorious lights and trees and food and family time! If
you haven't already, go check out the new Christmas initiative the LDS
church put out on Mormon.org its awesome! The theme to it is pretty
great, it's all about serving others around you and that's something I
love doing! Why think about yourself and eat potato chips when you
could go see someone, make their day, and maybe even give THEM your
potato chips?! Haha Christlike, sincere service is, in my opinion, one
of the few ways we can allow the love Christ has for others to enter
our hearts and help us love them even more than we do! Another opinion
I have is that the Bible doesn't capture all of Christ's love and
service, I think the disciples still experienced it all but they just
couldn't remember it all; I imagine Jesus as the kind of man who took
every opportunity to serve a fellow brother or sister, no matter how
small the service. It's not the size of the service that matters, but
the love that goes into it. The smallest opportunity to do something
for another should not be taken lightly, we never know how much it
will mean to them!

So we got transfer calls on Saturday and I'm staying in Lexington for
another transfer with Elder Conlin! We're pumped to see what's in
store for us in the next 6 weeks, time will only tell the many
adventures of Conlin&Crow! We had an awesome Thanksgiving, and for the
first time I can remember, I didn't have turkey! Instead, we had steak
and Alaskan crab! I let everyone else go to the crab and I pounded the
steak haha it was awesome! We also tried some cabbage rolls since a
lot of the people in the family we are with were Korean, all in all it
was a good time!

Go find someone to help out, no matter how small and insignificant it
seems, I promise it'll make a difference,
Elder Crow

October 31, 2016 Happy Halloween

Yes ladies and gents, today it is almost 70 degrees outside and it is
Halloween!!!! Glory hallelujah there is a God boys and girls, there is
a God! I have never worn a short sleeve short so late in the year and
I am loving it! This week has been peanut nutter and crazy! I got to
try something I never thought I would try, I got a massage from a
$8,000 massage chair. I strongly considered it that is what a chair
feels like in heaven, we've got some awesome members here in Beaumont
haha! We also got to help out a lady from Peru here in Lexington, she
was really funny and she put us to work. She's going to be meeting
with the Spanish elders soon so it was pretty cool to me seeing small
acts of kindness touch someone's heart.

Ok so I found this awesome scripture in a little quote book my dad got
for me before I left on my mission, it's D&C 24:8- "8 Be patient in
afflictions, for thou shalt have many". This made me think of
something I realized in my studies a little while back, there is
nowhere that we are promised we won't have trials because we are
obedient and life will be easy because we believe in Jesus Christ;
this modern revelation literally promises us that we will have them.
I'm thankful that we've got so many things today to help us through
those hard times: scriptures, words of modern-day prophets, prayer,
family members, etc. . The world may be attacking us but we've got the
best defense there is, so we don't need to worry about anything they
can do to us 😇

God Bless,
Elder Crow

October 24, 2016 Elder Conlin joins the Beaumont crew; Joy isn't Cheap

Hello everyone,

This week has been nuts, my new companion Elder Conlin just came from Jeffersonville, Indiana and he calls Heber City, Utah home. He's my first companion from Utah!!! I thought I was gonna make it the whole 2 years without a Utah boy, but I guess not! Haha it has been getting colder here, it's in the low 60s and I am not a fan of the cold. I'm in the doggone South it should just be warm all the time!!! But I shall survive...maybe, I'm on a bike for my 2nd winter in a row! Missionary work definitely gets harder when it gets colder, but hopefully we'll still be able to get stuff done here in Beaumont!!

So we were working with this mission-renowned member, his name is Brother Carr. He literally works and helps missionaries, so he's awesome!! He came to help us out and bring some of Elder Conlin's things from Indiana. He really likes to talk about the gospel and he was asking us about things that have been hard for us on our missions and I shared with him that I haven't always been the most chipper fellow. Then he said this to me, "Don't let anyone purchase your joy so cheaply, you can thrive wherever you are!" And that really hit home for me. So, boys and girls, don't let anyone control how happy you are that's just giving in to them. It's much harder to put on a smile but it's much more worth it as well; in President Monson's words: "Choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong".

God Bless,

Elder Crow

October 17, 2016 Apostles and Transfers

Hey everybody,

This week wasn't very eventful until the weekend, then things got poppin' lockin' and polka dottin'! On Saturday we had Elder Stevenson, one of the 12 Apostles, and Elder Uceda, a member of the quorum of the 70, come speak to the whole mission. I had an awesome time seeing past companions and mission friends, so many of those guys have changed my life! But it was even cooler to hear from a modern-day Apostle. Elder Stevenson is a funny guy and a powerful speaker, the Spirit was in the room the whole meeting and it was very peaceful; not overpowering, no one was passing out or getting put into spiritual comas, but it was awesome.

Something that Elder Stevenson spoke about that I really liked was when he brought up a section from Preach My Gospel called "A Successful Missionary". In it, and this is the part he talked about, he said that we don't have to measure our success based on numbers or because of how great other missionaries are doing, you can know you are doing good if you feel the Spirit. It's that simple. We, not just missionaries, make these huge expectations for ourselves that we feel we have to accomplish in order to be someone. But the Lord's expectations are much simpler than ours. In the words of Elder Bednar, "If today you are a little better than you were yesterday, than that's enough."

Oh and we got transfer news! Elder Clark is heading out to Western Kentucky and I will be staying in Beaumont. My new companion is Elder Conlin, I don't know him too well but I'm excited to meet him!

God Bless,

Elder Crow

October 10, 2016 Weddings and Baptisms

Dear Everyone,

I don't have much to talk about today, this week flew by and this is the last week of the transfer!! This Saturday is gonna be great, we are having a mission-wide conference with Elder Stevenson (one of the 12 modern-day apostles) and Elder Uceda from the Quorum of Seventy! I haven't seen some of my old companions in a while so I'm excited to see them there, but hearing from an apostle is super exciting and I'll let y'all know more about it next week!! So this week was really exciting because, as you saw, Kelsey was married and baptized this past week (but she didn't make it to church so she's getting confirmed next week haha)!! Her husband, Matt, has always been gone whenever we would teach her so it was my first time meeting him and he was one of the nicest guys I've talked to in Lexington! And Kelsey showed me and Elder Clark how to make Oreo balls when we helped her make them for her wedding, and they are deserts fallen from Heaven!!! 

So this week didn't go how we thought it would haha, we met a woman named Kibbibi yesterday and she's really nice! She talked to a member at the place she works and she said she wanted to talk to missionaries, so we stopped by yesterday and talked to her. She wanted to meet with us, her kids want to meet with us, but her husband does NOT like Mormons so he said we couldn't come back. As my old buddy Elder Haws put it, Africans are super stubborn. Very stubborn. But with God's help, things will work out in the end, it's just a trial of our faith like Moroni talks about in Ether 12:6. We may not understand why things happen the way they do, but they do. So we should just get over it, suck it up, and look for a chance to learn from our trials like it was brought up in General Conference. 

Well I'm out of time, Love y'all,

Elder Crow

October 3, 2016 General Conference Weekend

Hello everybody,

Sorry for the late start, I got a nudge from somebody to get goin' on my group email so here it is! So I realized I went on a bit of a complain train last week, so I apologize; no one reads these to hear we cry over some hard times, so I will be discontinuing that habit :) So I got a chance to wash down 'ol Titanic this week before we got another week of work in. For those confused souls reading this, and that is all of you, I named my bike Titanic. Reasoning: She's crazy reliable and a darn good bike, but when I hit the slightest bit of gravel or lose a bit of control...you would thought I hit an iceberg! Haha but this week was good, wasn't perfect, but nothing is when you're a missionary so it's all part of the dream!

The highlight of my week was most definitely General Conference! Just the fact that we have men and women literally called of God is so reassuring, let alone that we get to hear them speak to us twice a year!!! It was so wonderful to feel the Holy Ghost the whole time, it wasn't like I lit myself on fire or anything, it was very subtle and almost unnoticeable, but the Lord has been helping me to learn how to recognize the Spirit and I am so grateful for it.

One of my favorite talks was by Henry B. Eyring when he spoke about gratitude. He quoted a church hymn called "Count Your Blessings"; "When upon life's billows you are tempest-tossed, When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost, Count your many blessings; name them one by one, And it will surprise you what the Lord has done." That's just the first verse, but it really amazes me how fast human beings can forget their blessings. I did this during one of my studies this past week and I challenge all of you to do the same, sit down for 10 minutes and make as large a list as possible of the blessings you have in your life and the sacrifices that have been made for you. It truly will "surprise you what the Lord has done" for you.

God Bless y'all,

Elder Crow

September 26, 2016 Bed Bugs and the Flu

Heller everybody,

This week has been a bit rough as you can tell from the title. Yes, I had my first run-in with bed bugs, and I hate them...so much!!! Words do not describe my burning hatred for bed bugs, they are NOT just something to go along with a song!!! All of you who haven't had bed bugs, stop whatever you are doing, I don't care if you're driving a car or skydiving, stop whatever you're doing then get on your knees and pray for the next 3 hours that you will never have bed bugs!! They suck!! I didn't take pictures of my bites, but they're pretty knarly. That wasn't even the worst part, it was all the dang cleaning we had to do! We had to wash and dry (multiple times) all of our clothes, pull everything away from the walls, and we can't sleep in our apartment. So we've been camping out with the Downtown elders this week. And then I got sick and it made it hard to go to sleep. So that's my sob story haha but I'm not dead and I'm not in Hell so I can't complain. 

I re-read a talk called "What Lack I Yet?" this week and got a lot out of it. It's such a blessing to have living prophets and apostles here on the earth today, it would be so confusing without modern-day revelation and guidance from these men of God! So anyways, in this talk Elder Lawrence recounts the story of the Savior and the rich young merchant. In this story, a wealthy young man approaches Jesus and asks what he needs to do to inherit the kingdom of God; Christ, in response, tells him to keep the commandments of God, to which the young man replies that he's been living the commandments his whole life so "what lack I yet?" Jesus tells him that he still lacks one thing, to give all he has to the poor and to follow Him. But the young man couldn't do it, he loved his worldly things too much. So what do you personally lack? The simple answer to this question is to pray and ask Heavenly Father "What Lack I Yet?" and I know He will tell you what you need to do to improve. We all have room to improve, which implies that we need to fill that empty space with something. It is our choice to fill it with good or bad, but true happiness never lied in wickedness. I'm so grateful to have endless opportunities to become more like the Savior and to have so many restored truths to bring me closer to Him like the Book of Mormon!

Love y'all go watch General Conference this weekend,

Elder Crow

September 12, 2016 First week in Beaumont!!!

Dear everyone reading this email,
A big 'ol hello to y'all, I hope everything has been well for each one
of you, things have been great in Beaumont! There is actually no city
called Beaumont, we bike around Lexington every day. It's been pretty
toasty out, but we got cooled down on Saturday when we got caught in a
nasty rain storm. Livin the bike missionary dream boys and girls,
ain't nobody got it as good as the Beaumont boys! It's really
different serving in a big city, I miss the country already haha!
People here are very different and it's taking some getting used to on
my part, but it'll all work out in the end! We stopped to talk to a
couple this last week and we couldn't understand them because they
only speak whatever language they speak, they're from Africa (Elder
Haws I needed you man)! So yeah, Lexington is pretty diverse. It's
awesome being a bike missionary again, not worrying about miles or a
clean car, I just have to worry about getting hit by one! The drivers
here are terrible! There is also a very sweet old lady named
Pocahontas in the ward, we visit her in her nursing home and she calls
us "her boys" and we call her "mama" and that's how everyone knows us,
so it's pretty awesome!

So yesterday in church I heard something said that I had never thought
of before and I want to share it with y'all. So most everyone knows
this scripture, if you don't here it is, in Matthew 17:20 it says: "20
And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say
unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say
unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove;
and nothing shall be impossible unto you." Now I always thought that
meant to literally remove mountains, and it can apply to that if you
have that kind of faith, but in Sunday school someone said, "if we
have faith, we can remove the mountains in our own lives." And that
blew my little mind!

So yes, you can move mountains! Heavenly Father doesn't give us trials
for no reason, He doesn't do ANYTHING without a reason behind it. If
we humble ourselves and look for God's reasoning in our hard times, we
won't question what He does and we will find peace and happiness in
our lives. I remembers as a Senior in high reflecting back on the
years my dad was deployed and wondering why Heavenly Father had taken
me away from my dad for those precious years. I somewhat understood it
in my first few weeks as a missionary. The Lord knew I needed to grow
on my own while my dad was gone, He knew I couldn't have anyone to
rely on but Him if I was gonna make it through those difficult times
and in future times of trial. God needed me to be alone so I could
realize I am never alone. Just a simple example. Try reflecting on
some past trials and try to think of the Lord's purpose in putting you
through it, it will help open your eyes to the amazing plan He has for
you.

God bless, enjoy some sunshine and some lemonade (unless you're in
school then get to work!),

Elder Crow